The gospel as Mark tells it traditionally has been associated with Peter. No doubt, there are modern scholars who seek to make their bones by disputing the claim. I’m not interested in such academic trivialities. There’s a reason for the sense of authorship held through the centuries, some connection between the Christ who meets us in the Markan text and Peter. The Petrine vision does not come trailing genealogical lineage back to David as in Matthew and Luke, nor already luminous with the mystical depth of John’s “in the beginning, was the Word.” Rather, one is thrust first into the ministry of the Forerunner, that Angel Man, as the East understood the Baptist, only to end, the original ending is at verse 8 of the sixteenth chapter: “And the women came out and ran away from the tomb because they were frightened out of their wits; and they said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid . . . “
The long ending to Mark is not wrong, this consoling, lucid announcement of the Resurrection appearances before the Ascension, but it feels like a tack on for the sake of the faithful, a coda to assuage the sensibility of those uninterested in art. Mystics and poets always love John’s telling of the gospel. It’s the vatic favorite, radiant with the vision of divine glory. Yes, I like it well. But Mark, rough Mark, that Petrine bluntness, also has its secret. Indeed, it is the gospel of the secret. The Lord is always healing clandestinely, hiding in plain sight. When the Christ acts, folks are told to be quiet about it. It’s a prudential care. The mission must be accomplished, and too early an announcement would bring forth the consternation and wrath of the blockhead world. Then there is the first ending, the one a poet would prefer, leaving it all in the darkness of aporia and disquiet, not snug and written out like a finished tapestry.
The disjunctures between the gospels are not signs of dissonant fracture, but the refusal of “anti-fragile”impermeability, a vulnerable capacity of the living to speak a truth that transcends the merely historical, even as it takes up time into the wondrous infinity of eternity. It is a narrow fundamentalism that insists on literalism, as if that were required to match the demands of univocal rationality; such a criteria is less robust, and dogma understood along those lines is not living tradition. It mischaracterizes what dogma is, the guidance of Spirit that leads not to rote certitudes, but to ever greater mystery. In Mark 14, the disciples are given a gnomic command. On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb was sacrificed, they are sent by the Christ to go into the City where they will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. Some think this fella was Mark, but I tell you he had another name, and that name was Time. Time is what lead them to the Cenacle, that sacred space where the truth of Bread and Wine would be enacted.
I say all this to try and explain the strange act of Palm Sunday, the day the Lord stopped telling the folk to be quiet.
When he came into the City riding upon a donkey, trailing a colt, the foal of a donkey, that act was quotation. (Leave aside whether there is one donkey or two. I like two, the foal bearing garments, but the donkey is the key.) The Christ expected the anawim, those who waited, to recognize the vates Zechariah in it, that late prophet:
Rejoice heart and soul, daughter of Zion! Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem! See now, your king comes to you; he is victorious, he is triumphant, humble and riding on a donkey. He will banish chariots from Ephraim and horses from Jerusalem; the bow of war will be banished. He will proclaim peace for the nations. His empire shall stretch from sea to sea, From the River to the ends of the earth.
That River is Jordan, the baptismal depths cried out by the rough hewn desert prophet that begins the Markan song, but also, it comes from Eden, and recurs in the apocalyptic depiction of the heavenly City, where it is for the healing of nations. It is the river that bursts forth from the heart of Christ upon the Cross, provoked by the Spear of Destiny, the Lance of Longinus.
And all of this is victory that cannot be understood by the calculations of instrumental reason. The cynic, like blind Pilate, can only be baffled by this holy fool, who acts for a kingdom not of this world.
Péguy’s mystique that confounds politique is the same play of the sacred, the depths of nature already redolent with, suffused with, the grace of love.
Richard J. Barry, in his fine scholarly work, has noted that this understanding was part of the original blessing, that tradition given to Jewish priestly action. He says “God does not dwell in creation like a ghost in an old house, a wispy presence that leaves the physical surroundings unaffected. Nor is God’s tabernacling destructive, as if divinity is in conflict with the material creation itself.”
No, the Eucharistic action is the flourishing, abundant, creatively expansive meaning of Creation. As Alexander Schmemann so beautifully put it, “It is our Eucharist. It is the movement that Adam failed to perform and that in Christ has become the very life of man: a movement of adoration and praise in which all joy and suffering, all beauty and all frustration, all hunger and all satisfaction are referred to their ultimate End and become finally meaningful.”
It is the poetry of God that is announced by the Anointed, when it is time to be known, by entering into the City on the back of a humble donkey. And all Creation sings its Hosanna.
Brian- I've never read Mark this way before, but now I'll be thinking of what you said here for some time: "The mission must be accomplished, and too early an announcement would bring forth the consternation and wrath of the blockhead world." Now that you've mentioned this ... it makes a lot of sense. Beautiful writing. I especially appreciate the way you tie some of the events in the passages with the greater narrative.