The Gospel of Mark takes the sabbath super literally
An approach to the octave shape used also in Bright Week
I have seen attempts to outline the Gospel according to St. Mark using a thoroughly chiastic pattern from beginning to end — wherever one identifies the ending to be! (Scholarship has turned up a bit of controversy in that regard.) But I have never found that approach to yield a satisfying account of the Gospel’s contents. Matthew I could see was clearly chiastic. John, too, I saw as a pentad-based chiasm, and I was not alone in doing so. Acts was the same pattern. But what of Mark? What of Luke? The pattern didn’t seem to fit these books. When you’re looking at these things, you never want to impose a pattern on something that isn’t there. That’s like reading your own passions into the words of the Lord. The point is to reshape your vision according to the Holy Scriptures, not the other way around. I needed another lens to see the body of Mark’s text. Once I learned the octave from the Psalter, I tried it on Mark and felt I had found what I was looking for. There’s a strange catch, though.
The sabbath isn’t there. There’s no “Part 7”. The ending of Part 6 abuts directly with the beginning of Part 8. It’s like the Evangelist himself takes a sabbath rest from writing. I wouldn’t at all feel comfortable going with this model if the text itself didn’t make the structural lacuna as literal as it possibly could. It also helps that the liturgical pattern of Bright Week does exactly the same thing. Let’s look first at the Gospel.
With Mark, it’s best to start at the end. There’s a clear break between the accounts of Jesus’s ministry ending with chapter 13 and the Passion narrative beginning with chapter 14. As with the other Gospels, the Passion is a chiastically composed set piece (I won’t cover it here, but maybe in a future post); it carries through chapter 15 and concludes there. The final scene is set temporally with the words “And now when the evening was come, because it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath...” (15:42). Joseph of Arimathea acquires Christ’s body from Pilate and buries it in a sepulcher; the Myrrhbearing Women behold the burial. Then chapter 16 opens with the tag, “And when the sabbath was past” (16:1). The space between chapters 15 and 16 is literally the sabbath, and there is literally no text there.
So if we set aside the Passion and Resurrection narratives in chapters 14 through 16, what does the rest look like? I don’t know if anyone else has thought to look for a chiastic structure between chapters 1 through 13, instead of 1 through 16, but that’s the approach I find to be successful. The results are pentadic. Again, working backwards, we first of all see that the Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday takes place at the beginning of chapter 11, so all the text through the Apocalypse Sermon on the Mount of Olives concluding chapter 13 consists of teachings of Christ during Holy Week before the Passion. I’ve mapped the text out as follows on my website:
