Biblical Wanderings: Gospel of Mark, conclusions

The high priest questioned him, “Are you the anointed one [messiah], the son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus, “And you will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of the heavens.” (Mark 14:61-62)

And they entered the tomb and saw a young man dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side, and they were astonished. But he said to them, “Don't be astonished. You seek Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here.”  (Mark 16:5-6)

Am I not allowing for enough Me time? I ask myself, as this month winds to its busy end; as I prepare for my Patreon streams, and schedule meet ups with friends, and look to resume band work; as the album process continues and upcoming performances approach…I fear losing myself. That’s the standard definition of introvert, right? Losing energy with social interactions, requiring solitude to recharge. And yet in recent years, I have watched as a subtle change took place within me. Suddenly, at times solitude seems unendurable to me, whereas I come off of social interactions with fresh energy. Maybe it’s finding the right people, maybe it’s finding the right things to do with them, maybe it’s a shifting of perspective within myself. I expect less, and allow for more. I don’t try to control how I feel.

Still, at the close of a long week of engaging, my head filled with other people’s voices, opinions, perspectives, it can be hard to find myself again. I always viewed that as a problem - something wrong with the way I was living, that I was getting in too deep with others, rather than pursuing my own path. In fact I was relentless about pursuing my own path, keeping a healthy distance from friends and family, letting my own visions and ideas brew. Maybe that was what I needed at the time, but now I know something that I didn’t before: when I lose myself, I find myself, and it’s a stronger self. A self less laden with fear about the outside world, more inclined to the sort of empathy that comes with experience.

In the gospel of Mark, in its earliest forms, Jesus never reappears to his followers in the flesh after his crucifixion. Instead, what we get is a stranger in a white robe, who tells the women who came to dress Jesus’s body that the body they’re looking for is no longer here. They go home confused, and that’s the end. They were expecting the triumphant return of the same person they used to know, and what they got instead was a more radical re-imagining of death, life, and the changes we all go through.

The truth is that we all die in many little ways before that one big one comes. When I looked at others as a kid, when I thought about my own future, I thought, I don’t want that, and I was afraid. I don’t want to do boring old-people stuff. I don’t want health problems. I don’t want to go through the process of getting attached and getting hurt. I don’t want to have my heart broken. It all felt like death to me. 

But it happened anyways. I’ve encountered heartbreak. I watch city council meetings online and I eat plain oatmeal and vegetables. I look back on who I once was, and there’s been an irrevocable change. I have more love now. I have lived more, and lost myself, and not died. I have reached out to people and touched them, thinking they might hurt me, diminish me, and instead I found myself changed, strengthened, reignited by love. I am not who I once was. With every attachment and subsequent death, I’ve grown a bit more detached from my fear.

Who is that man in the white robe, the one waiting with good news, a stranger to the eyes of those women? Could it be the son of man, waiting on the right side, not of a kingly court, but an empty tomb; coming not with earth-shaking wonders, but as gently and as easily overlooked as the clouds in the sky? 

The “son of man”, Jesus’s favorite title for himself, is an ambiguous phrase, loaded with potential meanings. Reading it today, I was suddenly reminded of the term “reshimu”, a Hebrew term discussed in Kabbalistic teachings: “the sensed impression left by any act…what the person carries away with him from his direct experience rather than his intellectual perception.” (from the footnotes of Likutey Moharan, 4:9) That man in the robe stands as the imprint, the lasting residue of Jesus of Nazareth: not that body that was betrayed and killed, but the real Jesus, that pure-white core, that stands smiling to surprise us when we enter in expecting death. This, I think, is what “son of man” means: the one who enters into human life, into the body, into society, and emerges out of it as something new. Or maybe nothing new at all - just a stranger, waiting for someone to ask the right questions.

(A special shoutout to those who have contributed their own comments to this series. Reading them has become a highlight of my week. This will be my last entry for this run, but I’d love to come up with a new excuse for weekly posting soon.)