A Year With The Gospel Of Mark
The lectionary, a cycle of readings that guides readings in worship over a three-year period, focuses each year on one of the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke.
Thus at the beginning of each new church year (Advent), communities are offered the opportunity to shift perspective and hear the gospel of Christ through a specific perspective.
This year we return to the gospel of Mark which is, one could argue, the most “original” of the synoptics, the one that influenced both Matthew and Luke, and also the one that jumps much more immediately into the life and ministry of Christ and ends far more abruptly focused mostly on Christ’s death and only in anticipation of his resurrection.
For a while now, I’ve thought of Mark as the “radical discipleship” gospel. This is probably because Chad Myers, whose Binding the Strong Man is the only commentary on a book of Scripture to rival Barth’s Romans commentary in terms of impact, presents Mark as a manifest of “radical discipleship,” a narrative of the Human One who seeks to realize the Reign of God in our social, historical, spiritual, and political landscape.
Jesuit activist Daniel Berrigan says of Binding the Strong Man, “Myers of course brings his own bias to the text; he is quite forthright about it. The ‘bias’ amounts in his case to an attentive analysis of the politics of Jesus; to that Way of defiance, loving, albeit courageous, toward the worldly powers that in His time and ours ravage the world and legalize high crime.”
Some call the gospel of Mark a breathless narrative, emphatically describing Jesus’ acting and preaching as the kingdom of God breaking into our reality as good news.
Others have convincingly argued that the gospel of Mark is written to be read out loud. Although sometimes the Greek in which it is written has been accused of a kind of clumsiness, when students of the text have attended to how the gospel sounds when read out loud, they increasingly have come to see that it isn’t that the Greek is clumsy but that the text is written for the ear, to be heard.
I love the gospel of Mark. Of all the gospels, it is the one most accessible for our moment, I think. With less of the mythologized accoutrements of Matthew, or the “spiritualizing” of Luke, I find Mark to be THE gospel among the gospels.
Over the course of this year I’ll try to highlight a few of the more intriguing aspects of the gospel of Mark here on the blog, like the oddity that Jesus performs miracles in the first half of it, but seems unable to continue them in the second half of the gospel (as if he has “spent” his powers). Or the other oddity of the multiple endings and no Nativity.
But for right now, as we begin a new year in church, I invite a certain level of introspection. Have you read a whole gospel from beginning to end recently? If not, perhaps go grab a bible this weekend, open it, and read Mark? The whole thing can be read out loud in about 90 minutes.
Mark is the most popular of gospels to memorize and perform, perhaps because it is the shortest but also because it was written for such performance. You can find dozens of recordings of performances of it online, one of the more famous of which is Max McLean’s one-man show.