“Preach the gospel at all times,” urged Francis of Assisi, adding, “if necessary, use words.” And we may wonder that the truth he administers — that actions preach louder, and better, than words — doesn’t paralyze proclamation altogether.
Still, the example of the canonical evangelists should nerve us to keep on. After all, if they knew and observed Francis’ rule (and who can believe that they did?), then, by whatever calculus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John judged the necessity to be great. For, of words — gratias Deo, such marvelous words! — they used plenty.
While of such words Mark–whose Gospel is featured in the lectionary this fall–uses the fewest, there is no reason to regard that as a “Franciscan” economy. The last half century of scholarship has taught us to see the brevity and leanness of his Greek as the stylistic expression natural to the earthshaking tale he has to tell. He is now widely regarded to be, as Samuel Sandmel was alleging as early as the 1960’s, “an artful writer, usually in full control of his pen.” The brusque parataxis reflects the breathlessness of the gospel itself that Mark strains faithfully to preach — in fewer words, perhaps, than many might require, but in words, nonetheless.
Mark’s interest in a witness in words, specifically — that is, in an audible and meaningful declaration, on real human lips, of the truth about Jesus — seems even less “Franciscan.” By design, apparently, this interest in public confession drives the Marcan drama and gives it much of its distinctive shape. What Mark himself (1:1), the Father whose voice sounds from heaven (1:11, 9:7), and even the demons (especially 3:11) comprehend and confess about Jesus — that he is “the Son of God,” God himself drawn near in saving power — humans cannot comprehend or confess. None of them “gets it,” not at least until the grisly scene at the cross plays out. There, finally, in a stunning epiphany, a Roman centurion presiding over Jesus’ execution sees and confesses him to be God’s own Son.
The blindness of Jesus’ opponents, and of his own family, to this truth stands out as Mark’s narrative unfolds. But it is the disciples’ blindness — Reynolds Price calls them “even more culpably blind” — that is most striking, and troubling, for us readers. Professed or prospective disciples ourselves, we can’t like what we see and hear in Mark’s portrayal of our predecessors. We may read with natural sympathy, seeing ourselves too much in them. We may take some comfort, too, in Jesus’ patience with these predecessors and in his hints of reunion, the other side of denial and flight. Still, we cannot read without being convicted, yet moved, too, finally, to be more faithful disciples ourselves.
Just such transformation of disciples may be near to Mark’s purpose in writing. We readers cannot help but hope, on arriving at 16:8 — hardly a conclusive conclusion! — to “write a fresh ending” (as it were), “completing” in our own lives of discipleship and witness what Mark calls, notably, the “beginning” of the gospel.
The most glaring failure in witness that we’ll want to “rewrite” has to be Peter’s denial (14:53-72). Peter’s proximity, there in the high priest’s courtyard, to the legal proceedings involving Jesus, and the way that Mark “frames” those proceedings with Peter’s denial, suggest that Peter is the one truly “on trial!” Given Jesus’ silence, the need of a witness to fill it, and Peter’s obvious opportunity, this failure of the leader of the first disciples to match a pagan centurion’s testimony at the cross has to sting us reader-disciples deeply. We have to hope and pray (none more than Mark’s earliest readers, tradition says, “on trial” in Rome) that, called to testify at the point of a sword, we will not withhold that witness for which words have clearly become necessary!
Yet we will also want to “rewrite” other failures of witness. Take, especially, all that self-centeredness in the disciples “on the way” to Jerusalem, first in Peter (8:31-38), then in the lot of them (9:33-37), then in James and John (10:35-45). These failures are particularly horrifying, narrated as they are in a perfectly timed but increasingly dissonant chorus to Jesus’ clear, three-fold prediction of his passion. What reader among us doesn’t groan, wishing to take them all back?
These failures reflect a collapse of virtue that is no less compromising, apparently, of a disciple’s faithful witness than Peter’s denial in the courtyard of the high priest. Only here the failure turns, not on an unreadiness to confess with one’s lips, but on an unreadiness to confess with one’s life. So, for all his interest in words, Mark turns out to have an interest in deeds, too. More than we initially expected, he values a “Franciscan” transparency through which belief in Christ as “the Son of God” becomes embodied, and made manifest to the world, in disciples’ actions. We readers have to conclude that, as followers of Jesus, we share this interest. Our lives should tell of the Son of God, confess him, as eloquently as any words.
If that’s the chief point, however, here’s the chief irony: that in Mark’s narrative disciples do not model this transparency (any more than they model the confession of the lips). Who does? Mark’s “little people,” this stream of seemingly unimportant characters making brief appearances in the narrative. More of them in the next installment.
Harry Chronis is pastor of White Rock Church in Los Alamos, N.M. This article series evolved during his recent sabbatic leave in Edinburgh with further exploration of the topic in dialogue with an adult Sunday School class at the Los Alamos church.
