Reading Notes: The Gospel of Mark- Part A

(Image of Jesus sourced from Flickr that was labeled for reuse)

If we’re being candid, I have read the Gospel of Mark numerous times throughout my life. I have grown up hearing these stories time and time again. While I was familiar with the meanings and lessons behind these passages, I was not familiar with the storytelling patterns hidden in between the margins. This assignment provided me with the opportunity to read between the lines and hone in on a different angle of the Bible.


By reading these stories in a new light, I realized two main things, each story had a question and Jesus is a man of few words. Just about every passage found within the first ten chapters of the Gospel of Mark contained a question. The people who came to listen to Jesus’s sermons often asked him questions, the Pharisees often questioned the validity of Jesus’s teachings, and Jesus himself asked his listeners questions in an effort to make them think. Rhetorical questions can act as a creative writing technique within one’s story. It encourages the reader to be engaged and actively participate.


The second thing I noticed was that Jesus often only said a few words to get his point across. Jesus always got the punchline of every story found within the Gospel of Mark. For example, in Mark 2 Jesus heals a paralytic man and all he said was “Son, your sins are forgiven,” and he was immediately healed. This was after the fact that the friends of this paralytic man cut through the ceiling of the overcrowded home Jesus was teaching in, in an effort to drop this paralytic man at the feet of Jesus. After all of that hard work of carrying a grown man, cutting through the ceiling, and lowering him through the roof of this home, the only words Jesus had were, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” To me this translates as a story technique because it is proof that your stories don’t have to necessarily be wordy if your story is profound. Jesus’s words were bold and were few, the stories we tell can be the same way.

Bibliography:

King James translation of the Gospel of Mark, link to the online reading.