The Hokey
Pokey Is What It’s All About!
I remember being in awe as Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel explained that the manuscript that became his book Night began as a one-thousand-page memoir of his time in the Auschwitz camps as a teenager. He edited it down to a mere 120 pages so that it might be a bare-bones, metaphysical and existential account with no elaboration of the horrors he and some 12 million people experienced at the hands of Nazi Germany, including six million European Jews.
Among the four gospel accounts of Jesus the Christ, Mark, long understood as the earliest of the four, stands as a similar bare bones existential account: a mere six short sentences sum up his baptism by John, his hearing the voice from heaven and an experience of the Spirit of God, the same Spirit drives him into an extended time of testing in the wilderness, and the beginning of his public ministry. His time in the wilderness in Mark consists of only two short declarative sentences, with no details of what his “testing” by “Satan” consisted of. [i]
If one brackets out the familiar accounts in Matthew and Luke, which are nearly identical and all too familiar, one might be able to imagine this testing as a sign of an internal struggle to make sense of what the Spirit and Voice had told him: that he is God’s beloved Son, and that the God of his ancestors Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac, Rachel, Leah and Jacob is well pleased with him. Too many years of Sunday School, too many years of sermons, too many annual publications around Christmas and Easter time purporting to tell “the real story” of Jesus the Christ, make it difficult to imagine anything other than what others have told us about the man from Nazareth in Galilee as he is in the wilderness.
Only Mark leaves us to sort it out ourselves. We might ask ourselves, why? Why no details about a time away from everyone and everything else in a place with no resources but himself and the presence of God as angels, and some sort of wild beasts? And of course, the Satan, who throughout the Hebrew scriptures is portrayed as an agent of God’s to test people’s faith.
Is it possible that after hearing the voice from heaven, that the one who would later by called the Christ, God’s anointed one, himself has some questions about just what on earth all this means?
The immediate outcome of this extended stay in a wilderness is his confidence to proclaim the closeness of God’s “kingdom,” and the need of everyone, all the time, to “repent and believe the good news.” It is a trademark of Mark’s spare, bare-bones account to suggest in the very first sentence of chapter 1 that this Jesus who joined in John’s ritual bathing in the River Jordan is himself, his very self, the good news that he proclaims! And that Mark intends only to reveal “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Which, similar to John’s account decades later, indicates that there is no ending to the story – at least not until God’s kingdom of Shalom covers the entire face of the Earth.
After forty days, which is meant to denote something like longer than a Lunar Cycle, more than a month, Jesus calls on everyone to change their minds – metanoia – and turn, or re-turn to God and God’s way of Shalom. Further, Mark’s choice of the Greek metanoia, as opposed to the more definite Koine Greek word for full and total conversion, epistrophe, suggests that this repentance this Beloved Son of God calls us to is not a once-and-done affair, as depicted in the epic Burt Lancaster film, Elmer Gantry – nor as often depicted in endless televangelist shows or tent revivals – but rather is an ongoing process of conversion in most of our lives, as the still popular Shaker song has it: “To turn, turn will be our delight / Till by turning, turning we come round right.” [ii] It seems part of the human condition that we continually need to turn and re-turn to God and God’s way of Shalom: justice and peace for all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. Like the Hokey Pokey, we need to turn ourselves about.
Very few of us can take more than a month away from everyone and everything to get this turning back to God and God’s way “just right” as Jesus appears to do. Repentance, then, is an ongoing, often never-ending, process in which we mean to never look back, but…inevitably we stray from the path, re-turn to bad habits, creating the need to “turn, turn, turn, turn again” until we “come round right” once again. Repentance is characterized as a coming to our senses and once again grounding ourselves in the presence of God – or for Christians, to see ourselves once again grounded in the promised presence of Christ “until the end of the age!” [iii]
That is, it’s OK for us all to go astray. There are few, if any, of us who do not! One imagines this testing going on with God’s own administrator of Godly SAT’s, Satan, is based as much on our own doubts about our own belovedness as it may be in any direct questioning of our faith by God’s own tester. It was the great 20th century theologian, Paul Tilich, who suggested that doubt is not the absence of faith, but rather is an essential element of faith. Frederick Buechner says it best: “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” [iv]
It ought to be noted, this ritual to turn back to God is depicted in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Law and the Prophets, or Torah. The word is shuv (pronounced shoove) – which can mean to turn from one place or direction toward another, or to re-turn to one’s beginnings. Thus, in Genesis 3:19 Adam is told by YHWH in the garden, as we were just reminded on Ash Wednesday, that ultimately, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return ( shuv ) to the ground ( a damah ), since from it you were taken ; for dust ( a damah ) you are and to dust ( a damah ) you will return ( shuv ).”
As we were also reminded on Ash Wednesday, our God is an awesome God since the repeated description of God in Torah, the scriptures of Jesus, is often repeated: “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” [v] There it is again! We are to shuv, shuv, shuv, turn, turn and re-turn to the Lord our God because our God is not finished with us yet!
Lent is that time of year for us all to find ways to shuv, to turn, to re-turn to the Lord our God whose Good News IS Jesus the Christ, God’s beloved Son! In his life, death and resurrection, the Christ shows us how to shuv, shuv, shuv until we come down right! And since he promises to be with us to the end of the age, we have lots of time to get it just right! And that is Good News for us all!
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