Tuesday January 16 and finished the first cycle of reading through the Gospel of Mark. I am experimenting with lectio continua, reading continually through a gospel a number of times, at least a chapter a day. Familiarity with the narrative is enhanced by growing appreciation for Marcan style, noticing new and recurring vocabulary, seeing pericopes in new structural contexts, all of which is to allow the text to slowly soak into the mind to create its own inner responsiveness.
Alongside the lectio continua of the text, a slow read through one of the more critical and challenging commentaries. In this case the volume by Eugene Boring. I've sometimes wondered how you get on through life with a surname like "Boring". Thing is, his commentary on Mark is anything but. Indeed, Eugene Boring is an established exegete with several commentaries to his name and the words stimulating and independent describe best his approach. His commentary on Revelation is both readable and responsible; on Matthew, which he contributed to the New Interpreter's Bible, he comes at that highly organised Gospel with fresh insights and longstanding reflection; his most recent work is on Thessalonians and it too is mainstream critical but without losing the sense that the text belongs to the church, and belongs in the church, as Word of God and bread for mind and soul. Boring is a good choice of conversation partner.
One of the difficulties, or perhaps advantages, of reading Mark like this is that I have the time to live in the text. In the past I've read Mark through a number of times at one sitting, read chunks of it hundreds of times over 50 years, so I already think I know quite a lot about it. Why then lectio continua? Is it an attempt to squeeze out something more, extra, even new? Perhaps.
But perhaps also it is seeking the kind of intellectual and spiritual adventure that underlies the memorable book by Marcus Borg, in which he invited his readers to join him in meeting Jesus again for the first time. But you can't not know what you know, can you? You can't read a familiar text as if you didn't know what was in it, what was coming, how it ends, can you? No. But because we are creatures of time and context, living with change and always changing ourselves, each new reading of a text like Mark, takes place at a different time and in a different context for each of us.
The same text addresses a different person; the same text speaks into the changing continuity that is each one of us; same text, same Jesus. Maybe like the disciples in Mark, I can be obtuse, sceptical, too tied to the limitations of my own horizons, too afraid to get out of the boat and walk with Jesus, too thick to know what to do with 5 loaves and 2 fishes second time around, too scared to go beyond Gethsemane to the darkness beyond all light, and too scared to go anywhere near the tomb - leave that to the women!
Be that as it may, this same text speaks to me in different ways at different times because I'm never the same person two days in a row. For example the parable of the sower takes on a whole new meaning when I realise I'm overstretched, running around desperately trying to fulfil expectations and demands. When I've no time to deepen my heart and mind with nourishing food for soul and intellect, all the good seed of what God is trying to say and do in my life falls on stony ground. Or God's good Gospel word is choked by weeds which ironically grow best in good soil, while their toxic, choking presence nullifies the capacity of that same soil to produce crops without them being strangled for space. Or to change the metaphor but stay with the same parable, a well trodden path is good for easy travel; but it's the place of death for seeds that contain the future.
Lectio continua is then my personal experiment with the Gospel of Mark this year. What good will it do? What discernible benefits will come my way? Will I learn new lessons about Jesus and new directions in discipleship, because after all Mark is about those two big themes, Christology and discipleship? Will I find coming near Easter a stronger pull into the passion story, told with unexampled power by Mark? Will I get scunnered reading the same text over and over, and end up complying with a self-imposed discipline just because it is self-imposed, and my ego doesn't like to let itself down?
If it takes just over 2 weeks to read Mark, then by the end of the year I'll have read it 24 times. That's a lot of Gospel. You'd think it would become boring; but I have Boring to keep me on track!
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