I have just read through the Gospel of Mark for my Lenten preparation, and the starkness of it is really quite haunting, and sometimes jarring.
I feel like it’s the gospel where Jesus comes across as the most profoundly human, visibly frustrated and crushed by the grind of events, but still somewhere between feeling angry at and sorry for the whole mess of humanity. He just can’t bring Himself to leave people as they are, and literally can’t get away from them either, so repeatedly finds Himself overcome with pity, and is unable to turn people away. So, He must heal them, or feed them, or call them to follow Him.
At the same time, people don’t ‘get’ Him, including His own family, and the readers as well are left to puzzle over Him and His strange words, seeming to predict some great upheaval that will shatter everything we’ve ever known. It’s like a whole world is about to die, and this Man knows it, and He’s going to die, and we dread it, and yet when everything else is in ashes, and the cursed fig tree withers, His strange, haunting words, woven into inscrutable parables and profound hyperbole, will endure to the end.
The Passion section is so very stark. There’s been this build up through the gospel that Jesus can achieve the miraculous, casting out demons and walking across water, and all these prophecies about the punishment of God on the temple and Him coming in the clouds of glory, overlap in searing potency. And all of a sudden, the protagonist gets dumped in a pit, and beaten, and spat at, and struck, and mocked—it’s all moving so fast—and then He’s nailed to a tree, and it’s all quite horrifying. The cynic would have cause to shake his head.
I’m getting a re-appreciation for how much tonal whip-lash is involved here. The narrative almost gives you the feeling that the power of God will somehow save Jesus, or that at least his followers are going to do something. I mean, He’s so blatantly been set up as the hero, and this sort of thing doesn’t happen to heroes. He’s begged for pity alone in the garden, the pity He’s felt for so many, mostly thankless, people. Surely some pity will be shown back, some salvation brought to bear to pull Him through. Surely this must be the “good news” Mark wants to tell us.
Then… nothing happens. They just kill Him. He’s left asking why God has forsaken Him, and the Pharisees laugh at His pain, and the grating words of Elijah, and we wonder if this strange dream of an old world dying and a new world breaking through has all come to rot and ruin.
And then the temple curtain is torn down the middle.
There are the famous “two endings” of Mark’s narrative, but the hard-cut one seems to fit the bare-bones nature of this gospel best:
“Then they went out and fled from the tomb, seized with trembling and bewilderment. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Trembling and bewilderment. Yes, this strange “good news”. We’re living in a world that is both slain and reborn, and this gospel is our scandalous grace.
Thank you!