I met Marcus only once or twice, and each time with many others gathered around and energetically engaging him—a give-and-take, back-and-forth process he seemed to enjoy as immensely as they did. While I envy those who can write of him as a close friend and colleague, I am delighted that his work inspired me.
Like so many thousands of others, I was very moved by Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. Yet even as I was giving copies and recommending the book to friends and family, students and colleagues, out of my sheer enjoyment of the book, I was also beginning to pay closer attention to Marcus as a thinker and as a writer. “How did he do that?” I would ask, as I re-read for the tenth time a particularly compelling passage—and compelling because he had just negotiated a very dense topic with the precision of Ockham’s razor and yet with the sensitivity of a therapist helping a person explore her or himself more honestly and more deeply.
Marcus was able to pull off on the page what few other scholars could, namely a way into the New Testament material that was simultaneously a way into the reader’s own questions—not just about the material but about themselves. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time would involve meeting yourself, and your own understanding of faith again for the first time. That’s what he could do. While so many of his colleagues were rightly concerned with getting the scholarship right, Marcus was also deeply attentive to how that scholarship could speak to readers’ own very legitimate questions about their faith traditions, their religious upbringing, their un-certainties in the face of others’ certainties, and so on. In this way, he taught colleagues and students and readers alike the force of a well-asked question. When I read him, I always felt I was in the presence of a courageous faith convinced that pursuing difficult questions was the critical task of the New Testament theologian.
Marcus would likely affirm what another marvelous New Testament teacher of mine, Dieter Georgi, would say to us in the classroom: “the gaps in your experience are your greatest resource.” Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem,” helps us get at Marcus’ uncanny and gracious gift. At the heart of the song is the following refrain:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Marcus was not afraid of the cracks in human existence, in himself, or in the traditions of Christian thought. He taught the rest of us to trust those cracks as places of insight. Yes, it takes courage to name the cracks that others would hide, to raise the questions that others—that we ourselves—would silence. Marcus knew that if we stayed with those difficult questions, if we pursued real problems with both persistence and sensitivity, then more genuine responses would begin to open, both in the material and in ourselves. That’s how the light gets into the world, and Marcus brought in so much!
Some reflective questions for you to consider:
- Can intellectual honesty lead to the renewal of one’s faith?
- Can intellectual honesty be a form of humility?
- Does the gospel ask us to sacrifice ourselves for its sake or to become fully ourselves for its sake?
- Why do difficult questions about God and Jesus and the Bible open up painful questions about our own lives?
- How is the re-imagining of our faith and expression of faithfulness to it?
