Kyle Dresback
Friends,
Remember that feeling in your stomach when you watched Jaws for the first time? Or when Romeo lifts the poison to his lips, taking a sleeping Juliet for dead?
Even if you’ve forgotten the definition of “dramatic irony” from your literature classes, you know it when you feel it: that pit in your stomach when you have the critical information that the protagonist lacks; the urge to yell “Watch out!” to the unknowing character toiling away in ignorance.
And once you’re there, the storyteller has you.
Mark sets up this same literary tension in the opening sentence of his gospel: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” We’re barely settled in our seats and he has handed us the key to the entire story: this story is about Jesus who will rescue God’s people.
And now he can get to work.
First, for those who arrived late, he makes sure everyone’s clear on Jesus’s identity. After Mark tells us, God announces it from the heavens in Jesus’s baptism. Then in the first half of today’s reading, the unclean spirits fall down before Jesus, declaring him to be “the son of God”.
The reader is well informed at this point.
Now all Mark needs is the blissfully unaware swimmer in the ocean…or, in this case, fishermen on the lake. It is here, in the second half of today’s reading, that Mark introduces us to Jesus’ disciples.
And sure enough, throughout his gospel, this cast of characters doesn’t get it. They habitually miss the point, lose the plot, fall asleep, and run away.
In privileging the reader with Jesus’s true identity, Mark has set up the dramatic tension: he wants us to feel it when his characters miss the real Jesus. It’s by design that we want to reach into the pages and shake them by the collar, “Pay attention!”
I suspect this is where Mark wants his readers—not merely informed or entertained, or even armed with the correct political or theological material, but invited into an encounter with the living Jesus.
May we have ears to hear.
In Christ,
—Kyle
