What's MARK about?

Summary

Mark was the first gospel to be written, about 40 years or so after Jesus' life. It probably began long before that as a series of oral stories that the early communities told one another every week when they gathered for the meal that became communion. Over time these stories about Jesus were organized and eventually written down in the order they were usually told in. Because Mark was the first gospel, we don’t know for sure what the stories were like before they were arranged in the way we have them in Mark's gospel. But there are some elements of special significance.

This is the gospel closest to the life of Jesus

In Mark, because there has been less time to adjust the stories, the stories are more basic and less polished, and they sometimes show Jesus as more emotional and less omniscient than the other gospels. For example, in Mark, Jesus is occasionally “deeply moved” or “angry,” whereas the later gospels remove those strong emotions. When Jesus confronts his home town who refuse to trust him, Mark says that he wasn't able to do many miracles there. The other gospels adjust this to say that Jesus chose not to do many miracles there. We can see how over time Christians wanted Jesus to seem more and more perfect. This may suggest to us that Jesus was more like our own experiences than we sometimes think—if we were to work backward, the earlier stories may have been even more human. Mark does not seem to have heard of any special circumstances around Jesus' birth—it seems that Mark understood Jesus' birth to have been totally ordinary. In the same way, Jesus' resurrection is not described, only that the women followers ran from the tomb with fear. It may be that if the gospel was originally a play, Mark's intention was to encourage the community watching to go out and be the resurrection themselves. That can be a great help in understanding how fully human Jesus was, even having many of our own limitations. This can assist us with a sense that Jesus is closer to us than we may have thought.

Mark arranges his stories about Jesus in a very deliberate sequence.

We don’t usually notice when we read Mark one story at a time on Sundays, but the stories have been arranged in an order that tells us what Mark thought was the central message of Jesus' life. In the first half of this gospel there are many miracles which astonish the onlookers. But half-way through, Jesus begins talking about the fact that he must be executed and then raised. From that point on there are hardly any more miracles, and three times in a row the disciples refuse to take seriously Jesus' expectation that he will be executed. Just before this series of conflicts with Jesus, a blind man is healed but only partly at first. After the three times the disciples refuse to be servants of each other, as Jesus is calling them to be, Jesus heals another blind man, and that man is fully healed and he then follows Jesus “on the way.” The term “the way” was the earliest title for the new faith, long before it was called “Christianity.” Mark's intention is clear: disciples respond to the wonderful healings and miracles but don't want anything to do with Jesus' call to sacrificial love. Nevertheless, Mark is saying, in spite of the fact that we don't “see” what Jesus is about at first, we will “see” after Jesus' heals us through God's love expressed in his death and resurrection.

How Mark helps us know Jesus

Mark, being the closest gospel to Jesus, in some ways gives us the most accurate description of what Jesus was actually like. His humility in being limited as we are is more obvious and may help us feel closer to him. Those limitations become central to understanding Jesus—his repeated insistence on the need for him to suffer and to die a sadistic death is the way that we can appreciate the depth of God's love in totally identifying with what humans experience and therefore being with us in a profound way. As the later gospels make Jesus more “holy” and “perfect” they place more emphasis on how God is present through Jesus' death and resurrection, but by so doing may make Jesus feel impossibly perfect and distant from us. Mark provides an important corrective to an impossibly perfect Jesus who we can't possibly follow.