This Sunday is what used to be called The Long Gospel and relates The Passion of Christ.
(Incidentally, this reminds me of my mother who told me that as a teenager in Ireland during the '30's, she remembered people used to faint at various times during Mass , but the numbers doing so increased sharply during the reading of this Gospel, not so much from empathy for Christ's Passion, but more because in those days, complete fasting for 24 hours before receiving communion was rigidly followed by most people and sitting down was a definite no-no.)
To set it in some perspective I have found these two articles helpful.
The first is a lovely summary of Mark's Gospel from John Predmore S.J at his blog here called Ignatian Spirituality:Set The World Ablaze, especially the last paragraph where he says:
" I set aside half an hour before Mass
to read the Passion narrative slowly.
I fix my attention on the emotions of
each character so I can experience what they may have felt.
Mostly, I try to
understand what Jesus is feeling. I ask him to tell me as I hold what he says
in reverent silence.
I simply want to be a friend to him and give him what he
needs most in suffering - the experience of sharing his story with a friend.
Each year, I am surprised with the deeper emotions he shares with me.
I know I
can never hold all his pain; I just try to be there with him.
I don't know what
else to do."
The second is by writer and musician Nick Cave, who may not be the obvious person to offer thoughts on Mark's Gospel but whilst I find myself not in complete agreement with all his views I still find this a compelling reflection and well written. It dates from 1998.
An
Introduction to The Gospel According to Mark ( from here)
by Nick Cave
"When
I bought my first copy of the Bible, the King James version, it was to the Old
Testament that I was drawn, with its maniacal, punitive God who dealt out to
His long-suffering humanity punishments that had me drop-jawed in disbelief
at the very depth of their vengefulness.
I
had a burgeoning interest in violent literature, coupled with an unnamed sense
of the divinity in things and, in my early twenties, the Old Testament spoke
to that part of me that railed and hissed and spat at the world.
I believed
in God, but I also believed that God was malign and if the Old Testament was
testament to anything, it was testament to that.
Evil seemed to live close to
the surface of existence within it, you could smell its mad breath, see the
yellow smoke curl from its many pages, hear the blood-curdling moans of despair.
It was a wonderful, terrible book, and it was sacred scripture.
But
you grow up. You do. You mellow out. Buds of compassion push through the cracks
in the black and bitter soil. Your rage ceases to need a name. You no longer
find comfort watching a whacked-out God tormenting a wretched humanity as you
learn to forgive yourself and the world..
Then,
one day, I met an Anglican vicar and he suggested that I give the Old Testament
a rest and read Mark instead. I hadn't read the New Testament at that stage
because the New Testament was about Jesus Christ and the Christ I remembered
from my choirboy days was that wet, all-loving, etiolated individual that the
church proselytised.
I spent my pre-teen years singing in the Wangaratta Cathedral
Choir and even at that age I recall thinking what a wishy-washy affair the whole
thing was. The Anglican Church: it was the decaf of worship and Jesus was their
Lord.
"Why
Mark?", I asked. "Because it's short", he replied. I was willing to give anything
a go, so I took the vicar's advice and read it and the Gospel of Mark just swept
me up.
Here,
I am reminded of that picture of Christ, painted by Holman Hunt, where He appears,
robed and handsome, a lantern in His hand, knocking on a door: the door to our
hearts, presumably. The light is dim and buttery in the engulfing darkness.
Christ came to me in this way, lumen Christi, with a dim light, a sad light,
but light enough. Out of all the New Testament writings - from the Gospels,
through the Acts and the complex, driven letters of Paul to the chilling, sickening
Revelation - it is Mark's Gospel that has truly held me.
Scholars
generally agree that Mark's was the first of the four gospels to be written.
Mark took from the mouths of teachers and prophets the jumble of events that
comprised Christ's life and fixed these events into some kind of biographical
form.
He did this with such breathless insistence, such compulsive narrative
intensity, that one is reminded of a child recounting some amazing tale, piling
fact upon fact, as if the whole world depended upon it - which , of course, to
Mark it did.
'Straightway' and 'immediately' link one event to another, everyone
'runs', 'shouts', is 'amazed', inflaming Christ's mission with a dazzling urgency.
Mark's Gospel is a clatter of bones, so raw, nervy and lean on information that
the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence.
Scenes of deep tragedy are
treated with such a matter of factness and raw economy they become almost palpable
in their unprotected sorrowfulness.
Mark's
narrative begins with the Baptism, and 'immediately' we are confronted with
the solitary figure of Christ, baptised in the River Jordan and driven into
the wilderness. 'And he was there in the wilderness 40 days, tempted of Satan;
and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him' (1:13). This
is all Mark says of the Temptation, but the verse is typically potent owing
to its mysterious simplicity and spareness.
Christ's
forty days and forty nights in the wilderness also say something about His aloneness,
for when Christ takes on His ministry around Galilee and in Jerusalem, He enters
a wilderness of the soul, where all the outpourings of His brilliant, jewel-like
imagination are in turns misunderstood, rebuffed, ignored, mocked and vilified
and would eventually be the death of Him.
Stanley Spencer Christ in Wilderness
Even
His disciples, who we would hope would absorb some of Christ's brilliance,seem
to be in a perpetual fog of misunderstanding, following Christ from scene to
scene with little or no comprehension of what is going on.
So much of the frustration
and anger that seems at times almost to consume Christ is directed at His disciples
and it is against their persistent ignorance that Christ's isolation seems at
its most complete.
It is Christ's divine inspiration, versus the dull rationalism
of those around Him, that gives Mark's narrative its tension, its drive.
The
gulf of misunderstanding is so vast that His friends 'lay hold of Him' thinking,'He
is beside himself' (3:21). The Scribes and Pharisees, with their monotonous
insistence on the Law, provide the perfect springboard for Christ's luminous
words.
Even those Christ heals betray Him as they run to the town to report the
doings of the miraculous healer, after Christ has insisted that they tell no one.
Christ disowns His own mother for her lack of understanding. Throughout Mark,
Christ is in deep conflict with the world. He is trying to save, and the sense
of aloneness that surrounds Him is at times unbearably intense.
Christ's last
howl from the cross is to a God He believes has forsaken Him: "Eloi, Eloi, lama
sabachthani"
The
rite of baptism - the dying of one's old self to be born anew - like so many
of the events in Christ's life is already flavoured metaphorically by Christ's
death and it is His death on the cross that is such a powerful and haunting
force, especially in Mark.
His preoccupation with it is all the more obvious,
if only because of the brevity with which Mark deals with the events of His
life.
Image source
It seems that virtually everything that Christ does in Mark's narrative
is in some way a preparation for His death - His frustration with His disciples
and His fear that they have not comprehended the full significance of His actions;
the constant taunting of the church officials; the stirring up of the crowds;
His miracle-making so that witnesses will remember the extent of His divine
power.
Clearly, Mark is concerned primarily with the death of Christ to such
an extent that Christ appears consumed by His imminent demise, thoroughly shaped
by His death.
The
Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His
life, had a ringing intensity about him that I could not resist.
Christ spoke
to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage
at the mundane, through His sorrow.
Christ, it seemed to me was the victim of
humanity's lack of imagination, was hammered to the cross with the nails of
creative vapidity.
The
Gospel According to Mark has continued to inform my life as the root source
of my spirituality, my religiousness.
The Christ that the Church offers us,
the bloodless, placid 'Saviour' - the man smiling benignly at a group of children
or serenely hanging from the cross - denies Christ His potent, creative sorrow
or His boiling anger that confronts us so forcibly in Mark.
Thus the Church
denies Christ His humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps 'praise'
but never relate to.
The essential humanness of Mark's Christ provides us with
a blueprint for our own lives so that we have something we can aspire to rather
than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather
than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy.
Merely
to praise Christ in His Perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully
bent.
Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator.
Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the
pull of gravity - our ordinariness, our mediocrity - and it was through His
example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to fly."
In short, to be Christ-like.
This essay originally appeared in the Pocket Canon
Gospel
According to Mark, (C)Canongate, 1998
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