Mark: Growing in Faith Book One - Sample Session

RENEW Scripture Series

Mark Growing in Faith BOOK ONE Father David P. Reid, ss.cc.

Deacon Charles Paolino

Contents

About the Authors

iv

Presenting RENEW International

v

Abbreviations of Books of the Bible

vi

Before You Begin

vi

Introduction

vii

Session 1: According to Mark

1

Session 2: Baptism and the Wilderness

10

Session 3: “They left everything and followed him.”

21

Session 4: “He was grieved at their hardness of heart.”

31

Session 5: “To be with him”

43

Session 6: “To preach”

53

Session 7: “To drive out demons”

64

Session 8: “And they took offense at him.”

75

Session 9: “Come away ... rest a while.”

86

Session 10: “He blessed and broke the loaves.”

95

Session 11: Eyes to See and Ears to Hear

104

Session 12: “You are the Messiah.”

112

Session 13: “What this rising from the dead could mean”

120

Session 14: “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

131

APPENDIX 1: Lectio Divina

139

APPENDIX 2: Ritual for Enthroning the Bible at Home

141

APPENDIX 3: Sunday Readings from the Gospel of Mark

144

Use of this Book for Individual Reflection

146

Instructions for Small-Group Leaders

148

Faith Sharing in a Small Group

150

Resources from RENEW International

154

1

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SESSION

FOCUS

According to Mark

The proclamation that opens the Gospel prepares us to hear the Good News.

Opening Song You may choose the following song from the virtual CD Music for Mark: Growing in Faith.

Track 29: “The Church’s One Foundation,” Samuel J. Stone/ Samuel S. Wesley Go to renew.org/Mark and click on “Download music” to go to the playlist. To buy the album, click “Download all MP3s.” To buy individual songs, click “Add to Cart” to the right of each title and then click either “Continue Shopping,” or click “View Cart/ Checkout” to conclude the purchase.

Opening Prayer Pray together: We place ourselves before you, O Lord, conscious of your overwhelming love that has given us a world of abundance.

We pray that all your children may share in it.

We thank you for the continuing presence of your Son, our brother Jesus, who shares with us the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

We thank you for our family through whom your love is now extended to us.

May we hear your word with untroubled attention so that we may share your love with all who meet us today.

Amen.

2 · Mark: Growing in Faith

Breaking Open God’s Word Mark 1:1 — Getting Our Attention Reflect Reflect for a moment in silence on the first verse of this Gospel. How do you anticipate reading Mark’s account will touch your heart or speak to your life?

Enter into the Biblical Story The phrase “according to Mark” is attached to an anonymous text of the New Testament. As noted in the Introduction, this does not mean that no one knew the author. The community of Christians in Rome for whom Mark wrote—and who accepted Mark’s rendition as a valid expression of their faith—would have known his identity. But with a subject such as Jesus, who would dare put his own name on the text? The attribution “according to Mark,” coming from the later community, is itself an immense honor for the writer.

By tradition, Mark is named as the author and truly is an author, unless one likes to say that the Holy Spirit is the author and Mark the writer. In the use of gospel passages in the Lectionary for Mass, Matthew was so dominant for so long that Mark was overshadowed. Only with the rise of modern biblical scholarship has the genius of Mark been revealed. Even his clumsy Greek, once judged as a deficit, is now seen as an advantage, perhaps in tune with how people actually communicated. Thus, his presentation is made all the more real.

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Already, in these opening words, Mark shows that he is master of his material and sensitive to how it can be arranged to tell us what we as readers need to know. In the title “Son of God” (Mk 1:1), Mark anticipates the statement of the Roman centurion when Jesus dies on the cross: “Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (15:39). There is some concern among scholars that the title “Son of God” in this opening verse is not well attested to in the ancient manuscripts, and it is put in brackets in a modern critical edition of the New Testament text. If, indeed, a copier added that title, “Son of God,” could it be because that early reader was struck by the anticipation, in the opening verse, of the one confession of “Son of God” in the entire Gospel?

The title “Christ,” which the author applies to Jesus in this verse, and the title “Messiah,” which Peter will use later in this account, are equivalent. “Christ,” from the Greek, and “Messiah,” from the Hebrew, both mean “anointed” or “the anointed one.” When Jesus asks his disciples in this Gospel, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter will reply, “You are the Messiah.” In the Hebrew Scriptures, meshiach referred to a high priest or king who was anointed with oil as a sign of his office. Over time, the title took on an additional and more specific meaning, namely a savior, though not a divinity, born in the line of King David, who would usher in a “messianic age” and reign over Israel as God’s Kingdom on earth. Peter has that in mind when he tells Jesus, “You are the Messiah,” but Peter does not anticipate, nor does he initially accept Jesus’ startling response that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (8:27–33).

The word “beginning” captures all that Matthew and Luke would do in their infancy narratives. The beginning of the good news was the birth of Jesus, and in the first verse Mark bluntly establishes that the good news comes from God, and the good news is God’s Son. Mark asks those who will first hear or read this Gospel, people of the Greco-Roman world, perhaps residents of Rome, to deepen their faith in Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God.

4 · Mark: Growing in Faith

This first verse does not constitute a sentence. Hear it, however, as more than a title or heading. Hear it as a heralding, a proclamation! In the prefix of the English word “evangelical,” which is as close as we get to the Greek word euangelion, the letter u becomes v, meaning something good—like eu in the word “eulogy,” which means “a good word.” We hear, too, “angel,” even within the English word “ev-angel-ical.” If an angel is a messenger, the eu indicates “good angel,” “good news.” Mark does not have Luke’s angels, singing God’s glory. But with this opening verse, Mark does strike a note of proclamation that says, “Pay attention!”

Reflect The author writes that Mark was inviting his readers to deepen their faith in Jesus. What does the anticipation of deepening your faith mean to you?

The Old Testament Witness How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news….

—Isaiah 52:7a

M

ark may well have been thinking of this passage, in which the prophet celebrates Israel’s deliverance from captivity in Babylon. Here we find the words CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

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“good news”—gospel—in connection with the arrival of a messenger of peace. The feet of the courier of such liberating news are blessed. The content of the message is consolation and salvation (Is 52:9).

Mark appreciated the full weight of the word gospel. The context of Isaiah’s prophecy that foreshadows Mark’s proclamation, homecoming from the exile, is no less weighty.

The Lord returns to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon.

Jerusalem is redeemed, and the people must return to her spotless: “Depart, depart, go out from there! Touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of it, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord” (Is 52:11).

And what will the nations see? The eyes of all the nations and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’” (Is 52:7).

Respond to the Human Experience Hindsight is 20/20, seeing things clearly only after the day has passed. That’s the import of the question Jesus will put to his apostles—“Do you still not perceive or understand?”—and it could apply to any one of us (Mk 8:17). When in life does any of us make the transition from “following” Jesus out of tradition, or even out of habit, and fully embracing him as God-mademan, the Son in the Holy Trinity? As I said earlier, Mark, until the end of his Gospel, withholds any confession by a human being of who Jesus is. In the baptism in the Jordan and in the Transfiguration, the Father acknowledges Jesus as “Son.” Forces that see him as a threat, beginning with the unclean spirit Mark will shortly introduce, recognize that Jesus is holy, while those who are described as his disciples do not—at least not at the

6 · Mark: Growing in Faith

moment. But for you and me, when does Jesus as risen Lord, God’s Son, become real?

Mark’s Gospel, through the experience of the first disciples, confronts the Christian with the pitfall of not recognizing the fullness of Jesus’ identity. Here, recognizing is not a matter simply of knowing but of testifying to Jesus as Son of God and Savior and therefore central to one’s life. The Gospel of peace, heralded in Mark’s use of Isaiah, is given from without. One who hears the Gospel is not only invited but enabled to receive it. Hear Mark’s Gospel, then, as prophetic. We usually think of prophets as persons goading an individual or a community to reform. Think Moses and Pharaoh, Jeremiah and the kingdom of Judah, or John the Baptist and Herod Antipas. But prophets are also, in the imagery of the Book of Isaiah, sentinels of consolation, poised on the walls of Jerusalem although it is in ruins, ready to welcome the exiles home.

How can one put together oracles for reform and sentinels of consolation? The juxtaposition brings us close to the heart of the Good News as interpreted by Mark. While Mark must be first understood within the symbolic world that he creates, the Christian reader keeps his or her eye on the other New Testament developments, especially the other Gospels, to see where such boldness on the part of Mark led. Surely, this is intended by the same Spirit that has given us the canon of Scripture as one of the foundation stones of the Church.

On the one hand, Mark is writing in a world shaped by the ministry and language of Paul, who died around the time that Mark’s Gospel was written, probably shortly after A.D. 70; on the other hand, the other Gospels take up and develop many of Mark’s themes. If Mark’s Jesus is a man of few words and much action, his Jesus also supplies what Paul did not provide and what the other Gospels supplement with many words. Paul would have rejoiced to read Mark, for Paul felt the lack of such a narrative portrait of Jesus. He often gave his own life as an example of following Jesus, but he would add that he was but imitating Christ (1 Cor 10:33–11:1).

Paul emphasized the death and resurrection of Jesus. Mark would seem to be a “both/and” presenter of the Gospel. Mark’s both/and is cross and glory, although he is slow to reveal glory until he has driven home the message of the cross in the con-

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text of Jesus’ life and work. It could be that the experiences of the persecution in Rome under Nero left Mark no choice but to present the cross as a constant occurrence in the life of the Christian believer that is in any way coherent.

Reflect If you were asked who Jesus is to you, how would you respond?

Respond to God’s Word “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” We read that in Matthew’s Gospel (7:21) and it reminds us of the difference between only calling ourselves Christian, disciples of Jesus Christ, and living as though we believe that Jesus was the Son of God, second Person of the Trinity. In this media-saturated age, and in this increasingly secularized society, it may be more challenging than ever not only to accept the centurion’s declaration as true but to live as though we believe it. Allowing Mark’s Gospel to wash over and through us may be just the reinforcement we need.

Invitation to Act “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17).

This session is about testifying to Jesus as Son of God and Savior. To what actions does this inspire you?

8 · Mark: Growing in Faith

Reflect What “good news” do you find in this section of Mark’s Gospel?

Pray Pray that the Holy Spirit will accompany you while you participate in this group and open your heart and mind to Mark’s message of cross and glory.

Act If your experience in this first group meeting was positive, tell a friend in a way that clearly invites him or her to join you for the next session.

Closing Prayer Pray together:

Almighty God, you sent your Son to share the Good News of your love and you call each of us to take up his message of peace and consolation for all.

Take from our hearts all that keeps us from you.

May we live our lives as he taught us, putting ourselves at the service of others.

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With the guidance of your Holy Spirit, may we recognize and proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord who lives and reigns with you in the Blessed Trinity, God, now and forever. Amen.

Looking Ahead Prepare for the next faith-sharing meeting by reading: • Mark 1:2–15 • Session 2: “Baptism and the Wilderness”