It is fitting to begin the Jesus Quest with a review of this most surprising Gospel, which can be read in one sitting.
Imagine yourself with Mark in your hands, and it is now the only Gospel you possess, and you know of no other Luke, or John or Matthew. Then remember that most scholars—almost all of them—believe that Mark was the very first Gospel written, and that Matthew, Luke, and perhaps even John had at least parts of this Gospel open in front of them when they wrote.
Even some Christians I’ve read are shocked by the ferocity of Jesus when they encounter him here, particularly without the softening of the other evangelists. It is somehow significant that the demons understand who Jesus is, while his disciples and family generally do not. Stranger still is how Jesus talks in parables with the intent to confuse. After Jesus gives the parable of the sower, Mark quotes Isaiah 6. Here in Mark 4…
Then Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.
But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”
The parable of the sower represents the attempt by Jesus to sow the Word of God, and in Mark the disciples hopelessly fail to understand, although in Matthew (13) they do. Birds devouring the Savior’s seeds belong to, indeed are, Satan. Does Mark understand either the parable or Jesus’ interpretation? Mark doesn’t say so; we have to assume that he knew that his Jesus was alluding to Isaiah’s bitter irony, in which Yahweh sends forth a willing prophet while remarking that he will not be understood. Matthew, softening Mark’s harshness overtly quotes Isaiah, thus giving us a rather more conventional Jesus, who can shrug off any slowness of understanding, whether among the people or his own disciples. But what happens to Mark’s utterly characteristic sense of how mysterious Jesus is, if we accept Matthew’s revision?
Robert Frost captures the fierceness of Jesus as an enigma brilliantly in his poem “Directive:”
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
Frank Kermode is my guide here in his most fascinating book A Genesis of Secrecy. I highly recommend it. He points out that the ending of Mark raises even more questions. The book ends with:
So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
The women are running away from what is no longer the tomb of Jesus. Do they yet see and perceive, hear and understand? Running away afraid is hardly a tonality of good news. Chapter 16:9-20 is an editorial after-thought attempting to remedy this striking abruptness. Some scholars believe that Mark originally had a different ending that was edited out. But this is conjecture, since we really don't know.
Greek scholars tell me that Mark was written in a hurried form of Greek. The favorite word of the Gospel is “immediately;” used some forty times. The ending, like the rest of the Gospel is either clumsy or powerfully subtle. Harold Bloom in his book Jesus and Yahweh helpfully suggests that Mark is both clumsy and subtle, reminding us of the enigma of the literature of Edgar Allen Poe.
The upshot is that the secretive Jesus in Mark is woefully enigmatic and difficult to grasp. We the readers see without perceiving and hear without understanding, and like the three women, we run away from the tomb afraid. In Mark, Jesus is talking to insiders, but even the assumed insiders fail to understand. The literary result is an open-ended tonality that rules very few possibilities out. Thus Jesus questers must begin with a hypothesis of a narrative sort that can explain the enigma of Jesus’ behavior here.
No scholar who takes Jesus seriously can quite shake the potent mystery of Jesus’ secret ministry. Schweitzer, Wrede, Remius, and many other scholars since were all powerfully moved by the ferocious puzzle of Jesus in this Gospel. For this reason alone, I believe it contains all the other Gospels, and subsequent gnosticisms, and theological possibilities, which sought to answer the riddle.
