Two years ago, in my fourth year at UBC, I worked as a math tutor in Steveston. I'd wanted to take this one first-year history course and nothing else that year, and because I'd chained myself to student loans already the years before, I had to pay back little pieces of it each month, and needed to make the cash for that.
I found out in the process that I really like explaining things to people, and teaching them some new topic by bridging something that they know so far with that new thing. Go from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and you'll almost never go wrong.
Nowadays, I've been trying to spend my time studying a thing like the story of Jesus, my Lord, and it's making me wade into all these subjects I either have no background in, like the cultural significance of so many different words or activities for a 1st Century Jew, or never really used to be 100% good at, like realizing how certain characters must feel as things are happening, or that certain elements of the story continue on behind the scenes while new things are happening, when neither of those things are explicitly mentioned but instead let on. I've been having to stretch inside, in order to make room for all these new details, to learn to take them seriously, and to try to get them to penetrate to the centre of my being, instead of staying somewhere more sideline.
So, I guess I just want to share how I've worked through making some of these things I've studied matter more to me or be more real to me. I do this hoping that they'll be useful to people who are also trying to get their heads around what it's like to study this stuff for the first time, or are bumping into roadblocks, and I'll offer them now and then as I come up with them. Maybe all this'll do is reveal how far behind and foolish I am and help no-one. Well, I don't like that possibility, but we all gotta start from somewhere, even if that somewhere is really humbling as places go, and I'm no different.
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Words that Hearken Us Back Somewhere
...Mark introduces Jesus in a striking scene that tells us more about his identity:
Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." (Mark 1:9-11)
For the Spirit of God to be pictured as a dove is not particularly striking to us, but when Mark was writing, it was very rare. In the sacred writings of Judaism there is only one place where the Spirit of God is likened to a dove, and that is in the Targums, the Aramaic translaton of the Hebrew Scriptures that the Jews of Mark's time read.
I could understand from the outside well enough this idea. "If the Jews from this time grew up with, read, and therefore knew fairly well a bunch of works including the Targums, and if there was this one word that was so rare the Targums was the only work it showed up inside and Jews would notice and think of the Targums first if you used it, then Mark could reliably make a Jew think of the Targums if he used that word." (I had to spell everything out to myself because otherwise, it wouldn't have been crystal clear for me.) But what was it like from the inside to be taken elsewhere like that? What else do I know about that's like that?
And I came up with Pinky and the Brain! Pinky happily blurts out tons of words that are found nowhere else but with him, and if you hear one, you immediately think "Pinky." NARF. Poit! Zort! And troz! (I laughed so much when I remembered that one - Wikipedia says he started saying it when he found out it was zort in the mirror hahahaa) If culturally American university students attending classes this year grew up with 90s cable TV, watching cartoons as kids, and if Pinky and the Brain caught enough screen time in people's living rooms for lots of them to know Pinky's tics, then you could call up Pinky to many of those fine beings by using one of them. And I know what it's like to be reminded of Pinky.
Pretty much you can take any character in any kind of work that's ever had a catchphrase and get this from the inside. And it seems to be a device that's used a lot - words that cannot but recall something very specific in you if you're a first century Jew - and importantly. Here's why Mark wants to take you back to the Targums.
In the creation account, the book of Genesis 1:2 says that the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters. The Hebrew verb here means "flutter": the Spirit fluttered over the face of the waters. To capture this vivid image, the rabbis translated the passage for the Targums like this: "And the earth was without form and empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttered above the face of the waters like a dove, and God spoke: 'Let there be light.'" There are three parties active in the creation of the world: God, God's Spirit, and God's Word, through which he creates. The same three parties are present at Jesus's batpism: the Father, who is the voice; the Son, who is the Word; and the Spirit fluttering like a dove. Mark is deliberately pointing us back to the creation, to the very beginning of history. Just as the original creation of the world was a project of the triune God, Mark says, so the redemption of the world, the rescue and renewal of all things that is beginning now with the arrival of the King, is also a project of the triune God.
Sweet what he does even though he's just a fisherman.
