Rereading the Gospel of Mark

 

I reread the book of Mark. I confess much of the Bible has always been a problem for me. With my recent rereading it was no different. Thus I turned to the historical-critical method scholars Dale Martin and Bart Ehrman for help. And then to Josef Ratzinger and Timothy Ware, a great Catholic and a great Orthodox theologian. Ratzinger discusses Mark explicitly; Ware gives the general framework that fits Mark like a glove. Only with their help was I able to come to some understanding of the story, and found it actually much deeper than I was able to understand it on my own (very humbling). Now you can read a book like Mark from different perspectives: historical-critical, literary, theological, faith. I just wanted to understand it as a story and as theology, and so kind of bracketed out the historical question. 

 . . .

    Mark wants to tell his readers who Jesus was, why his life was so significant. "Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?" (4:41). It is curious that the demons recognize him immediately, the crowds are full of wonder (an appropriate response) but the disciples are constantly confused. The answer unfolds over the course of the book.

     Jesus repeatedly tries to keep his identity hidden, silencing demons, ordering healed people not to tell anyone, and commanding the disciples not to reveal him. And his disciples seem clueless throughout the book.  This puzzled me. So I went to scholars and theologians. I learned that the connection between the "Messianic Secret" and the cross goes back at least to a certain William Wrede, who made the Messianic Secret famous in 1901. Wrede argued that Mark created the secrecy motif to explain an embarrassing historical fact: if Jesus was really the Messiah, why was he not recognized during his lifetime? The interpretation that makes the most sense to me is that of Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. What Ratzinger did is give the secret a theological rather than merely literary explanation, as did Wrede. 

   His argument was that the titles "Messiah," "Son of God," "King," and even "Christ" were ambiguous in first-century Judaism. People naturally interpreted them in political, military, nationalistic, or triumphalist ways. That is exactly what happens in Mark. Peter correctly says: "You are the Christ." But then rejects the prediction of suffering, proving he knows the title but not its meaning. Therefore Jesus forbids public proclamation because the title itself is not enough. It will inevitably be misunderstood. Only the cross reveals what kind of Messiah he is. In Ratzinger's reading, the secrecy is not over whether to tell people that Jesus was Christ but was because they would not, could not understand what that meant. Before the cross, everyone fills the title "Messiah" with their own expectations of power, glory, victory, or national restoration. After the cross, the title can finally be understood for what it is. Thus the Roman centurion's confession at the crucifixion is so important: "Truly this man was the Son of God." The irony is deep. The disciples confess Jesus as Messiah before the cross but misunderstand him. The centurion confesses him at the moment of apparent defeat. For Mark, according to Ratzinger, that is the first confession that fully grasps the meaning of the title. The cross functions like the key to a code. Before the cross people misunderstood “Messiah,” “son of God,” “kingdom of God,” and even “power.” After the cross, as a culmination of the story, we learn that Messiah means self-giving love, kingship means service, divine power is sacrificial love. Victory appears through apparent defeat. Jesus remains a secret until the cross because the cross reveals the meaning of every title applied to him. Without the cross, "Messiah" is merely a word onto which people project their hopes. Through the cross, the word receives its true content. A reversal of values if there ever was one.

    The cross overturns the framework through which human beings interpret reality. The disciples think they know what greatness, power, victory, and kingship mean. The cross reveals that they do not, which is why they cannot understand Jesus beforehand. They know all the facts but lack vision as their hearts are not open. (An epistemological message of the book is that only the heart can see, those with “hardened hearts” are blind, even if they do know all the facts.) Mark seems obsessed with misunderstanding. The problem is not that people do not know the answer. The problem is that they are asking the wrong question. They want to know whether Jesus is the Messiah. Mark wants them to discover what kind of Messiah he is. Jesus cannot be understood correctly apart from the cross. The disciples' blindness is understood not simply as intellectual misunderstanding but as a spiritual condition. Humans do not apprehend divine reality clearly because they are trapped by pride, fear, and distorted desire. Only through repentance and participation in Christ's life can true vision emerge.

    A favorite Orthodox image, I learned, is the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22–26). The man first sees people "like trees walking." Only afterward does he see clearly. Many Orthodox commentators see this as a symbol of the disciples themselves. Understanding Christ comes gradually through purification and transformation.

   The problem Mark lays out is a kind of blindness of attention. People are socially programmed to seek power, prestige, security, wealth, and victory. Therefore they cannot recognize goodness when it appears as humility, suffering, and self-giving love. In that sense, Mark's Gospel echos themes earlier found in Plato, and later found in Augustine, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Raimond Gaita: namely, we do not merely need more facts; we need to learn how to see. At bottom, the main theme of the book is not who Jesus is – that is made clear – but what must happen to us before we can recognize who Jesus is. Before we can see the world right. The answer Mark gives is that only when our ordinary understanding of power, success, and greatness is broken by the cross do we begin to see reality clearly. 

. . . 

    It is interesting that a similar reading is offered by the critical-historical Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, from a different perspective. Both Ehrman and Ratzinger agree that Jesus repeatedly silences people because people would misunderstand his identity if they proclaimed him Messiah before understanding the significance of his suffering and death. The divergence comes one level deeper. For Ehrman, this is a literary and historical observation about Mark's theology. Mark believes that Jesus is the Messiah, but a suffering Messiah. Since most people expected a triumphant Messiah, Mark constructs a narrative in which Jesus' true identity remains hidden until the Passion. For Ratzinger, the same observation points to a theological truth about reality itself. The cross is not merely Mark's literary solution to a narrative problem; the cross is the actual revelation of who God is. Both agree that Mark wants readers to reinterpret messiahship through the lens of suffering. For Ratzinger, a man of faith, through the story God has revealed the true meaning of power, kingship, and love through the cross. The literary reading is similar; the metaphysical conclusion is different. Why is reality structured in such a way that suffering love reveals truth more deeply than power does? That question lies outside the historian's discipline, though I think Ehrman smuggles in his purely secular positions at times, at least in his interviews. The issue is whether Mark is expressing a truth about God (reality) or a just a belief of the early Christian community. 

. . . 

  I think that is the main thrust of the book. There are other related themes or problems that become clear when interpreted in this light. I couldn’t help but notice that Jesus is often less than kind and patient with the disciples. He often seems exasperated by their ignorance. He is hardest on those closest to him. The crowds often receive compassion. The sick are healed. The possessed are liberated. The hungry are fed. The sharpest rebukes are directed at the disciples because they have been invited into deeper intimacy and therefore bear greater responsibility for understanding. In light of the above reading, however, rebuke is a form of love. Not sentimental affirmation, of course, but the refusal to leave someone imprisoned in illusion (cf. Socrates leading the imprisoned souls out of the Cave of shadows). The cross reveals what divine love actually is. If that is true, then Jesus' severity toward the disciples is not contrary to love. It is part of the painful process by which their distorted vision must be healed so that they can finally see what love, power, and God really are. By the end of Mark, the disciples never fully "graduate." They remain confused and frightened almost to the last page. Mark is not interested in presenting heroic disciples but in showing how difficult genuine conversion of vision really is. (The implication is that it take the resurrection to do it.) The reader is surely meant to recognize himself among them. The problem is not so much why the disciples are so dense but how they must either let go of their worldly concept of reject Jesus on the cross as a failure and a fraud. That is where Mark's severity becomes uncomfortable. 

. . . 

   I know there are many echoes of Mark’s theme in literature and even movies. My favorite in a 1951 film adaption of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. The verse from Mark (8:18) is: literal translation - "Having eyes, do you not see? Having ears, do you not hear?" One of the most moving scenes in the movie occurs when the transformed Scrooge visits Fred and Fred's wife and asks forgiveness. He says: "Can you forgive a pig-headed old fool with no eyes to see with and no ears to hear with all these years?" That line was added by the screenwriters, not original to the book, but it beautifully captures the theme from Mark, a perfect summary of both Mark's Gospel and Dickens's understanding of conversion. Scrooge's problem was never intellectual. He knew the poor existed. He knew his nephew loved him. He knew Christmas made people happy. The facts were all there. But he did not see. Likewise in Mark, the disciples see miracles, hear teachings, and witness wonders, yet Jesus repeatedly asks: "Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear?" (Mark 8:18) In both stories, redemption is conceived as recovering the capacity to see reality rightly. 

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Works

 

Ehrman, Bart D. "The Gospel of Mark." The New Testament. The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2001.

 

Martin, Dale B. "The Gospel of Mark." Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (RLST 152), Open Yale Courses, Yale University, Spring 2009, Lecture 6: The Gospel of Mark.

 

Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI). Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. New York: Doubleday, 2007. [chapters 9 and 10]

 

Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction to Christianity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. Einführung in das Christentum. Vorlesungen über das Apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis. München: Kösel-Verlag, 1968.

 

Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995 rev. ed. (original edition 1979).