Quick (1.10 2023)

 Normally I would not write a blog which focuses on a single word. However, with reference to the Gospel of Mark, there is one term that seems to embody Mark’s style. As I discussed last week determining whether it was Mark the recorder or Peter the preacher driving this dynamic is, at least for me, an open question. It was likely a bit of both. The word, of course, is εὐθέως. Rendered into English as illustrated in the first graph. The second graph shows its frequency in the entire New Testament, and the third graph narrows it down to Mark's usage alone. 

    For all intents and purposes, 1/2 of the uses of this term in the New Testament are Marks. I don’t want to get too deeply into the weeds on this but clearly, Mark wants to tell the story of Jesus as dynamically as possible. This prompts one of the central exegetical questions we need to ask while working through a text. “Why?” Why this word, this way, in these contexts? The sister words εὐθὺς and εὐθέως are adverbs. In his great book On Writing, Stephen King admonishes writers to eliminate all adverbs. Talk about not getting the memo! Mark’s gospel seems to be an extreme example of how to make a point. He does not use the “content carrying” words (nouns), nor the “action defining” words (verbs) to drive the action but a modifier. So, for Mark, the “why” question gets a “how” answer. He wrote this way to create a specific effect. 

    Matthew and Luke are clearly telling the same story, and their plotlines are similar. The most graphic difference (other than length) is the dynamism of Mark’s story and that is largely due to the use of these adverbial modifiers primarily, εὐθέως.

    You might be thinking “I thought you said that you weren’t going to get too deeply into the weeds?” I don’t think I have and now I will try and draw this together to show how this kind of information is vital for forming judgments about Mark’s story of Jesus and how you and I can do a better job of preaching it. 

    I’ve read quite a bit about Mark in the last 8 weeks, but as far as I can remember (which is to say there is nothing in my notes about this) the following is pretty much my assessment. 

1. Mark had to know the whole story, before writing his version. Like a chef examining a recipe he looks at it and says “this sounds good! How can I spice it up? Perhaps some white pepper, or ginger, or a pinch of thyme?” To make those changes the chef needs to have an idea of how the overall recipe works—the whole recipe—or minimal changes risk damaging it rather than enhancing it. Similarly, Mark is able (likely due to interaction with the other synoptic Evangelists in print or person) to gauge the entire “recipe” and concludes “I can spice it up without changing the story by modifying the pace of the action.” That is what εὐθέως does in Mark. The subjects and objects of the Gospel are the same. Mark surfaces the character of Peter’s preaching creating an arresting approach to the story. The story remains the same, as does the action predicated. Mark just makes it spicier.

2. This is (or should be) the reason we preach from one Gospel at a time and not a generic, conflated “story of Jesus.” There may be times when it might be necessary to point out a parallel between Mark and Luke, Mark and Matthew, or even Mark and John. But in so doing you and I usurp the editorial and authorial role of each Evangelist who was prompted to tell the story of Jesus “According to…” Matthew Mark, Luke, or John. 

3. The shape of preaching needs to be determined by the shape of the text. In this case, we can substitute the word “pace” for “shape.” Because for Mark; pace is shape or gives shape to His telling of the story. Much of the academic literature on the Synoptics and the Synoptic Problem discusses “changes” made by the respective evangelists (as if Luke a Gentle, located his version of the story in Greece). It is more accurate to talk about not how the Evangelists change the story but how they tell the story. Changing the story implies altering content, which clearly, they don’t do. Telling the story is a matter of context, specifically the audience and environment in which the story is told. 

    In preparing sermons from Mark, we need to make clear distinctions between the words and deeds of Jesus and the frenetic pace of Mark’s storytelling. The message is the same, the story is unchanged. What does Mark do? He inflames a sense of urgency. It might be a good idea to shape our messages from Mark with similar urgency. 

    Many of us first began to study the Biblical languages with the romantic idea that they were “magic meaning beans”, silver bullets which slew the beasts of unbelief with arguments invisible to those who did not know the code. Well, “this ain’t that movie bro.” Faithful exegesis has few or no shortcuts. Some of the work is now automated and simplified. I sure am glad that Accordance has fast searches and readily made graphs. People recognized much of Mark’s method long before these tools were available. Discovering or better, recovering, (even better recovering for yourself) this information is only the first step. Sharing the factoid that Mark seems to have fallen in love with εὐθέως, at the beginning of a Sermon series and then not exegeting every passage with Mark's torrid narrative pace in mind is just showing off. What we need to do is keep this fact in our back pocket, and keep doing the hard, invisible work of exegesis. No one in the pew should care, and they certainly should not see how you unravel the consequences of this linguistic factoid. But every sermon from Mark should be informed by the suddenness, the quickness, the nearness, the now-ness with which Mark seasoned the old, old story of Jesus.