1. Reading Mark in Troubled Times

It is strange how our perceptions can shift so suddenly.

Only a few years ago, it was difficult for many people in the affluent West to recognize in the Gospel of Mark a world resembling anything like their own. The world of the first gospel is a violent and chaotic one, populated by the sick, the dying, and the dead. It is a world of desperate crowds that threaten to crush the one who calms storms, and of lonely individuals, full of demons and disease, who have been cast out from amongst the living to wander the desolate places of the dead. A world of “wars and rumours of wars”, of leaders caught in the machinations of realpolitik, prepared to sacrifice individuals to keep the overwhelming might and power of Imperial Rome from falling on their heads and bringing everyone to desolation and ruin.

It is through this violent and chaotic landscape that Jesus moves, a strange figure, more at home in the wilderness with the wild animals and angels than with his family who try to restrain him, or the people of his hometown who think he has lost his mind, or the teachers of scripture convinced he is possessed by the prince of demons, or the fisherman and tax collectors who follow him without perception or understanding, and then betray and abandon him to his unfathomable ordeal, in which he thinks even God has forsaken him.

All this might once have felt remote from our own lives. That was before our own seemingly stable and prosperous world was overtaken by sickness and lockdowns. Before we began hearing of the incendiary bombs falling of the elderly, women, and children, burning them alive. Before we came to fear that our rapacious desire for consumption would unhinge the doors of the sea. Before we became uncertain of who we could trust and of what we could believe.

Where once the world of Mark might have felt like somebody else’s world, it now feels increasingly like the darkening world we inhabit—chaotic, violent, uncertain, full of senseless suffering and grief. A place where human beings are crushed by economic, political, psychological, natural, and spiritual forces beyond their control. A place forsaken by God.

St Augustine once described human life as “a kind of living death”. More than fifteen centuries later, we are now ourselves having to relearn the vulnerabilities and sorrows, the precariousness, that mark human existence. Accustomed to stability and prosperity we find ourselves moving slowly into a new dark age, one fraught with challenges and dangers we once thought only other people in far distant times and places had to face. As we do so, we might take a second look at Mark. It is a book that speaks more directly to our own situation than we had previously imagined. It is set in a world not unlike our own. And it is in that world of darkness and grief and confusion, which is our world, that there suddenly appears a lively, fiery, unquenchable presence.

In the Gospel of Mark we are invited to encounter the burning presence of the living God. And it is in that encounter that we will find the sustaining hope and joy we need in dark and troubled times.