McCowen confessed that he felt rather hesitant
about the venture fearing that ‘reciting the Gospel might be a dull
exercise.’ In the event, he said ‘I was
thrilled beyond measure. This was the
greatest script I had ever found.’ He
performed it at the White House and for an audience of four hundred Anglican bishops. He wrote: ‘it is impossible to study St Mark
carefully and not know ... that something amazing happened in Galilee two
thousand years ago.’
On most of the Sundays between now and the end of
November – with the exception of the seasons of Lent and Easter and the month
of August – our Sunday gospels will be from Mark, the first and the shortest of
the four gospels. It is only fairly
recently that scripture scholars have come to appreciate what a gifted writer
Mark is. Like many authors, ancient and
modern, he used literary devices to structure his narrative. A scripture commentator, Edward Dowling SJ
has discovered that today’s Gospel reading furnishes us with a good example of
how carefully and skilfully Mark composed his gospel.
The key questions running all through Mark’s Gospel
are: ‘Who is this Jesus of Nazareth and why was he rejected?’ He begins
to answer the first question in the very first line of his Gospel when he tells
us Jesus is the Son of God, but everyone else in the narrative is left to
discover the answer on his or her own.
The central message in today’s reading in that ‘Jesus is the Holy One of
God.’ This is the key element and Mark
creates what commentators call a necklace effect around it. If you hold a fine necklace in your hands you
will generally find the largest gem in the middle flanked by a perfectly
matched pair of slightly smaller stones.
These in turn have progressively smaller stones placed beside them,
resulting in one side of the necklace being a mirror image of the other. Today’s Gospel offers us an example of this
necklace technique. Leading up to the
central idea of the passage – which is that Jesus is the Holy One of God –
there are four other ideas increasing in importance. Leading away from this central gem of the
true identity of Jesus there are four corresponding ideas in descending order.
Immediately before this central truth that Jesus is
the Holy One of God we have the unclean spirit crying out: ‘Have you come to
destroy us?’ Immediately after it, the
unclean spirit leaves the man with a loud cry.
This is the first matched couplet, paired by the word ‘cry’. We now come to the next matched couplet. Before the unclean spirit spoke, we are told
‘the people were astonished at his (Jesus) teaching’. After the unclean spirit leaves we are told:
‘All who looked on were amazed.’ So this
second couplet is matched by feelings of awe.
Towards the beginning of our Gospel passage we read
that Jesus ‘taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.’ Towards the end of the story, after the
miracle, people ask: ‘What is this? A new teaching with authority.’ So this third couplet is united by the idea
of ‘teaching with authority.’
And so we come to the fourth and final
couplet. The account begins with Jesus
entering the synagogue to teach or promulgate his message. It ends with the report that ‘his fame spread
everywhere throughout the whole region of Galilee.’ These matching ideas or ‘gems’ centre on
spreading the good news. So the whole
passage shows us Mark’s careful craftsmanship – emphasising the central point
of the passage – Jesus is the Holy One of God.
Today’s Gospel reading gives us the first account
of Jesus entering a synagogue.
Synagogues did not come into existence until the Babylonians destroyed
the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 BC. They
were originally schools to preserve and teach scripture and to gather the
people to prayer. They greatly helped to
preserve the faith of the Jews in exile so when they returned to their homeland
synagogues spread throughout Palestine.
They were particularly important in areas far removed from the rebuilt
Temple in Jerusalem.
Synagogue services consisted of prayers, Scripture
readings and explanations of these readings – like our Liturgy of the Word at
Mass. At the time of Jesus there were no
resident rabbi’s. Scribes, whose job it
was to transcribe and explain scripture, were often asked to interpret the
scripture passage in the service. When
Jesus taught, he broke new ground and taught on his own authority, as we hear
today: ‘Here is a teaching that is new and with authority behind it.’
