“Throughout the Gospel, Mark has warned that signs, miracles, and portents do not evoke faith… Along with early Christianity as a whole, Mark is interested in faith in the resurrected Jesus, not in proofs of his existence. It is an encounter with the resurrected Lord, not the empty tomb, that produces faith.” (Edwards, The Gospel of Mark)
I was commenting on a thread from a friend recently, which was posing a question regarding the reliablity of the Gospel accounts, particularly regarding the resurrection. This led me to recover this quote above from one of my commentaries on Mark, a Gospel which was cited in this thread as not only the earliest of the canonized compositons, but as one which percievably doesn’t cite encounters with the resurrected Jesus. Setting aside the later addition of the extended ending, the Gospel famously ends at the empty tomb, with the command of the angel to “go tell” leading the women to flee the tomb in terror and amazement, “saying nothing to anyone.” (16:8) Something many a scholar and sermon has weighed in on in over the years with stated reflections on the ambiguity of it all, evoking thoughts that span the spectrum from poetic and astute to disconcerting and incomplete.
As I’ve been reading through this quote again, and thinking through the aformentioned thread, I was struck by the following observations:
The apparent intentionality by which the empty tomb, if read in light of Mark’s literary structuring of the Gospel as a whole, arrives not as the focal point of the narrative but rather becomes the means by which the author brings the larger and overarching concerns of his writing to the surface in a climatic and pointed fashion. As the commentary by Edwards suggests, a significant part of this can be seen as the constant movement in the Gospel between unbelief and belief (or more accurately, seeing and not seeing), consistently positioning both within the growing tension of these counter-intuitive expectations. This is something the citation above is capturing in Edward’s assessment that, for Mark, signs (or proofs) will never convince, only an encounter can.
But there is an important addition to this point that needs to be said. Here, the author of Mark’s Gospel would not have our appeal to modern empiricism in mind. This is not the language of the ANE. For the ancients, and for Mark’s audience (and the author), that the world is filled with signs and miracles would be assumed. This is the shape of the world they both observe and experience and also inhabit. This is important, because for the author and the audience, the concern here was not for seeking modern proof texts of the gods existence, but rather for how Jesus fit into the equation in a world full of gods.
For modernists, and in-particular those of us occypying the narrative of the West, the empiricism of our day is asking a very different question with a very different set of concerns, beginning with the fact that it assumes a contrasting starting point when it comes to the shape of the world. This matters because, this is precisely how and why modern objections to the legimacy of the resurrection tend to also evoke a redefintion of the word “faith.” Here, faith becomes a word that juxtaposes the claims of the Gospel over and against our modern demands for a kind of science and a kind of history that fits with our present and culturally constructed conceptions of knowledge or truth. Unlike the Gospel of Mark, the concern is not for how Jesus fits into the equation (the modernist will happily pull Jesus the crucified “moral teacher” out of the equation), but for how we accept a world filled with signs and wonders. In truth, the modernist assumption assumes the resurrected Jesus does not and cannot fit in the equation at all as it’s default position, forcing the text to bend to our own demands rather than seeing what the text is saying to it’s original readers. It is on that level that the modernist can then say, because the text does not appear to be satisfying our demand and answering our questions, it must be (fill in the blank).
Set within that ANE context, faith did not accord with modern usages which evoke a kind of belief in something without evidence. Why does this matter? Because when one pulls something like the Gopsel of Mark out of it’s world and forces it to bend to our modern expectations and conceptions, things gets confused and misconstrued, and, in my opinion, what gets missed is this most important question concerning Jesus for our modern questions and demands- why this Gospel would have been compelling and necessary to the context of it’s original readers in the first place (which it undoubtedly was).
Recovering that question is precisely the in-road into why, again in my opinion, the presence of this resurrection story in the pages of history is or should be compelling to modern readers on objective grounds. Faith in the ancient sense is not belief without evidence. The assumption that this evidenced witness exists is the very reason why we find this discussion about the empty tomb in the Gospel of Mark preserved at all. Rather, faith here, in it’s proper contextualized understanding, is a participatory word. It evokes allegaince to a conviction regarding what one is compelled towards in light of what they have observed and experienced. It concerns their interpretation of the crucified and risen Christ, not their struggling with the concept of a resurrection. Faith, in this sense, is a word birthed from the social contracts of their day, bound as it is between two things set in a particular relationship to one another- in this case the relationship being that which exists between Mark’s audience and the Jesus that has entered into their story and is informing their (Jewish) expectations.
It’s important to note here that, if this is correct, and if the narrative in the Gospel of Mark is constructed around an obvious and pre-existing conviction in the resurrected reality of a resurrected Jesus, and if it is correct, as I would argue along with numerous scholars, that this is the only way to make sense of Mark’s literary work on a thematic level, then such efforts to force the Gospel, as certain circles of modern scholarship are want to do, to adhere to modern demands for certain empirical approaches, are actually not acting (or their argument is not acting) in good faith.
What should be of interest here, or the questions we should be asking, is, if it is clear that the Gospel according to Mark is written to a historical community formed around these Jewish expectations in the 60’s, and if the logical implications of the existing Gospel is the pre-existing story of the resurrected Christ which they are already aware of and are already living in and with, both of which I think are fair assessments on reasoned and logical grounds, this means two things- this credal awareness is not bound to or emerging with the Gospel of Mark, and this credal awareness is expressley rooted in an active conviction (faith) in the resurrection for a reason. Otherwise, to put it simply, the conversation the Gospel represents between author and audience does not make logical sense.
Thus we are burdened as modern readers to ask why and how this is the case in those same terms. To use our own modern expectations to force this scenario to reflect what is commonly reflected in certain polemics as a community somehow uninterested in or unable to distinguish between true and false experience, or proper and improper evidence, is only setting us at a distance from the necessary and rational and logical questions.
There is another point to be made here too. If it is true that Mark’s Gospel has a particular narrative structure and form, one that is almost certainly borrowing from recognized and common ancient biographies among other forms and devices, the logical conclusion is that the author is accentuating and using these narrative devices and literary constructions to say something specific to his audience and their context. Thus, to understand how these specific literary devices and emphasis and themes are being used not only roots us in a world grappling with that pre-existing witness, but connects it to what the author sees as “their own” relative modern concerns.
Which is to say, just because the text has a literary form does not evoke the logical conclusion of invention in and of itself. Just because it is borrowing from ancient biography does not evoke the logical conclusion that this literary form is bringing to light a Jesus that is somehow being co-opted out of the historical presence of a “moral teacher” and reformatted as a resurrected divine figure by later editors. There is in fact little to no evidence that such a conclusion would be warranted.
The audience, as would be true for such writings, are being placed within the narrative. They are being asked to see themselves and their own story within the story of Israel and the story of Jesus, and largely in ways that, if we are to read the Gospel at face value, assume these readers understand the hyperlinks and the allusions and common witness evidenced in the text itself.
Which is to say, the Gospel only matters if a resurrected Jesus mattered to it’s audience first.
This is made abundantly clear by the Gospel’s opening line- “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Which, not inconsequentially, is the very thing that should awaken us as modern readers to what Mark’s literary structure is ultimately bringing to light with it’s ending.
We can say the same thing about Paul’s writings as well, where Paul is writing to and engaging with a people in the late 40’s and 50’s regarding a story they already know and are living within. Paul’s writings assume that his readers know all of these extant details which are lingering in the background of what Paul does say regarding his particular concerns for the ever changing context of these communities he crosses in his travels, informing the what and why of his concerns.
Which is to say, his letter’s don’t make sense unless there is a pre-existing conviction and witness at play in the lives of these communities, and for that matter a witness that logically places us in the very imagination of the eye witnesses that Paul would have existed in proximity to, something we see being referenced all over the place in these writings.
Thus, as those of us studying his works today, those are the questions we have to ask in our own cross-cultural movement and ensuing process of contextualization.
If one wants to make the argument that there was no pre-existing conviction regarding the resurrection, someting common modern polemics against Christianity often simply assume on their way to some shape or form of an argument for invention, the burden is placed on such an argument to justify how and why this would be the most likely interpretation of this composition history. how and why this would be the most likely interpretation of a world, both in it’s hellenized and, even more importantly and compellingly, Jewish context, which arrives for the audience of these writings with an established credal presence.
And not just an established one, but one that they take with the utmost seriousness. This might be a world somewhat lost to us today when it comes to manuscripts, as would and should be expected, but the most serious scholars understand that this doesn’t (or to use the more aggressive word- cannot) preclude us from asking what the logical implications are regarding what we do have, the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s writings being amongst that. This becomes especially prudent when we consider how smartly structured Mark’s Gospel actually is on a literary level. It should go without saying, but unforunately it needs to be said more often than not, but the text knows the difference between literary form and invention.
This conversation doesn’t simply end here however. Both the fact that the Gospel of Mark seems to be pushing us to consider that knowledge of the resurrected Jesus comes through encountering the resurrected Jesus, thus shaping the way we see and know the world as faithful (lived conviction) participants in this story, along with the fact that, as with much of our reasoned arguments, we are always dealing with the category of logical implications, point to this simple idea- who Jesus is and why Jesus matters in relationship to the resurrection witness sets such encounters with the resurrected Jesus within the bigger questions that our lived reality bear out in response. As modern readers, this forces us to contend with how our own worldviews, the narratives we are participating in and the realties we are encountering, make sense of the world we observe and experience today.
Here my mind is shifting back to a book I am presently reading called Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologican, by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman. In many ways, the questions they are wrestling with wonder about how it is we find Jesus today in a world that no longer makes space for the possiblity of the narrative form we find in Mark speaking to something true. At best we have empty metaphors that we apply to our materialist interpretations. At worst, we have the intentional underwriting of a Jesus we have remade in our own modernist image. The problem being, neither of those things seriously contend with what the Gospels are. Such an encounter is, in many ways, made and deemed irrelevant and impossible.
Perhaps then, the most pertinent thing for such discussions in the modern sphere is that aforementioned question of and concern for the logical implications of a given worldview or belief. Have we in fact attended for the logical implications of the worldview driving our modernist readings and approaches? In what is essentially an ongoing conversation between Volf and Wiman, this is, I think, what is ultimatley being wrestled with on their way to the bigger questions (or, as it is stated at one point, the biggest question- is our reality shaped by God or not).
I really resonated with this observation from Wiman to this end:
“It’s not easy to love reality. I’m certain I have never managed it. Why would the chief injunction of our lives be so nearly impossible? Who is Jesus for me (then)? He is the one who makes suffering sacred, the one who harmonizes love and action, the one who makes it possible to love God…. If we understand God as love, the problem of how to love God is not clarified by simply swapping the terms. We’re not released from the objectlessness of God… Perhaps (then) we are meant to love reality.”
Volf adds this poignant observation to the mix in response:
“Modernity: the realization of freedom from. The necessary new era: the call of what freedom is for…. Freedom is both spiritual autonomy with regard to God and humble servitude with regard to humanity. It’s appallingly simple- but so very difficult to live out.”
Freedom from or freedom for. Two different questions with their own implications for how we see the world. In Volf’s view, the implication of a modern world that has built itself on the assumption of freedom from (the chains of history and the past), has in fact clouded the fact that we have lost the ability, and even in some cases the presumed interest, in asking what this freedom is for, if anything. To what end are we to live and why must we live so, are not the questions that the myth of progress are asking. Where in this world do we find the kind of authority that can freely make sense of the ways in which we do in fact live. For both Volf and Wiman, there is much to consider regarding the implications of a god-less world on this front-
“If God were not the God of all, God would dissipate for us all into “divine individuals” and each of them drawn into our fraught relations with one another… This transmutation of God to will to power is in the logic of God being the God of a particular without at the same time being the God of the whole world.” (Volf)
That’s a quote I’ve been reading and re-reading for a bit. Sitting with. In many ways this is why I find power in encountering the narrative of Mark’s Gospel in it’s world, as I have been over the past while. However much it flies against the modernist assumptions and worldview that I have been handed, there is something for me in it’s narrative of resurrection, in it’s story of new creation coming in Jesus amidst it’s liberating from the enslaving “Powers” that awakens something in me regarding how it is that I actually experience the forces of Death and Life in this world. It gives a proper name to that which I know to be intuitively true about how this world works. More than this, it gives me a logical basis for understanding the true shape of this world, unlike what my modernist treaties taught me, for making sense of a world seemingly shaped by this universal witness to a reality that that is not reducible to it’s materialist and utilitarian functions.
I am struck by something I came across in my commentary as well. This reoccuring theme in Mark regarding the difference between watching from a distance or participating in an encounter:
“Mark concludes the crucifixion narrative by including the names of several women who “were watching from a distance.” This is undoubtedly an allusion to the lament in Ps 38:11, where the righteous suffering individual mourns his friends and neighbors who “stay far away… In Gethsemane (14:34.38) Jesus commanded “watching”…The word Mark uses for “watching” here is different however. Apart from its description of the women in 15:40,47;16:4, it occurs four times previously in Mark, and in each instance it depicts spectating or detached observation as opposed to seeing that leads to perception and conviction.”
Here, the Gospel according to Mark paints a picture of how it is that we come to know the truth of the resurrection in our own lives. Not as some extant, empirically proven, data point, as though we can fit it into a world that refuses to accomadate it’s shape and have it make sense. The reality is, no such “signs” would get us to such an encounter with a risen Lord. At best, if such a thing were to manage to break through that initial wall of resistance and unsettle us, we would be left with that same confusing witness of fear and amazement, standing as we would be from a distance. For Mark, even in the ancient world of second temple Judaism with it’s own set of concerns and questions, the good news is in fact found in the truth that, even where this distance exists, the risen Lord “goes ahead of us,” preparing the way forward into that promised new reality. This is where the Gospel begins (“See, I am sending my messanger ahead of you.” 1:2), and it is where the Gospel ends (“He is going ahead of you to Galilee.” 16:7)) Not in some version of divine hiddenness, but into an act of revelation. “There you will see him,” states the author of Mark, on the way, preparing the way, found in the particpatory nature of the faithful life.
Yes, this is unsettling for modernist conceptions of knowing. And yet this is precisely what Volf and Wiman are getting at in Glimmerings- such conceptions of knowing do not make sense of the lived life. That’s what the resurrection of Jesus helps uncover. On many fronts, and I am speaking for myself here, the modernist world I have been handed and find myself swimming within is the romanticized view, the invention of it’s illusions of progress and constructed versions of immortality spun by different names and different images, all in the name of infusing this existence with meaning. All of the ways in which my once atheist predications sought to colour over the shape of such a reality and it’s logical implications by way of giving our newly constructed myths an authority they do not otherwwise have. All explained, biologically, socially, mentally, as mechanistic functions designed to colour our experience of reality with the comforts that such illusions afford us.
I know I am not alone in this, but for me this was one of the most difficult things to confront, was the logical implications of a world that takes this shape, and yet still needs to make logical and rational and coherent sense of the lived life. It doesn’t make our experiences of these illusions less real, but it does lead to some very real and difficult questions when conronting the question of what is actually true within this given framework of reality.
This to me is the great paradox of trying to make sense of something like the story we encounter in the Gospel according to Mark. On one hand, yes, it is about hope. It is about being handed a story that can tell us what freedom, so defined (or in need of defintion) is for. But in this sense there is an irony- that the contrary positions which assume a worldview that has no room for the resurrection would seem to be, logically speaking, hinged on a narrative which states that hope itself, when defined according to those processses, is a necessary illusion.
It would seem then, and I think this tends to be the central point of modern forms of skepticism, the source of the tension is that tricky word called truth. What seems to be abundantatly evident in either case is that narrative matters to shaping what we see as true. For the Gospel of Mark, true sight comes by way of the lived life, and to live we need a narrative. This is as fundamental to the human experience as the breathe in our lungs.
I am reminded here of an old familiiar hymn, one that, in a moment of reflection on my guiding narrative I (somewhat) re-wrote verse 2 with a slightly different or shifted emphasis as a way of capturing those particular nuances. Every time I sing this song or hear this song in it’s common form, I bring these re-accentuated lyrics to mind, reminding myself of the story I am particpiating in. The reason I am reminded of this here is because, i think it captures so much of the narrative I have found on my journey through the Gospel according to Mark over these last number of months, the very narrative that comes alive for me in encountering the resurrection of Jesus in this world afresh:
Crown Him the Lord of Life who triumphed over (the Powers of Sin and Death), and rose victorious in the strife for (the creation) He came to save. His (the gift of his glorious indwelling presence in creation) now we sing, who died, and rose on high, who died to bring (the new creation) to be, and lives that (the Powers of Sin and Death) may die.
The Stories of my Life 