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Jesus with Minjung

(Mark 2:1-14)

We see a seeming tension, which has continued throughout the centuries of Christian history, between pious religion or the so-called religious person and the ordinary people who manage their lives without a deep sense of religious scruples, and so are considered as sinners by the religious. There is also another kind of tension between the attitude of some of the Christians who seriously involve themselves in the affairs of the people in order to experience and to live out their conviction about the relevance of the Gospel and who, in some extreme situations, even disregard the importance of Christian identity, and those who are so paranoically obsessed about the purity and unblemished identity of their Christian personality that they virtually shield themselves from the world with a religious aura surrounding them.

However, the theme of this Assembly (the CCA Assembly of 1981 held at Bangalore, India – Ed) suggests that now we are able to boldly state that to be in. Christ means that we are with people. Since Jesus, during his earthly ministry,

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was with the people who were alienated and oppressed by the religious and political power structures, we can dare to say that to be in Christ means "to be with people". Without being with people and without being existentially involved with the deepest aspirations of the people of Asia today, we cannot say that we are truly "in Christ".

People are often referred to, in the Bible, as a crowd of people. Crowds followed Jesus. From the crowd Jesus called out and chose his twelve disciples (Lk. 6:13). It is said that at the time of Jesus there was a great tension between the people of Galilee and the religious leadership in Jerusalem. The masses of people in Galilee were too poor to be able to keep all the finer details of rabbinic law and, consequently, they were looked down as "sinners" by the religious.

The ancient Israelite covenant had shown special concern for three categories of people, and these were, in fact, particularly cared for (Exodus 22). In a nomadic or semi-nomadic social structure, people's welfare was sustained in a tribal network of family relationships. Once that family tie is broken, people are immediately exposed to the dangers of becoming social destitutes and the objects of abuses and exploitations. Therefore, Old Testament covenant expressed particular concern for widows, orphans and foreigners. The foreigners are the people who, for a whole variety of reasons, had left their kinsfolk. They were obliged to live under the mercy of people other than their own. Very often they were refugees for socio-political reasons or because of natural calamities. The laws that governed the life of the people in the desert had good reasons to protect them.

But, the situation suddenly changed after the people of Israel settled in Palestine and the monarchical regime began to take roots. The land was no longer in communal holdings. The kings and princes were driven by a passion to

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acquire more and more land (I Kings 21). The story of King Ahab and Jezebel is a perfect illustration of a struggle between the political leadership which was somewhat despotic and attempting to develop a system of absolute monarchy, and the people, who were demanding the justice which had been upheld for centuries by their traditions. The plea of the people of Israel to Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, is a typical example of the confrontation between the people and the monarchy:

Your father laid a cruel yoke upon us, but if you will now lighten the cruel slavery he imposed on us and the heavy yoke he laid on us, we will serve you (I Kings 12:4).

In this drama, the king did not listen to the counsel of the elders. Instead, he listened to the advice of the younger advisors with whom he had grown up. (There are some countries in Asia where the political leadership is unwisely counselled by younger military officers.) In this changing political situation, the ancient system of social welfare, which sustained the well-being of people as well as of society, was totally uprooted and urbanized, and semi-capitalistic system took root in the land of Israel. The story subsequent to this is about the prophet storming onto the scene defending and taking sides with the alienated and exploited minjung.

Beginning with Elijah, the story of the prophets is the story of protest movements against the unjust power structures and for the justice which the people were demanding.

Listen to this, you who grind the destitute and plunder the humble, you who say, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell corn? When will the sabbath be past so that we may open our wheat again, giving short measure in the bushel and taking overweight in

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the silver, tilting the scales fraudulently, and selling the dust of the wheat; that we may buy the poor for silver and the destitute for a pair of shoes?" (Amos 8:4-6).

In Jesus' time, the masses of people in Palestine were mainly labourers, craftsmen and peasants. From the accounts of the Gospels we can easily understand that Jesus grew up in the midst of these labourers who were engaged in the fields (Matt. 9:37-38, 13:27) and the workers engaged in the vineyards on daily wages. These were the people among whom Jesus grew up; they were, by and large, poor people. They were subjected to double taxes. They were obliged to pay a religious tax for the maintenance of the temple in Jerusalem. The temple was not looked upon by the people as a symbol of their spiritual pilgrimage; rather it was a burden. Jesus' prophecy about the destruction of the Temple (Mk. 13:1-2; Matt. 26:61), and his condemnation of the Temple being the cave of robbers (Mk. 11:17), seem to indicate that Jesus is reflecting the sentiment of the people of his time. While Jesus followed the basic Jewish religious precepts, he severely challenged the exploitative religious system. According to the account of Josephus, when Jerusalem fell in 70 AD and the golden ornaments of the temple flowed into the market, the price of gold went down by 50 per cent in the Syrian market.

Another unbearable burden for the people was the tax to be paid to the Roman Government. It is said that the total amount of tax the people of Judea had to pay the colonial government was somewhere around 600 Talent, equivalent to 3,600,000 days' wages of one labourer who earns one denarius a day. That was not all. There were further obligations the people had to meet in the event of the movement of Roman military forces in the region. At any rate, the whole system was laden with a variety of exploitative schemes.

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Those who collaborated with or served actively the foreign powers were the very forces which tried to preserve the economic privileges around the activities of the Temple. In other words, there was an inevitable alliance between the Jewish religious leadership and the Roman colonial rulers. The people, therefore, had no escape from being the victims of exploitation by both these forces.

Under such historical circumstances, Jesus began his preaching of the Gospel and the proclamation of the good news on the shores of the Galilean sea.

The words for "people", ochlos and laos, have ethno-sociological connotations. In the Septuagint the word "laos" (God's people) is used more than 2,000 times, and the expression "ochlos" does not appear in Pauline epistles which are believed to have been written before the Gospel of Mark. Therefore, we can suggest that the term 'ochlos' (minjung) was introduced into the Gospel tradition by the author of the Gospel of Mark with some specific intentions, or with a particular understanding of the term.

In the Gospel of Mark, the word ochlos (minjung) appears 36 times and the word laos appears only in two places (7:6, 14:2).

The people of Galilee gathered around Jesus, and as he began his life as an itinerant preacher, the crowd of people followed him (2:4,13; 3:9, 20, 32,5:1,24,31, etc.). The twelve disciples are sometimes differentiated from the ochlos (8:34, 9:14), but they were also a part of the minjung.

The people (ochlos) are placed over against the dominant people of Jerusalem (2:4-6, 322, 11:16-18). The lawyers and people from Jerusalem were in opposition to the ministry of Jesus among the minjung of Galilee. While the minjung of Galilee were gathering around Jesus and following him the ruling class of people were afraid of Jesus and the minjung

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(11:18).

When Jesus was sitting surrounded by the crowd (ochlos), Jesus' brothers and mother came and asked for him (3:32). But when Jesus heard this, he looked around the crowd and said "Here are my mother and brother" (3:34). It was a declaration of the establishment of a new community in the new Messianic kingdom inaugurated in his coming. Scholars suggest that this is unique in the Gospel of Mark, whereas Luke dilutes this notion into the concept of "disciples" and Matthew totally eliminates it.

Jesus clearly saw the potentiality of ochlos (minjung) to be the first recipients of the Gospel of liberation from the old order, and declared the inauguration of his messianic kingdom. In all this, what we must recognize is that Jesus did not lay down any preconditions for those who followed him. To come to Jesus, the people – minjung were not required to meet any religiously defined conditions. Jesus received them as they were.

Then, who are the minjung? The enemies of Jesus condemned Jesus for associating with tax-collectors and sinners (2:15, 16). Matthew refers to tax-collectors and prostitutes (Matt. 21:31). Obviously, the crowd of people who followed Him were sinners and tax collectors. Who were the sinners? From the point of view of religious orthodoxy, they were the people who had not kept the laws and traditions of Israel. There may have been two categories of sinners: those who were in open defiance of the law of Moses, and those who were engaged in certain occupations which were considered dishonourable.

Some of the occupations were thought to be dishonourable because, in them, the people were obliged to break the Sabbath (for example, labourers on daily wages, shepherds and prostitutes). There was also a sense of classism

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People who were engaged in so-called unclean occupations, such as butchers and leather-makers, were considered social outcasts, and they were barred from the ordinary socio-religious milieu.

Those who were physically handicapped were considered sinners. Sickness was an evidence of God's absence rather than active blessing; therefore, sick people were also considered sinners.

The son of Alphaeus was a tax-collector (2:14). He was well-to-do enough to invite Jesus to his house. This Levi was called by Jesus, and he left his seat in the custom house and followed Him.

When Jesus came to his house and sat at his table, there were many other tax-collectors and sinners too.

Tax collectors were part of ochlos (minjung). This raises a question. If a reasonably well-to-do tax-collector is included in ochlos (minjung) then minjung cannot be defined exclusively in terms of their economic poverty alone. Minjung, therefore, are the people or the crowd of people who are poor and socially (and by implication also religiously) alienated masses of people in a given society. In this sense, minjung has socio-economic and political connotations.

Galilee was never a part of the mainstream of the history of the powerful people of Israel. Galilee had always been a sort of satellite of the Jewish power centre, Jerusalem. The Galilean region was the area where the powerful families in Judea and Samaria sought to expand their personal land holdings, since the land there was so much more fertile compared with other areas in Palestine.

To these oppressed and alienated people of Galilee, Jesus came preaching the good news of liberation:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has

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anointed me; he has sent me to announce the good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour (Lk. 4:18, 19).

Except the radical zealots who were roaming around the regions of Galilee, and who, as a matter of fact, were perhaps the only people who had an explicit sense of rebellion against the ruling power structure, most of the rest of the people seem to have been thoroughly domesticated, and had shown no sign of resistance. However, when Jesus brought the good news of the Kingdom, the crowd of people followed him and listened eagerly to him. This is a story of a wandering preacher and the wandering minjung.

Jesus was not always prudent by the value orientation of middle class good people. Instead, he was, in most cases, rather direct in his approach. His direct approach seems to be like the appeal of the Psalmists who called upon God to intervene and revenge their enemies. It was always clear which side Jesus was on. The episodes of his last days amply demonstrate just how, and by whom, he was brought to death on the cross.

He was put to death by the power structures of the day. He died on the cross between two zealots as a political criminal as well as a religious blasphemer. But, the people knew where he stood, and why he was hanging on the cross. Even a centurion who stood near the cross confessed, "Truly this man was a son of God" (Mk. 15:39). The poor people longed for the messianic kingdom in which economic justice would be restored; and the zealots had their eyes on him because the messianic kingdom they envisaged would be a kingdom free from foreign domination.

However, throughout the history of the Christian church,

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the people of the church, both in the East and the West, made him a middle class bourgeois gentleman after their own images, and refused to hear the laments of Jesus over the religious institutions and the theologians of his day. This bourgeois church could not understand the historical significance of Jesus' association with sinners, tax-collectors and prostitutes.

His association with sinners has been noted but misinterpreted, while the terrible sternness of the judge has been glossed over – a sternness that came in order to light a consuming fire and bring a sword, and so revealing something of his own inherent freedom, possibly even of rebellion. The history of the revolutions that he has caused is not yet written. In fact, its possibility has, as yet, been hardly discovered, however rewarding and well-founded such a theme might be. That shows how constantly, his reality and his impact have been effaced by the Christian world which incessantly fashions its own God after its own image, but gets furious when others do the same, or portray realistically the human nature of Jesus that they recognize (E. Kaesemann, Jesus Means Freedom, p.29).

The resurrected Jesus left Jerusalem and went ahead of his disciples to Galilee, where he had started his ministry of preaching the Gospel of liberation among the poor and the sinners. Jesus came from the hinterland of history. In this hinterland, where the sun does not shine, in the shadow of oppression and under the pressure of injustices, the people received the message of liberation. To that hinterland Jesus went ahead of his disciples to the place where they first met Him. Galilee was the starting point of the proclamation of the Gospel of liberation, and the reasons for returning to that starting point were not merely nostalgic. It is the call to come to terms with a new starting point in history, that is to say, we are called upon to implement the message of liberation with

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the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. The hinterland of history the home of minjung, has now become the frontier of the revolutionary change in human history.