This September we return, after our excursion into the Gospel of St John, to a sequential reading of St Mark’s Gospel, picking up at the beginning of Chapter 7. This month we will read about Jesus’s controversy with the Pharisees about cleanness and uncleanness; the healing of the deaf and dumb man; the first “passion prediction”; the second “passion prediction” and the saying about little children; sayings about discipleship and about cutting off parts of the body that cause us to sin.
At first glance this all seems rather bitty. It is certainly true that when we compare Mark to Matthew and John in particular, we struggle to find an obvious structure to the Gospel. Indeed, there was a time when this Gospel was widely believed to have no structure: aside from the obvious order provided by the life of Jesus – Baptism and Temptation at the beginning, entry into Jerusalem and Passion at the end. Many felt that the great bulk of the Gospel was just one thing after another, in no particular order. The evangelist had simply gathered various stories about Jesus and collections of His sayings and strung them randomly like beads on a thread.
