The Gospel of Mark Mark
Mark
Mark’s is the shortest gospel, and when you read it straight through you can feel why: it has a breathless, eager sense, with things happening “at once,” and one dramatic incident following another. Unlike its longer cousins, Matthew and Luke, Mark gets straight to the point and pretty much stays there: who is Jesus, and what was the meaning of his death?
The central scene in which these questions are posed, and answered, comes towards the end of chapter 8, halfway through the story, when Peter blurts out, “You’re the Messiah!”—and Jesus at once tells his followers that they are going to Jerusalem where he will be crucified. But the abrupt opening of the book sets this double truth within a larger and still more startling frame. Quoting Malachi and Isaiah, Mark indicates that John the Baptist is to be understood as the “messenger” who will prepare the way, as the “voice in the wilderness” who will be the herald . . . for Israel’s God in person. Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40 are not about a coming Messiah. They are about Israel’s God himself, coming back at last to judge and to save after the long years of extended exile. Mark intends that we should read his fast-paced, dramatic narrative as the story of what it looked like when the one God finally came back.
Mark has comparatively little “teaching.” What he does have is Jesus acting with authority, healing all sorts and conditions, casting out demons, feasting with tax-collectors, stilling storms, multiplying loaves and fishes—and teasingly chiding his disciples because they kept on misunderstanding what was going on. They knew he was doing things which meant that the one God was taking charge in a whole new way, but though “the kingdom of God” was a well-known slogan at the time they had never thought it would look like this.
The drama intensifies as they reach the city. On the way, the disciples squabble about who would be the greatest, and Jesus reminds them that in the true “kingdom” all human power-systems will be stood on their heads—because, he says, “the son of man didn’t come to be waited on. He came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’ ” (10.45). The meaning of the cross is found inside the power-reversing meaning of the kingdom. Mark explains the meaning of Jesus’ strange action in the Temple, symbolizing its destruction, in a sequence of events and dialogues which highlight Jesus’ own role as the last prophet, issuing the last warning to God’s rebel subjects. We are not surprised when he is arrested, or that the question of the Temple and its destruction is central at his trial. Jesus responds to the ultimate question of his identity with a devastating combination of Daniel 7 and Psalm 110: he is claiming not only to be Israel’s Messiah but to share the throne of the one God. Mark shows us all this in such a way as to make his alert reader conclude, like the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross, that “this fellow really was God’s son” (15.39).
Mark, then, has given us the message, straight from the shoulder: Jesus is the Messiah, the embodiment of Israel’s God, dying to rescue his people from their fate. But his book is also full of mysteries: beneath the plain-spoken story we sense huge earthquakes rumbling until, with the women at the tomb on Easter morning, all we can sense is “trembling and panic” (16.8). They were right to be afraid. The world had been turned upside down. Their vision of God had been turned inside out. St. Mark’s gospel, twenty pages or so of text in a modern translation, still has the capacity to do that for today’s readers.
The Gospel of Mark
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a. The New Testament for Everyone, Third Edition. Copyright © 2011, 2018, 2019 by
Nicholas Thomas Wright, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. All rights reserved. Published by Zondervan, 2023.
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