Lection and Liturgy

17th century icon of St Mark via Wikimedia Commons Unlike Matthew’s carefully introduced and triumphantly concluded story, Mark begins fairly abruptly and ends even more suddenly than it begins. That beginning reflects a sense of pace that Mark injects into his gospel; Jesus is constantly on the move, and his mission is presented with a sense of urgency fitting to a figure who is announcing that the kingdom of God has come close. When I looked at the book of Daniel , I commented that it helped establish a new literary genre. That genre, where the secrets of God’s heavens are revealed in visions so that people know how to live faithfully in the present, is called “apocalyptic”, from the Greek word for uncovering, or unveiling in the sense of revelation. Mark begins and ends Jesus’ story with unveilings. In the account of his baptism, Jesus sees a vision and hears a voice. He sees the heavens torn apart, and God’s Spirit coming down; he hears a declaration that h...

The order of the biblical books is is not accidental but deliberate. The Old Testament ends with prophecy. The New Testament begins with the gospel that puts the greatest stress on Jesus as the fulfilment of prophecy. This is Matthew’s version of the story of Jesus. The canonical order is almost certainly not the order in which the gospels were written. In a rare instance of near universal academic agreement, biblical scholars think that this sub-genre of ancient biography was invented by Mark: the first person to write a gospel. The four evangelists, gospel book cover. Photo © Philip Barrington There is also universal agreement that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are in some way interrelated. After that scholars begin to part company. The majority think that one key relationship between the gospels is that Matthew and Luke both adapt Mark in different ways. They tidy up his story (and his grammar!) and supplement it with a range of additional stories they val...