Graphe Bible College
Bridging the Spiritual Gap between Mark’s Gospel and Us
This paper offers a method for reading Mark’s Gospel from a Pacifician viewpoint. As a Pacifician, I am a Gentile and, therefore, an ‘outsider’ approaching Mark’s Gospel. In Mark, I read about Jesus as the Son of God and the gospel of God and see his power demonstrated in various miracles and, ultimately, in his resurrection from the dead. However, I am not a Jew who lived in the first century Galilee and its vicinity and who participated in and even witnessed the historical Jesus and his powerful ministry. I am a Pacifician living in the twenty-first century, experiencing a historical and social-cultural context vastly different from where Jesus was. So, how can I appropriate the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth in the way it was witnessed first-hand by the people of his time? In other words, how can the story of Jesus presented in the Gospel be relevant to me as a Pacifician living today? In this paper, I shall argue that the most appropriate method for Pacificians like myself and Gentiles to read the Gospel is to ‘enter’ the narrative storyline of the Gospel through the Cross of Jesus and therefore make the story of Jesus my personal story.