Recent reflections on the Gospel according to Mark

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

Utterly Subversive of Western Culture

John Fenton was taught by Robert Henry Lightfoot ([dagger]1953), who became his hero. Lightfoot, with his revolutionary and unusual views on Mark, insisted that Mark deliberately ended at 16:8. Fenton attended lectures by Austin Farrer (Mark kept up his irony to the end so that 15:9 could be read as "He really was the Son of God--I don't think"), who noted that both Bultmann and Vincent Taylor (1953) had little time for Mark as a theologian. For Taylor, "what we find in Mark is no superimposed dogmatic construction, but the virile ideas of Jesus Himself" (125). According to Fenton, on the continent Bornkamm and Conzelmann were believed to have invented redaction criticism, "but to us in England what they were saying was largely Lightfoot's ideas and methods, without acknowledgement" (4). His own first book was on the Marcan passion and resurrection. He had become an enthusiastic reader of Kierkegaard during his undergraduate days at Oxford "with emphasis on offense, irony, Christ the stumbling block and the foolishness of God" (4). He found John of the Cross attractive ("he was so negative; he was Luther in Catholic disguise"). Paradox is the secret of the fascination and applicability of Mark: The omnipotent God (9:23; 10:27; 14:36) "makes use of human failures: the male disciples and the female disciples (they remained silent) the religious leaders and the Romans, the centurion who finally dismisses Jesus himself as a false pretender. We have the treasure in earthen vessels, and it does not matter that they are earthen. God's power is made known in weakness. Mark was right to call his book Good News; it is good news about God ... (who) reveals his omnipotence in the story Mark tells of human ignorance, misunderstanding, fear and weakness. In this paradox lies the secret of the fascination and applicability of Mark's book" (5).

Fenton thanks goodness that Mark leaves us with nothing, neither theology, Christology, ethics, eschatology, ministry, sacraments nor church history, the things that drive us from each other. Mark is content to give a story of disaster and a faith in a God who can do anything--even raise the dead. Fenton concludes that because it is so "utterly subversive" Mark is the best book for the twenty-first century:

   Western culture will need some subversive people to do something
   about its capitalism and its love of self. The one character
   who is the model in Mark's gospel is the child and the child is
   there as a representative of people who are unskilled, nobodies;
   who have no status. The child appears twice, in chapter 9 and in
   chapter 10, and in both cases, Jesus hugs them. They are the only
   people that he does hug" [57].

On the rich person who goes away sad, Mark says "Jesus looked at him and loved him"--it is the only instance of Jesus loving somebody, and he is one who fails. So Fenton concludes "Away success! Welcome failure! That is the good news" (58).

Whatever one thinks of this view, it is increasingly essential to think of the relevance of Mark if Christianity is to survive and to give reason and purpose to so much information that scholars have gathered. Yet our generation is so different, as Ernest (Paddy) Best (46-47) points out: