Bible Juices: Mark, Overview and 1:10-11

GENERAL OVERVIEW

There are four gospels in the New Testament which tell the story of the life of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Mark is currently believed to be earliest gospel of the four, because it is shorter and more ambiguous in many points, where the other gospels expand on the same stories and make distinct moral lessons from them. Mark is my favorite gospel, in part because of this ambiguity - its succinct writing style leaves much to the imagination, like a Harold Pinter play. Moreso than the other gospels, Jesus comes across as a rabbinic sage, rebuking and issuing challenging spiritual lessons to his disciples, which they rarely understand. The miraculous details of his life are told in matter-of-fact miniature, and many points which would later become essential doctrine to the Christian church - his status as the sole son of God, even his resurrection - are cloaked in an ambiguity which gives the gospel a highly literary feel, rather than didactic.

Rather than attempt any sort of comprehensive overview of the text, each week I’ll be expounding on a verse or set of verses that catch my interest.

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Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:10-11)

One man's speech is a rapid stream; the other's, simple and artless. (Zen koan)

After a spiritual cleansing, an abrupt vision of a deeper truth. In eastern traditions this mortal realm is considered to be all maya, illusion. In Hebrew the word for world, ‘olam’, is linked to the root A-L-M, meaning hidden. God is hidden within the elements of this world like a game of hide and seek, masking his closeness and presence behind the vastness of the sky, cloaking a constant quantum chatter within a universe of solid particles. This solidity of the borders of daily life breaks down, reveals itself as illusory, flexible, improvised, in certain times - times of patience, of desperation, of transition.

A rabbi on his deathbed pointed at a support beam in his room and asked his son, “Do you see that beam?” His son said, “I do.” The rabbi said, “All I see is the word of God holding up the house.” The sages tell us that God made the world, as seen in Genesis 1, with his ten utterances - “let there be light!”, for starters - and that these utterances were not only the start of the world but the continuous preservation of it. God is continually speaking the world into being; were God to stop speaking, the world would not be, and would never have been. As Jesus breaks the surface of the water, he suddenly experiences the world without the veil of maya that deceives human eyes, falling into that utterance of divine energy. Modern translations say, “A voice came from heaven”; a more exact manifestation of the Greek might be, “a voice was becoming from heaven” - a steady stream of speech, manifesting itself at last to the ear.

Inside that utterance, two things: a message of unconditional love, and the presence of something like a body, warm and feathered. The voice of the father cries out in joy and approval; the mother hen nestles her child silently. The job of being human is already done, and not yet begun. Jesus is tasked not with saving a nation but with being himself, the simplest and hardest of endeavors.