Behold, My Mother and My Brethren! - The Beginning of the Gospel and Becoming a Christian in (Post) Christendom (A Kierkegaardian Reading of the Gospel of Mark, #1)

This inaugural volume of Kierkegaardian readings of Mark began as an experiment in juxtaposition. What might result if one read Mark’s “ancient” gospel alongside Soren Kierkegaard’s “existential” writings as “the age of anxiety” arrived 1800 years later? Perhaps a sampling of a few subjects from its 20 chapters provides the best answer: >Jesus’ coming “only for the sick” becomes Kierkegaard’s call to “hurry up and despair . . . there is no bliss except in despair.” >The gravity and anxiety of sin brings a fall from “the glory of being human” that we can re-learn from what Kierkegaard called God’s “silent teachers”—the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. >The desperate leper who begged Jesus for “cleansing” is elucidated by Kierkegaard’s semi-autobiographical “A Leper’s Self-Contemplation,” a meditation on who is truly fortunate or unfortunate in this world and in the world to come. >The fear-stricken disciples in the boat on the raging sea while Jesus naps reveals Kierkegaard’s favorite metaphor for the only place where faith is possible—"out over 70,000 fathoms.” >Jesus’ bold declaration to a paralytic—"your sins are forgiven”—which presented a blessed or calamitous “fork in the road” to Israel’s religious leaders in the first century, becomes through Kierkegaard’s true Christianity an “1840s fork” for modern society choosing the atheistic Marxist “gospel.” >Mark’s controversial “messianic secret” relates to the problems that follow upon human boredom, demonic “publicity,” and the media’s trafficking in “news” regarding Kierkegaard’s uneven trouser-legs. In short, the juxtaposition of Mark and Kierkegaard unveils many realities of our lives and thereby reveals the relevance of Mark’s gospel and how we can become truly Christian in our (Post) Christendom situation.