Jesus, Gossip, Attention

What can a reading of the Gospel of Mark tell us about the real nature of sin, and how it applies to our current situation?

It’s the run-up to Easter. (This Sunday if you’re Catholic, the Sunday after that if you’re a real Christian, i.e. Greek Orthodox). So it’s a good time to think about Jesus, the undisputed champion of world history. (This won’t be as boring as it sounds, I promise. I hope).

To me Jesus is a way to learn about the world—how he behaved, and specifically what got him angry. There’s a lot of confusion about what a “sin” is—usually it just means something bad. But if you look at what gets Jesus most angry, you can learn about the nature of sin in a more interesting way than is usually the case.

I prefer the Gospel of Mark, because Jesus feels most human, most alive—and also the most grounded in our reality. He is frequently angry and disappointed in this Gospel—and his anger and disappointment can tell us about what sin really is.

What makes him angry? Lots of things! It seems like he spends most of his life running around from place to place, being disappointed by everyone he meets, and eventually being disappointed by his trusted circle of 12 friends, the famous Disciples.

How do people disappoint him? The most common way was by not keeping secrets! Jesus began his work—preaching I guess you could call it—in his early 30s, and only did it for a couple of years. When he started, he would heal people of their sicknesses, and he only asked for one thing in return—their silence. This is his first act of healing, where he heals a man suffering from leprosy. After healing him, Jesus:

“…dismissed him with this stern warning: 'Be sure you say nothing to anybody. Go and show yourself to the priest, and make the offering laid down by Moses for your cleansing; that will certify the cure.' But the man went out and made the whole story public; he spread it far and wide, until Jesus could no longer show himself in any town, but stayed outside in the open country.”

This keeps happening in case after case—Jesus heals someone and tells them to keep it a secret, and they never do, and then crowds start hounding Jesus so he has to stay outside, wandering around, because if he goes inside anywhere, a crowd will form and he’ll be trapped. Eventually this is what kills him—word gets around and he gets so famous and attracts attention and all that attention dooms him.

So this is the first lesson—what is sin? Sin is spreading things, making things public that don’t need to be. Bringing attention is how sin is manifested—attention is how sin spreads. Of course today with social media and the so-called “attention economy,” sin spreads more than ever—it’s no wonder that the moral foundations of society seem to be collapsing faster than ever.

Attention is important for Jesus—he doesn’t want attention from too many strangers too fast, because he knows it will lead to destruction (which it does). But he also knows the value and power of attention—towards the end of his life, when he famously prays in the garden of Gethsemane, he asks his disciples for one thing: to keep awake and alert, to pay attention, to not fall asleep. Here’s the passage:

“WHEN THEY REACHED a place called Gethsemane, he said to his disciples, 'Sit here while I pray.' And he took Peter and James and John with him. Horror and dismay came over him, and he said to them, 'My heart is ready to break with grief; stop here, and stay awake.' Then he went forward a little, threw himself on the ground, and prayed…He came back and found them asleep; and he said to Peter, 'Asleep, Simon? Were you not able to keep awake for one hour? Stay awake, all of you; and pray that you may be spared the test: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.' Once more he went away and prayed. On his return he found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy; and they did not know how to answer him. The third time he came and said to them, 'Still sleeping? Still taking your ease? Enough! The hour has come. The Son of Man is betrayed to sinful men…”

Jesus asks his closest friends, his disciples, for one thing—to stay awake while he prays a little in the garden. And they can’t even do that. The betrayal here, the sense of hurt, is very authentic, and to me it seems like this is the moment where Jesus fully gives up and embraces his fate—that he will die, but more than that, that he should die, that he must die, that he wants to die. If even his best friends can’t pay attention when he asks—if they are so sinful—then why bother existing in this awful world at all anymore? It’s often said that Jesus died “for” our sins, but the truth is that he died because of them—and this is how.

So this, I think, is the real nature of sin—of not keeping something secret when you’re asked, of spreading gossip, which brings unwanted attention; and also, of not being able to pay attention when you’re supposed to. This is not usually how sin is conceived of—but I think this is the best way of thinking about it. Sin is what angers and saddens Jesus the most—and nothing did this like gossip and the misuse of attention.

Today, of course, the world is completely and utterly dominated by gossip and by the misuse of attention. Sin has never controlled the world quite as much as now—indeed, the whole basis of society is sin, in this specific sense. And, since the kind of capitalism we have now makes so much money off gossip and attention—there’s a whole “attention economy” thriving—it doesn’t look like this will end anytime soon. The only discussion of it is simply how to succeed in it—how to stand out among the noise of the attention economy, how to win the game. Sin is our present and future—Jesus wept.