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      2. Covering Up Sexual Abuse: An Ecclesial Tendency from the Earliest Years of the Jesus Movement?

      MICHAEL TRAINOR

Australia’s Royal Commission into the Sexual Abuse of Minors and Vulnerable Adults uncovered one of the consistent and shocking tendencies of leaders of religious and church communities.1 This was the tendency to ‘cover up’.2 In order to prevent any scandal being focused on the Church, leaders sought to obfuscate the problem by moving perpetrators from one religious community to another, by blaming the one abused or by acting as though nothing was amiss and it was business as usual. This tendency was supported by an ecclesiology that regarded the Church as a ‘perfect society’ and its ministers as set apart through ordination, as unaccountable, and as acting in God’s name without transparency.3 Any flaws in the Church through human weakness could always be forgiven. This was applied to those who acted inappropriately and sinfully. At the heart of this ecclesiology, ministerial protectionism and cover-up, expressed through unaccountable conduct towards children, lies the culture of clericalism. The Commission summarizes this as:

the idealization of the priesthood, and by extension, the idealization of the Catholic Church. Clericalism is linked to a sense of entitlement, superiority and exclusion, and abuse of power.4

      The ‘cover-up’ tendency as a product of clericalism is not a phenomenon of recent history. This chapter will demonstrate that it occurred among members of the Jesus movement in the first century CE. What follows falls into three parts.

First, we shall see how the story of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, written around 70 CE, was a story about one who was protective of children and, like them, subject to maltreatment and abuse.5 Mark’s final story (Mark 14—16), anticipated by the disciples’ attitude to children and the verbal contestation between Jesus and his opponents, as well as Jesus’ own passion and death, becomes a story of sexual abuse with Jesus executed naked and ultimately shamed.6

Second, in Luke’s Gospel we see a different portrait. Luke presents Jesus as more majestic and dignified. Its author redacts Mark’s scene of the disciples’ response to children coming to Jesus (Luke 18.15–17), presents him as the victor in any verbal contest, and alters – almost removing entirely – the abusive treatment of Jesus found in Mark’s passion narrative. Instead of naked and shamed, the evangelist has Jesus die elegantly clothed.7

      In the concluding section, I suggest the reasons for the alterations that Luke makes to Mark. The study will invite us – contemporary disciples concerned about the present situation that confronts our churches – to a spirit of openness, reflecting critically on the endemic that has plagued Jesus’ followers from earliest years, and to act, in so far as we are able, on behalf of those who are abused as we continue to explore ways of ministerial accountability and transparency.

      Mark’s Gospel

Mark’s Gospel offers a portrait of Jesus that would speak into a Jesus household chronologically distant and culturally different from the world of the Galilean Jesus.8 Mark portrays Jesus as misunderstood and, as the story unfolds, someone who is gradually abandoned even by those closest to him. The ultimate moment of the sense of Jesus’ abandonment comes in his death scream of dereliction, ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’ (Mark 15.34). This is a highpoint in Mark’s Christological portrait, especially in what frames it – the lead-up to the death moment (Mark 15.21–33) and the centurion’s declaration that comes immediately after Jesus’ death (Mark 15.39), a point to which we shall return shortly.

      Mark’s Gospel begins in the wilderness with John the Baptist’s teaching; from the wilderness Jesus appears calling his listeners to ‘repent’. Jesus’ first words in Mark are: ‘The time is fulfilled and the reign of God has drawn near. Repent and believe in the Good News’ (Mark 1.15).

The injunction, ‘repent’ (metanoeō), is more than a declaration to the disciples and all gospel listeners of a conviction of God’s presence and moral living. It is a call to a fundamental openness of heart to what is about to unfold in Jesus’ ministry. Metanoia is an invitation to perceive what is happening from a different point of view. As Mark shapes the narrative with a view to the final chapters, we remember the often-quoted words of Martin Kähler, who declared that the Gospels are ‘passion narratives with a lengthy introduction’.9 Mark’s ‘lengthy introduction’ reveals Jesus alone and misunderstood as antagonism begins in Mark 3 and heightens as the narrative moves forward, reaching its crescendo in the Gospel’s final chapters. All the time, the injunction metanoeō remains.

      The Gospel auditor must listen beneath the surface of what happens to Jesus, at a second, deeper level that places the story against the backdrop of Mark’s cultural and historical situation. The evangelist writes not with a desire to freeze the memory of the Galilean Jesus in time and place, but, instead, with the intention of expanding the faith insights for a later Greco-Roman Jesus movement that the Gospel addresses, shaping its Christology to address the realia of Mark’s audience.

      And what is that realia?

      Mark’s Christological portrait offers a window into the situation of the Gospel’s audience. The way the evangelist portrays Jesus speaks into the situations that Mark’s householders face. One of these is sexual abuse. This emerges in the passion narrative, but it is subtly anticipated in the Gospel’s preceding chapters. There are, among many others, two indicators that flag or prepare the Gospel audience for the abusive treatment that Jesus will receive: the way the ‘little ones’ are treated by Jesus’ disciples, and the verbal interchange between Jesus and his antagonists. This intensifies as the story nears the Gospel’s denouement.

      The ‘children’ in Mark’s Gospel

In the beginning of the second half of the Gospel, as Jesus begins to journey towards Jerusalem with his reluctant disciples, he sets a child (paidion) into the midst of his posturing entourage (Mark 9.36). He encourages a change of attitude, a metanoia, to receive the child, the quintessential symbol of social nothingness, into their midst. Скачать книгу