Nick Cave - The Gospel According to Mark

When I bought my first copy of the Bible, the King James version, it was to the Old Testament that I was drawn, with its maniacal, punitive God, that dealt out to His long-suffering humanity punishments that had me drop-jawed in disbelief at the very depth of their vengefulness. I had a burgeoning interest in violent literature coupled with an unnamed sense of the divinity in things and, in my early twenties, the Old Testament spoke to that part of me that railed and hissed and spat at the world. I believed in God, but I also believed that God was malign and if the Old Testament was testament to anything, it was testament to that. Evil seemed to live so close to the surface of existence within it, you could smell its mad breath, see the yellow smoke curl from its many pages, hear the blood-curdling moans of despair. It was a wonderful, terrible book and it was sacred scripture.

But you grow up. You do. You mellow out. Buds of compassion push through the cracks in the black and bitter soil. Your rage ceases to need a name. You no longer find comfort watching a whacked-out God tormenting a wretched humanity as you learn to forgive yourself and the world. That God of Old begins to transmute in your heart, base metals become silver and gold, and you warm to the world.

Then, one day, I met an Anglican vicar and he suggested that I give the Old Testament a rest and to read Mark instead. I hadnt read the New Testament at that stage because the New Testament was about Jesus Christ and the Christ I remembered from my choir-boy days was that wet, all-loving, etiolated individual that the church proselytised. I spent my pre-teen years singing in the Wangarafta Cathedral Choir and even at that age I recall thinking what a wishy-washy affair the whole thing was. The Anglican Church: it was the decaf of worship and Jesus was their Lord.

Why Mark? I asked.

Because its short, he replied.

Well, at that time I was willing to give anything a go so I took the vicars advice and read it, and The Gospel Accordingto Mark just swept me up.

Here, I am reminded of that picture of Christ, painted by Holman Hunt, where He appears, robed and handsome, a lantern in His hand, knocking on a door. The door to our hearts, presumably. The light is dim and buttery in the engulfing darkness. Christ came to me in this way, lumenChristi, with a dim light, a sad light, but light enough. Out of all the New Testament writings from the four Gospels, through the Acts, and the complex, driven Letters of Paul, to the chilling, sickening Revelation it is Marks Gospel that has truly held me.

Scholars generally agree that Marks was the first of the four Gospels to be written. Mark took from the mouths of teachers and prophets the jumble of events that comprised Christs life and fixed these events into some kind of biographical form. He did this with such breathless insistence, such compulsive narrative intensity, that one is reminded of a child recounting some amazing tale, piling fact upon fact, as if the whole world depended upon it, which of course, to Mark, it did. Straightway and immediately link one event to another, everyone runs, shouts, is amazed, inflaming Christs mission with a dazzling urgency. Marks Gospel is a clatter of bones, so raw, nervy and lean on information that the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence. Scenes of deep tragedy are treated with such a matter-of-factness and raw economy they become almost palpable in their unprotected sorrowfulness. Marks narrative begins with the Baptism and immediately we are confronted with the solitary figure of Christ, who is baptised in the River Jordan and driven into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him (1:13). This is all Mark says of the Temptation, but the verse is typically potent owing to its mysterious simplicity and spareness.

Christs forty days and forty nights in the wilderness also say something about His aloneness, for when Christ takes on His ministry around Galilee and in Jerusalem, He enters a wilderness of the soul, where all the outpourings of His brilliant, jewel-like imagination are in turns misunderstood, rebuffed, ignored, mocked and vilified and would eventually be the death of Him. Even His disciples, who we would hope would absorb some of Christs brilliance, seem to be in a perpetual fog of misunderstanding, following Christ from scene to scene, with little or no comprehension of what is going on around them. So much of the frustration and anger that seems at times to almost consume Christ is directed at His disciples and it is against their persistent ignorance that Christs isolation seems at its most complete. It is Christs divine inspiration versus the dull rationalism of those around Him that gives Marks narrative its tension, its drive. The gulf of misunderstanding is so vast that His friends lay hold of Him thinking, He is beside himself (3:21). The scribes and Pharisees, with their monotonous insistence on the Law, provide the perfect springboard for Christs luminous words. Even those Christ heals betray Him, as they run to the towns to report the doings of the miraculous healer, after Christ has insisted that they tell no one. Christ disowns His own mother for her lack of understanding. Throughout Mark, Christ is in deep conflict with the world. He is trying to save, and the sense of aloneness that surrounds Him is at times unbearably intense. Christs last howl from the cross is to a God He believes has forsaken Him, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.

The rite of Baptism the dying of ones old self to be born anew like so many of the events in Christs life, is already flavoured metaphorically by Christs death and it is His death on the cross that is such a powerful and haunting force, especially in Mark. His preoccupation with it is all the more obvious if only because of the brevity with which Mark deals with the events of His life. It seems that virtually everything that Christ does in Marks narrative is in some way a preparation for His death His frustration with His disciples and His fear that they have not comprehended the full significance of His actions, the constant taunting of the church officials, the stirring up of the crowds, His miracle-making so that witnesses will remember the extent of His divine power. Clearly Mark is concerned primarily with the death of Christ, to such an extent that Christ appears completely consumed by His imminent demise, thoroughly shaped by His death.

The Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about Him that I could not resist. Christ spoke to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage at the mundane, through His sorrow. Christ, it seemed to me, was the victim of humanitys lack of imagination, was hammered to the cross with the nails of creative vapidity.