"Shock and Awe" Takes on a Spiritual Context

This afternoon, I read the Gospel of Mark in one sitting. I wasn’t in devotional overdrive like you may think; rather, I’m one week into classes and I’m already behind in my reading. This Saturday has been dedicated to the perpetual game of catch-up that characterizes grad school.

I was struck by choppy nature of the narrative. Mark lacks the flowery prose and rich descriptions that I’ve come to expect from my readings. It feels segmented and awkward at times; confounding at incidents the cursing of the fig tree, and filled with seeming non sequiturs as teachings are chained to one another through relations that seem strained.

And, last of all, there was the original ending. Instead of the call to baptize and disciple that we find in Matthew; Christ’s ascension in Luke; or the affirmation of the "beloved disciple" to continue the work in John; Mark ends with the three women who come to tend to Jesus fleeing from the tomb in fear because they’ve seen a stranger decked in white. Christ himself has not appeared. It finishes with a shock and a jolt, and in doing so, continues that stylistic pattern.

In a way, the choppy nature of Mark reminds us that Christ’s ministry was thoroughly unpredictable. Just as we are jolted back and forth through changes in focus and style, so are we continually shocked into attention by the surprising work of redemption in ourselves and our neighbors. It is easy for us to fall asleep, like the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, with the expectation that what awaits us is something as familiar as waking each morning. And yet, it was as those disciples were shaking the sleep from their eyes that they saw their leader arrested. They had lost their comfort and false sense of understanding. In the same way, as the women went about their traditional methods of caring for the dead, they were suddenly jolted out of what they expected to occur. They were shocked into seeing the truth, and reacted as we all do, running away in fear, to share the story later.

Tonight, Mark reminds me to embrace those sudden jolts as part of the journey of faith, as those events that awaken us to spiritual truth.