Mark: The Story of God’s Rule

Friends, today's post is an assignment for my New Testament class. Enjoy! I might actually do something similar for the other gospels, so let me know if that is appealing or appalling.  

When you think about the gospels, do you differentiate much among them? What does it mean to you that we have four different versions of Jesus’ story? I’m finishing up my first semester of New Testament in seminary, and even after reading them many times on my own, I am amazed at how different the gospels are. Mark stands out as particularly divergent from what we might think of as Christ’s story if we are familiar with it. There are several ways Mark has shocked me during this class.

First, the beginning and ending are shortened basically not there, at least not in the forms we find in other gospels. Mark has no birth narrative (meaning this time of year no one wants to read it!). No mention that Mary was a virgin, no shepherds, no barn full of animals, no wise men/kings, no angels. The story starts with a brief introduction of John the Baptizer, and Jesus first appears when he comes to him to be baptized, as an adult. The ending, too, is abrupt and seems to leave out a lot if you expect a resurrected Jesus to appear. Even if I hadn’t been studying the history of the gospels, I think it would be pretty easy to see why people think Mark was written first. It’s a very basic, straightforward version of the story. It feels like there’s no time for details—even if the writer believed there were angels and a virgin birth and such, which is doubtful, he deemed them non-essential and decided to make his point without them.

Second, as you may have discerned from the lack of birth narrative, Jesus is remarkably non-divine in Mark. God does say, “You are my beloved son. I delighted choosing you.” But the idea of being a son in this story is not supposed to mean Jesus is godlike. It means Jesus gets God, understands what God is trying to do, and wants to help God do it, presumably more than anyone else. It’s like on The West Wing when Jed Bartlet refers to Josh Lyman as his son (in the episode “Two Cathedrals”). Not a blood thing, but a sense that in his gut, Josh understands Jed’s purpose just as well as Jed himself does, and he is all in, willing to go anywhere with him to pursue it. The idea that being God’s son makes Jesus divine came later, as Matthew and Luke built on Mark.

            

A third mind-bending trick of Mark is not necessarily intrinsic to the text itself but is a compelling reading I found in Mark As Story by David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie. The authors say Mark, like other gospels, is often read as a story of Jesus’ execution (at the end) with a whole heck of a lot of exposition, introductory material. They choose to read it instead as a story of God’s rule breaking into the established world (at the beginning), with a lot of d­énouement. They make a really convincing argument for it, and I recommend the book to anyone who’s interested in this stuff. Much of what I say in this post comes from it. Anyway, it’s Jesus’ baptism, just a few verses into chapter 1, that inaugurates the rule of God, and the rest is the story of how that plays out. This reading changes how we pay attention to the story. If we think the important part is at the end, we’re likely to rush through a lot of the scenes and just get the gist so we can move on. If we think the main part happened at the very beginning, we have new eyes with which to read the rest. So we can see Jesus perhaps not as a doomed, tragic figure but as a person—as we established earlier, not a divine character—whose faith in God is so central to his life that he overcomes fear and pain because he believes his death will serve God and others. Still pretty tragic in some ways, but for me there’s an awe in this second reading that isn’t there in the first, as well as a loud and clear call of encouragement and challenge to the original listeners.

That brings me to a fourth point, the way the context shaped the meaning. Those who listened as Mark’s gospel was performed, at least some of them, would have been facing persecution and death not just because they followed Jesus but because they wanted what we would now call social and economic justice, and they believed in power that is expressed not in force but in service. Sometimes I think it’s not hard to picture how threatening this was to the people who had power at the time, because it’s still so threatening now. But then I think about how much worse it was. They had no such thing as political correctness and not even a reason to appear to care about people. It was pretty acceptable, as I understand it, to look out for yourself and your friends and act in your own interests. That definitely still happens, but when it does, other people sometimes find out and speak out. At the time this was written, there was no accountability like that. Mark came soon after the Roman-Judean war in 66-70. It was a peasant rebellion against Roman and Judean elites, and boy, did it not end well. The Romans destroyed towns and farms throughout the whole area of Galilee and Judea, and they burned the temple in Jerusalem. That’s what happened when you tried to speak out against anything powerful people were doing. Sometimes I’m angry with congress or other people in control, but I don’t run the risk of having my entire city destroyed if I say something. The people this story was written for felt like they had to choose between doing what was right and saving their own lives. Jesus’ story no doubt gave them something to cling to.

Alongside the potential encouragement in the story, there is an unmistakable challenge, point #5. As I studied that abrupt, unresolved ending, I kept thinking of the parable that is often called the story of the prodigal son. It doesn’t appear in Mark, so it’s not entirely academically appropriate of me to mention it here, but the connection is this: the parable ends with the father telling his older son that his brother’s return is something to celebrate. The gospel of Mark ends with three women fleeing from Jesus’ tomb. In both cases, the story acts as a question to the listener or reader. When something is left unresolved like that, we get to be the decider and think about how we want to respond, how we will respond. In the parable, we think about the older brother’s options. In the gospel, ideally, we see ourselves as the ones who now have the opportunity to tell what the women didn’t tell at the time. Especially in the original context, that ending was an invitation to pick up where they left off.  

That’s it for now. Hit me with comments. What do you think of all this?