6. The Miracles

Teaching in parables is a typical characteristic of Jesus. The evangelist Mark, in chapter 4 of his story, collected some emblematic parables of Jesus’ teaching. The first, almost programmatic, is that of the sower, which is followed by another short exclusive account by the second evangelist. Only Mark presents the parable of the seed that grows by itself.

“The kingdom of God is like a man who throws the seed into the ground, sleeps, whereby night or day, the seed germinates and grows, as he himself does not know. The soil spontaneously produces first the stem, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. When the grain ripens, he immediately sends for the sickle because the harvest has arrived.”

This is a parable of grace. It is an announcement of the extraordinary intervention of God, which produces fruit even without man knowing how it happens. The farmer, after he has sown, can sleep or stay awake, and his knowledge of the various mechanisms of Botany does not determine the result. The evangelist Mark wants to emphasize that grace produces extraordinary effects for those who are willing to accept the Word.

Let us not forget that Mark addresses especially to beginners, to catechumens, to those who have been fascinated by the person of Jesus, to those interested in knowing his message and meeting his person. And therefore, in the beginning, it is necessary to announce, above all, the grace of God. It is He who acts; it is He who takes the initiative.

The mustard seed says that the small initial word can become a tree, it can welcome the birds of the sky and become custodian and protector. Jesus does not compare the kingdom of God to a speck of dust to indicate that the speck of dust is small the speck of dust always remains like that; it does not change.

In contrast, the mustard seed is very small; when tried to put on the palm of your hand it is a black dot barely visible and yet, when sown, a plant almost a three-meter tree emerges.

The decisive element is the process, it is the change; it starts small but becomes big; it transforms, it becomes a tall shrub. This is the kingdom of God. If you welcome him, he enters your life and transforms it.

“With many such parables, he announced the word to them as they could understand. Without parables, he did not speak to them, but in private he explained everything to his disciples.”

Mark does not say that Jesus spoke in parables to make things simple; the evangelist already told us otherwise. The disciples need explanation. It is not true that the parables are elementary. They could understand something Jesus announces, his great message in a parabolic way, that is, just barely touching reality and provoking the listener to reason, to understand, to enter history and become the protagonist of the story. The disciples privately ask Jesus for explanations, evidently because they did not understand the parables.

Parables are not elementary tales for simple people or ignorant people. The parables are elegant and learned elements, the result of a sapiential reflection and intended for intelligent people capable of using their heads and hearts, capable of entering into dialogue with the Lord. You can understand his teaching, not only because you have listened to it, but because, remaining with the Lord, you can ask him for an explanation, and the teacher explains everything to those who are with him.

But after the narration of the parables, the teaching done with words, Mark emphasizes the action of Jesus. His word is effective and powerful; he realizes what he says. So, we find at the end of chapter 4 and throughout chapter 5, a series of tales of miracles. On that same day, the preaching of the parables on the beach of Capernaum ended. When evening comes, Jesus invites the disciples to reach the other side of the lake.

“Leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat just as he was. And other boats were with him. A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat so that it was already filling up.”

The Lake of Galilee, which is surrounded by hills, especially from the eastern part, the heights of the Golan, often allow violent currents of air to pass through, which cause sudden storms on the lake. It’s a windstorm. Jesus is tired for the day teaching without the means of amplification, to which we are accustomed outside, that requires an enormous commitment of strength, and falls asleep on the boat.

The disciples, on the other hand, are busy rowing, holding the rudder, raising and lowering the sails, and the wind blowing against them, scares them. The boat fills up with water. The story that Mark tells us, probably derives from listening directly to the preaching of St. Peter.

Remember that we said at the beginning that Mark was a disciple of Peter. He grew up with him, he learned the Gospel listening to the stories of the disciple Simon, who narrates his angry reaction towards Jesus. "He (Jesus) slept on the stern on a cushion." Mark reports that particular useless detail of the pillow.

The image must have impressed him having heard many times Simon Peter recount the episode. While Simon Peter, an expert fisherman, works hard to steer the boat, he does not see Jesus, and then he glimpses him from the opposite side sleeping on the pillow. Peter has a very difficult job to do ... and Jesus sleeps. Have you ever had an experience like that of being super busy and seeing someone else doing nothing?

Peter gets nervous and attacks Jesus, wakes him up and says: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” It is like saying: Do you sleep and leave everything to us? “He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Quiet! Be still!’ The wind ceased and there was great calm. Then he asked them, ‘Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?’” The disciples still have no faith. They are afraid in the middle of that stormy night.

The disciples are afraid; they don’t trust Jesus. They scold him for sleeping: “You don’t care about us.” This is a very human question of those who find themselves in difficulty and they appeal to the Lord, reproaching him for “leaving me in this situation, you don’t care about me.” I am afraid because I do not really trust him because, despite all the words, there is still no strong faith that he would save me, knowing that he is the one who handles reality. The disciples are amazed because, as soon as Jesus gets up, he does not put himself at the rudder, at the oar, at the rope of the sail, but he speaks to the wind and the sea, and the wind and the sea immediately obey Jesus, not the disciples.

And particularly very important, the forces of nature obey Jesus, while the disciples, however, resist him. Jesus’ relatives consider him mad, the scribes maliciously judge him as an ally of the devil, "And the disciples were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?’” But they have not yet answered the question: who is Jesus? Who is he? A very powerful man? Obviously, one that has made the stormy wind and the rough sea obey him. And those fishermen knew about situations of this kind.

Mark cleverly disseminated important questions throughout his Gospel: Who is he? Remember him in the synagogue of Capernaum when Jesus begins his ministry, people ask themselves: “What doctrine is this? This is something new united with authority.” Now, the disciples ask the same question.

In the first part of chapter 5, on the other side of the lake, they meet a strange character. We find the story of the liberation of the possessed man from the Gerasa area. It is a story that Mark expands considerably if you try to make a comparison with Matthew’s parallel narrative. In chapter 8, you will notice how much longer Mark’s story is. Therefore, it is an incorrect observation to say that Mark summarized the Gospel. Mark’s Gospel contains fewer episodes and much fewer words than Matthew’s Gospel, but it is not a summary of the episodes. He tells them in a much more abundant way than Matthew.

This is a typical case: the man dominated by evil is a victim of the devil. He is a man who lives in tombs dominated by an impure spirit. He describes it with great emphasis:

"The man had been dwelling among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any longer, even with a chain. They had bound with shackles and chains, but the chains had been pulled apart by him and the shackles smashed, and no one was strong enough to subdue him.”

He is an irrepressible man, a fury that lives in the midst of the tombs. It is a bit of an image of humanity, of this poor humanity in the grip of sickness: it is furious and indomitable. As soon as Jesus sets his feet on the shore, he is attacked by this furious man who yells at him against insults:

“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!” (He had been saying to him, “Unclean spirit, come out of the man!”)

It is the same thing that we have already seen in the synagogue of Capernaum at the beginning of the ministry. Jesus commands the wind and the sea: "Calm down!" And now he orders the unclean spirit: "Get out!" And there is this evil power that dominates man, it hurls itself against Jesus, does not want to be tormented.

Jesus speaks to that man, asks him questions. He asks him: “What is your name?” He replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” The Greek text says: ‘Λεγιὼν’ = legion. It is a Roman, Latin word. It is a military word; it is a word that recalls the Roman occupation army. There is a ‘legion’ occupying a man. There is a military-political problem affecting the people of Israel in those years, but there is another type of occupation which is much more worrying than that of the Roman legions occupying the territory of Israel. There is an occupation of the diabolic legionaries; it is the world of evil that corrupts man and the strength of Christ frees this man with a particular gesture.

That legion of devils enters the pigs that were grazing in that region and the pigs fall into the sea, a somewhat strange narration for our way of thinking. First of all, let’s not forget that pigs were considered impure and, therefore, there were no pigs in the territory of Israel. If there are herds here it means that we are actually abroad. The other part of the coast of the Lake of Galilee belongs to the Decapolis area, inhabited by the Greeks, not by the Jews.

Reference is made to the city of Gerasa, which is about 20 kilometers from the lakeshore but was the main city of that region. We are in a pagan environment abroad. The pigs raised by these people evoke a world of corruption. Those who have heard the news arrive. They see the man possessed by the legion now healthy, calm-minded, dressed, sitting quietly; he has been released. However, Jesus did not simply do good to that man, but also harmed the pig farmers who invite Jesus to leave their region.

To make myself understood, I try to imagine the situations. Think about the big gains that drug dealers have and their earnings depend on having so many customers. If someone undertakes to recover people from drug addiction, to get them out of the loop of the drug dealers, these people do good for man, but they harm the pig farmers. We often hear news of women who come from poor countries and are being exploited, held in situations of genuine slavery and used as prostitutes.

If someone undertakes to free these women, it causes damage because those who manage them gain from having them slaves. It is very clear that those who undertake to take people away from these systems of exploitation produce damage, produce economic damage to the pig farmers. These invite Jesus to go away. A true commitment to man annoys those whom the evangelist calls pig breeders with the symbolic language of the East, that is, those who play the diabolical game of keeping man under pressure.

“The one who had been possessed with a demon asked him to allow him to accompany him. but Jesus did not allow him. Instead, he says: ‘Go home to your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.’”

This is a mission. He who was demonized and is now healthy, the free man from the power of evil becomes a missionary. An evangelizer “Go home to your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.” That is, the power with which the Lord freed you is your human experience of liberation, which you must testify, not a theory but a concrete experience that you have experienced firsthand.

The other miraculous episode that immediately follows the rest of chapter 5, even includes two stories of healing and resurrection, one embedded in the other. The head of the synagogue goes to call Jesus because his 12-year-old daughter is dying. Jesus agreed to go with him and, along the way, he is touched by a woman suffering from hemorrhage. She commits an illegal act because she knows she is impure; she should stay away from people, much less touch a rabbi, but thinking that this man can heal her, she, instead, secretly touches the fringe of Jesus’ cloak from behind, and feels a power in her that heals her, and Jesus feels a power too.

In this case, Mark points out that no one had managed to heal that woman who had tried many things, had gone to many doctors, had spent a lot of money and was not healed. Indeed, it had gotten worse. It is an almost ironic brushstroke by Mark; just as no one could bind the possessed person, no one can heal this woman.

Once at the house of the head of the synagogue, the child is now dead and Jesus calls her back to life. He says to her father: ‘Continue to have faith, trust even when there is no more life (because as long as there is life there is hope ... we also say). Now there is no more life, continue to have faith because what deems impossible Jesus accomplishes it and goes beyond expectations.

Mark informs us about the word of Jesus ‘ipsisisima verba Jesu’, as the biblical scholar Joaquin Jeremias would say: the very words of Jesus "Talitá kum" ‘talita - girl; kum - get up. Also, Mark adds, “I tell you” to give the tone of Jesus’ voice. He said with a strong command: “I tell you, get up!” Jesus commands the wind, the sea, the devil, and death. He commands and they obey him, and everyone is amazed at this great power that Jesus has.

He returns to Nazareth, his country. Amid his people, there is a flop, a failure. His people do not believe him and, without faith, Jesus cannot perform prodigious signs. He cannot free those who do not trust him. We are once again in a dimension of rejection, of polemical opposition. Thus ends the second part of the first great section told by the evangelist Mark.