the sick, forgiving sinners and caring for the poor.
The entire message of Mark’s Gospel is the good news of this love.
Mark’s Gospel nears completion with the centurion, the Roman
soldier saying, “In truth this man was a son of God.”
He came to see this because of the love and peaceful tranquility
which Jesus exhibited as he suffered the cruelest torture and death.
These three statements at the beginning, the middle and the end
of Mark’s Gospel emphasize the agape of Jesus which he came to
preach, teach and exemplify to his disciples and to all persons.
Right away we learn of the love between the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit and this love is the basis not only for
the equal dignity of the Divine persons but also for all humans.
From Son of David to Son of Man to Son of God
The Jewish people were already expecting the Son of David
or the Messiah or the Christ to come and let them have a King
and a great kingdom again and even to drive out the Romans.
They were also expecting the Son of man who would come to be
a judge of heaven and earth but they never expected a Son of God.
The point of Mark’s Gospel as Jesus performs his miraculous
works of love is to slowly convince them that he is Son of
David, Son of man and also Son of God and those who became
his disciples, both men and women, saw him as Son of God.
Mark wrote his Gospel to let the agapetos convert, edify,
infuse faith, enlighten it and defend it against various opponents.
Jesus shows himself to be the Messiah or Son of David but he
is not the kind of King anyone expected for slowly they see
that his is a kingdom of love in which he and his followers
will love others, even their enemies, as more important than self.
He also taught them that he was the son of man but in a way
that they never would have thought and at Mark 9:31 he says,
The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands
of men; they will put him to death; and
three days after he has been put to death
he will rise again.
They did not understand what he meant and they were afraid
to ask him why he would suffer and die out of love
and they could not understand his talk about a resurrection.
The Kingdom of God which Jesus, the Messianic King, taught them
had to do as we see at Mark 10:29 with leaving
house, brothers, sisters, father, children
or land for my name sake and for
the sake of the gospel . . . and not
without persecutions.
Jesus made sense to them but his teaching about suffering did not.
The Reconciling Love of Mark’s Jesus
In revealing to us the agape of Jesus Mark’s Gospel
shows us how that love can bring about reconciliation.
The logic of reconciliation, the physiology of reconciliation,
the doxology of reconciliation and its mysticology all
become clearer if we think with Bataille about Mark’s Jesus.
The Kierkegaardian Bataille does bring out the logic of reconciling
as their Jesus loves others as more important than himself.
The Nietzschean Bataille knows that for amor fati to be real
we must not feel any resentment in our bodies
and the childish yes and amen for all others
must take place in the interplay between our body
and our heart and our brain as right loving
lets the flow of brain chemicals such as oxytocin
get going just right and our testosterone and estrogen
can balance so that we have a happy, holy love.
Jesus’ whole mission and our imitation of him could
be seen as related to the doxology of reconciliation.
Jesus basically teaches us the prayer of
Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.
As agape fulfills the Jewish loves of Hesed and Ahava,
of God’s love for us and our love for God
and for our neighbor the unmanifest does become
more manifest even in its unmanifestness.
Bataille with the inner experience of mystical love
can help us appreciate how the disciples
had to keep meditating on Jesus in an active
night of the soul that they might come to love him.
The women seemed to mystically contemplate Jesus
in a passive, receptive night of the soul
in which they received the gift of love from him.
Agape’s Messianic Secret
The introduction to Mark’s Gospel
in the New Jerusalem Bible says
that “Mark’s Gospel concentrates not
on
