Reading the Gospel of Mark as Short Fiction

An exercise inadvertently inspired by George Saunders

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been reading the gospel according to Mark in the morning and, in the evenings, George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (2021).

Saunders’ book is a collection of nineteenth-century Russian short stories he assigns in a course at Syracuse University, followed by his reflections on what makes the stories work. The book, he says, is an exercise in “watching ourselves read.” I just love that phrase. I’ve already stolen it. He hopes the reader will “read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you’ve just had.” (“What did we feel and where did we feel it?”) Following each story is an essay in which Saunders shares his own reactions along with “some technical explanations for why we might have felt what we felt, where we felt it.”

Great book. Adult language warning: there are bad words.

I’ve been reading this in the evenings, as I said, and reading Mark’s gospel in the mornings. The timing was serendipitous, not strategic. The main result of it has been that I’ve found myself reading—and reacting to—Mark as if it were a short story. With Saunders’ “technical explanations” in mind, I’ve noticed things in the story that I hadn’t noticed before, despite having read it many times. And, noticing new things, I’ve also felt new things. I’m pretty sure—though this is not the sort of thing we talked about in my formal Bible training—that I’ve felt these things because Mark wanted me to feel them.

In what I consider a heroic display of self-control (as there’s much more I’d like to say), I’ve picked three features of short fiction as Saunders describes them and noted how having them in mind has enhanced my experience reading Mark’s gospel. 

Characterization 

Characterization is the process of “continually increasing particularity” in our understanding of a figure in the story. A character may begin as a guy sitting on a bench. As the story develops, he becomes a guy affected by relatable past experiences, sitting on a bench as he screws up the courage to make a decisive action that will affect his life forever. “Some guy” has just become a very specific guy whose fate we now care about. To create this particularity, Saunders explains,

“The writer asks, ‘Which particular person is this, anyway?’ and answers with a series of facts that have the effect of creating a narrowing path: ruling out certain possibilities, urging others forward.”

Jesus first appears in Mark in the words of John the Baptist, who tells us that Jesus “is mightier than I” to such a degree that John is “not fit to bend down and untie the straps of His sandals” (1:7). That certainly feels meaningful. But if we are reading this story for the first time as, presumably, some of Mark’s early readers did, we don’t know what it is about Jesus that makes him so mighty. But this introduction creates an expectation. If Mark is a good storyteller (he is), we expect for this Jesus character to get more particular, for Mark to answer the question that might’ve occurred to us, What makes this Jesus so special anyway?

Mark eases us into the particularization of Jesus. At first Jesus does roughly what John the Baptist had done: “preaching the gospel of God” (1:14). Soon enough he starts doing new things. He enters synagogues and teaches “with authority.” Next Jesus has a semi-casual chat with an “unclean spirit” whom he then exorcizes out of the body of another person. Talk about particular. Jesus is now a repentance-preaching, synagogue-teaching, demon-caster-outer.

And we’re still in chapter one. Over the next several paragraphs, the Jesus that emerges is complex (he’ll be “moved with compassion”) and multi-dimensional (his family will say “he’s lost his senses”). He is becoming, in the story, a much more specific character.

Escalation 

A compelling story moves. Every paragraph, or at least every scene, is “advancing the story in a non-trivial way.” 

Mark’s story moves. The way he organizes his record of Jesus’s interactions with a wide range of folks has the effect of constantly raising the stakes of the story. One place we see the escalation is in peoples’ reactions to Jesus.

Initially Jesus is preaching the gospel of God. No big deal. John had done that. Mark records no particular reaction to this activity. Then Jesus starts teaching “with authority” in the synagogue and people are “amazed.” That’s escalation.

In chapter two, Jesus forgives someone’s sins. If we’re not sure whether that’s normal behavior for a gospel-preaching, synagogue-teaching, demon-caster-outer, Mark lets us know by sharing the responses of onlookers: “Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming!” 

That’s escalation.

Even if we don’t understand all the customs or social and cultural norms and expectations, Mark has made it clear that the stakes are climbing as Jesus’s behavior takes him beyond the boundaries of acceptability. We feel the escalation as the social atmospheric pressure changes around Jesus, as people go from “amazed” to questioning to adversarial in just a few short episodes. Soon enough the Pharisees will begin “conspiring with the Herodians against him” (3:4).

Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing 

A good story is full of details and seemingly-meaningful moments that we suspect will have an impact on how the story develops and eventually resolves. Often it’s only in retrospect that we know what sense to make of those details. Saunders explains it this way:

“As we read a story (let’s imagine) we’re dragging along a cart labeled ‘Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing’ (TICHN). As we read, we’re noticing—surface-level, plot-type things (‘Romeo really seems to like Juliet’), but quieter things, too: aspects of the language, say (‘Tons of alliteration in the first three pages’), structural features (‘It’s being told in reverse chronological order!’), patterns of color, flashbacks or flash-forwards, changes in point of view. I’m not saying that we’re consciously noticing. Often, we’re not. We’re ‘noticing’ with our bodies and our quality of attention and may overtly ‘notice’ only afterward, as we analyze the story.”

We put these things in the cart as we read and ask the author, “What are you going to do with that thing I couldn’t help noticing? I hope you’re going to make it pay off.”

Mark’s gospel is full of things I couldn’t help noticing. One thing I put in my cart on this most recent read through is John’s statement that Jesus “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (1:8). There’s nothing in the story immediately before or after that clarifies what that means exactly. But I suspect Mark will make it pay off.

I couldn’t help noticing that the location of the action keeps changing: from the Jordan River to Galilee to Capernaum; from the sea to the synagogue to someone’s house. Not sure what it means. Into the cart it goes.

And then there’s this: Jesus sometimes tries to keep his identity and some of his miracles a secret. When an “unclean spirit” says, “I know who you are: the Holy One of God!,” Jesus tells it to be quiet (1:24-25). When Jesus heals a man with leprosy, he “sternly warned him” not to tell anyone about it (1:44). I find myself asking Mark, What are you going to do with that thing I couldn't help noticing? 

Watching Ourselves Reading the Bible

As someone who considers the Bible divinely inspired, I’m compelled to confess that I consider the gospel more than just a great story. But as someone who considers short fiction the height of literary achievement, I’m relieved to discover that the gospel is not less than a great story. 

More personally, perhaps, reading Mark’s account as a good short story has made it just strange enough for me that I am seeing it, in some ways, as if for the first time. And because the main character of the story is Jesus, I feel like I’m having a fresh encounter with Jesus. I’m finding him complex, challenging, destabilizing. He keeps violating norms and expectations and, because I’m watching myself read, I am feeling those violations in ways I suspect Mark wants me to feel them. I’m eager to feel other things as the story develops. 

And this takes the pressure off of getting it right while I’m reading. If I engage the story as a story, I don’t stop and dissect a phrase to extract a meaning or application. I wait for the story to finish, trusting that the whole will make sense of the parts. Sometimes that means getting to the end and starting over again, equipped with a new set of reactions and observations that you can employ, this time, from the beginning. 

It’s the difference—if I may put it starkly—between strip mining a text for “takeaways” and surrendering yourself to a story. If those are my options, I’ll always prefer to be swept away by a narrative and then slowly make my way back to shore.