Recent reflections on the Gospel according to Mark

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2005 by Sean P. Kealy

Abstract

This article is an invitation to each reader to reflect on our journey through life with an amazingly deep work like the Gospel of Mark. Mark puts a radical question to our vision of life, the kind of God we believe in, the journey that that God invites---or better commands--us to make. As the poet said, it is above all an invitation to dance within the storm of life as Jesus once did for us.

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Perhaps the high point of the journey of Mark's elusive, mysterious, open-ended, yet challenging Gospel is that it was the gospel read in churches throughout the world during the Jubilee year of 2000. In an article, (A Controversial Gospel, p. 376), I suggested that even Mark himself must be laughing in paradise at the thought. During the extraordinary two million assembly of world youth with Pope John Paul II, each participant was given two copies (one to give away!) of the Gospel according to Mark with beautiful illustrations found in Roman churches, museums, galleries (United Bible Societies, Commune di Roma). I wondered also what Mark would make of Brenda Dean Schildgen's comment (134):

   A quick search on the World Wide Web will reveal well over a
   million sites for the Gospel of Mark on the Internet, in contrast
   to Matthew (a quarter of a million), Luke (one hundred and fifty
   thousand), and John, who surpasses even Mark in attention.

What Do Modern Readers Admire in Mark?

The literature on Mark is amazing: some 1,599 items are listed by H. M. Humphrey--not to mention F. Neirynck's bibliography. Despite a diminution of articles according to some scholars, the flood of publications, especially commentaries, has not ceased to this day. By 1979 Mark had become, in over 1077 languages, the most translated book in the world. However, as Pierre Grelot remarked (509), reflection on the Gospel is in no way at an end. One can only speculate what riches will be discovered in these foundational texts of the Christian faith when the commentators are rooted in the cultures of Africa, India and China.

The Helsinki scholar Petri Merenlahti quotes (36) the evaluation of the award-winning Finnish poet Gosta Agren, who notes that Mark has been "enthusiastically rediscovered as a great artist by narrative critics and by the general public: theater performances of the Gospel have played to full houses in Norway, Sweden and Finland"--"the best-written among the gospels--the most literary." In his collection THE CARPENTER, based on Mark, Agren praises Mark as a cunning author: "Solid, concrete structure gives strength to the story. The author is frank and lucid. Legendary material is not allowed to dominate, yet it flavors the events" (6). Merenlahti asks why Mark has been discovered by such authors, narrative critics and the public, despite the negative comments from Papias ("lack of order") to Bultmann ("not sufficiently master of his material to be able to venture on a systematic outline himself"--350). While Papias emphasized the connection with Peter, as if Mark repeated Peter's original voice as faithfully as possible, Augustine on the contrary saw Mark as an inauthentic secondary version of Matthew.

Nevertheless Mark's modernity has been seen in the light of two dominant traditions, realism and ambiguity, which provide an impression of authenticity and originality. Merenlahti also mentions the assessment by the singer and author Nick Cave who has written on Mark's impassioned intensity and expressive power (expressionism) in HARPER'S MAGAZINE and contributed the preface to Mark in the recently published Pocket Canons series by the Scottish publishers Canongate Books. Cave tries to rehabilitate the Christ of Mark, rejected and denied, sad and lonesome yet the brilliant advocate of a free, unfettered imagination so far from the harmless character to which the Church has reduced Jesus Christ.

On Mark's realism, Merenlahti refers to Erich Auerbach's 1946 classic, where he examines the noble and tragic account of Peter's denial in Mark. There Peter is the image of humanity "in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense" (41) combining "the tragic and the universal with the common and the ordinary," which in classical style belonged to comedy. According to this interpretation of Auerbach, "The gospels are avant-garde created by chance" (40). They are "noble savages" happily saved from the restraining influences of their contemporary high culture and its stiff literary establishment" (ibid). The most original/primitive Mark also "displays the greatest amount of ambiguity." It reminds one, as Donahue has pointed out, of a parable whose final, conclusive meaning "remains difficult for anyone to catch" and must be repeatedly sought after. Jesus' "kingship is a secret, his parabolic words and deeds, as well as his fate, are signs that need to be interpreted correctly." Mark's general inconclusiveness culminates in the general anticlimax of the ending, which is a grammatical rarity with the feeble particle "for," an ending which was possible in popular Greek. Frank Kermode compares this to Joyce's closing words in Ulysses ("yes") and Finnegan's Wake ("the"). For Agren, if the interpretation of a parable said it all, there would be no need of a parable. In the opening poem of THE CARPENTER, he writes, "There was no end; otherwise the journey itself would have made no sense"; and in the concluding poem: "The longing for news is the only news that makes it through."