I have been trying to show that, while Mark aims in his Gospel to call people into, and cultivate in them, mature discipleship — that is, discipleship that faithfully joins the confession of one’s life to the confession of one’s lips — it’s the “little people” in his narrative, and not (ironically) the disciples, who model this trust in Jesus as the Son of God. The initial picture of such faith, up through the appearance of Bartimaeus in the narrative, is a steady stream of “little people” who stop at nothing to get themselves and beloved others into Jesus’ presence. They ask of and expect from him the impossible, and prostrate themselves worshipfully before him. This picture changes, however, as the last of Mark’s “little people” appear and disappear in the passion narrative concluding his Gospel.
The shift begins with the scribe whom Mark alone portrays sympathetically (12:28ff). This scribe’s “nearness to the kingdom” involves more than standing close to the one who is (as the fathers put it) autobasileia, the “kingdom himself.” It involves agreeing — with one on his way to a cross — that self-sacrificing love for God and neighbor surpasses “all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” Thus oriented, this scribe is not yet the picture of faith in action; but he is the picture of faith ready for action. We reader-disciples will see him as a model of faith that is becoming faithfulness, maturing from childlike trust (though never out of it!) into resolute and principled commitment to self-giving, after Jesus’ example.
The poor widow (12:41ff) models this mature faith more actively. She demonstrates literally that mature faith is about giving, not receiving. Her willingness to “put in everything she had, her whole bios (life),” mirrors in anticipation the one who will soon pour out his whole life, too, “as a ransom for many” (10:45).
After her comes Simon of Cyrene. In an appearance (15:21) brief enough to be otherwise unworthy of mention, he caps these examples with a perfect representation of faith. He is “compelled” to bear Christ’s cross. Early readers of Mark, well acquainted with the legal and penal force of the empire (up to and including crucifixion), must have been sobered, and steeled, by Simon’s example. Yet reader-disciples like us, in every age, hearing Jesus’ description of what he “must” suffer (8:31) and heeding his invitation to follow (8:34), know that cross-bearing is inevitably compulsory for, and finally constitutive of, Christian faith. We accordingly reckon Simon to be something like the patron saint of discipleship.
This leaves only the example of the women at the cross and tomb (15:40ff; 16:1ff). Those who read 16:8 as evidence that they behave faithlessly will find in them only a negative example. But such a stunted interpretation of this final verse ignores the promise of rehabilitation for those (Peter et alia) who have fallen away, and of post-resurrection reunion in Galilee (see 14:28, e.g.) — none of which can happen if the women don’t bring the Easter tidings, eventually, to these disciples. Also, the “trembling and astonishment” and “fear” with which the women flee the tomb are (as William Lane says) “the constant reaction to the disclosure of Jesus’ transcendent dignity in the Gospel.” Why, then, are they not even more appropriate here, in the face of this mind-numbing word, from a credible source, that the one these women know was dead is now alive?
Furthermore, these women only know he was dead because of their faithfulness. In notable contrast to his male followers, they are faithfully present till the end, watching him die, watching his burial. Even if it is only “from afar” (15:40), they fulfill, as their male counterparts do not, the initial part of every disciple’s commission: “to be with him” (3:14). Their assumption that this fundamental attachment to his person extends to being with him in death, and to returning to the grave to anoint his body, situates them uniquely to fulfill, first again, the other part of every disciple’s commission: “to be sent out” (3:14), to proclaim and demonstrate the good news. What reader among us really doubts, then, that these women “got a grip” and soon matched the obedient declaration of their lips to the faithful confession of their lives?
In any event, I contend that Mark’s picture of full-orbed faith in Jesus only emerges as these “little people” who come last in his story add their contribution to that of the “little people” who come first. If so, what is striking about the picture is its evolution. The faith that “little people” demonstrate in the first ten chapters of the Gospel differs considerably from the faith that “little people” demonstrate thereafter. Earlier, this faith is receptive: it comes to Jesus with hands open to receive the blessing from heaven that he brings. Later, this faith is giving: like the Crucified, it shoulders its cross and, withholding nothing, puts the whole of life at the disposal of God and neighbor. Earlier, faith looks like simple trust; later, it looks like enduring devotion. Earlier, it is all worship and wonder; later, it is all witness and work. Could the connection and contrast say something important about discipleship and faith, as Mark understands them?
Perhaps Mark simply means to describe a rhythm that is integral to faith: like breathing, “in and out,” complete faith requires both worship and work, wonder and witness. If so, what disciple among us who has suffered through entire seasons having one without the other — the aridity of work without worship, the sloth of worship without work — doesn’t appreciate Mark’s invitation to something more life-giving, more whole?
But there may be an order here, too, that Mark thinks is important to faith. It certainly resembles the pattern that Christ lays down when he commissions the disciples (3:14), “to be with him” and then “to be sent out.” Perhaps, for Mark, faith has to begin in life-changing encounter with Jesus, or something vital is missing. Absent such an encounter, my faith lacks that utter conviction that no less than God has come, and to me, too, in merciful power, in the living person Jesus. And what other engine is adequate to drive a disciple’s work and witness in the face of, as Mark 13 warns, the world’s hatred and his returning Lord’s delay?
If so, then faith must also issue in something, as concrete and “embodied” as the original encounter. An engine of faith that delivers no real-world cargo has, for Mark, nothing to do with the gospel. Certainly when a disciple is “on trial,” faith will deliver that cargo in words. Yet even in a martyr’s witness, the true center of gravity for faith’s words lies in the material reality around, beneath, and before them. Their weight resides in the real stooping to serve, fasting and praying for deliverance, and feeding the hungry with what’s at hand (“You give them something to eat!”) that generate them, and in the real yielding of one’s life that seals them. The confession of a disciple’s life matters most of all. Where encounter with God’s Son never blossoms into life (and death) in sacramental union with him — a real sharing of his baptism and his cup — faith suffers a terrible miscarriage. For Mark it may be no faith at all.
The irony that it is Mark’s “little people” (as opposed to the disciples) who model this faithful confession of one’s life resonates, perhaps, with a deeper irony, one in Mark’s portrait of Jesus. It’s that, although clearly the Son of God, Jesus never claims this Sonship for himself. It is only claimed for him (in words, at least) by another, a Roman centurion — and this only at his death. Vincent Taylor argued, accordingly, that for Jesus, as Mark knew him, divine Sonship must have been “not primarily a matter of status but of action.” Rooted in a ransoming love, deep in the heart of God, this Sonship could not merely be spoken. It had to be demonstrated, lived and died, in him who was, and is, fully, this God drawn near.
Supposing Taylor is right, it follows that the discipleship laid on each of us should faithfully mirror that Sonship. Our discipleship should be “not primarily a matter of status but of action.” And whenever our faith manifests itself in deeds that tell of God’s Son, with an eloquence beyond words, we will, for that distinctive virtue, have a lot of Mark’s “little people” to thank.
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.
