“Follow Me”: The Way of Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark

By Luke Kammrath

The world has been completely thrown on its head. A nobody from Nazareth, who was brutally executed by the Roman Empire, has conquered all the empires of mankind and brought freedom to all its slaves. A world of ecosystems and communities of life headed towards death is being rescued. You are being called to follow in this movement, sacrificing everything that you have and are. Will you flee or will you follow?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Aug 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781630873837

Luke Kammrath

Luke Kammrath is a disciple of Jesus, gardener, and pastor. He follows Jesus with his intentional Christian community in Kansas City as they share all their resources, read the gospels, pray and eat together, walk with one another through the ups and downs of life, house those experiencing homelessness, and rely on their heavenly father for all things.

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Follow Me

The Way of Jesus According to the Gospel of Mark

Luke Kammrath

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Follow Me

The Way of Jesus According to the Gospel of Mark

Copyright © 2012 Luke Kammrath. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-374-8

eISBN 13: 978-1-63087-383-7

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Jesus of Nazareth and his radical love for the creation.

"Whoever wants to rescue her life will destroy it,

but whoever will destroy her life, for me and the gospel, will rescue it."

—Jesus of Nazareth

Preface

Christian books and resources are plentiful. Go to any bookstore or look online and you can find thousands of Christian books on a seemingly endless number of subjects. The number of works and the variety of choices can be overwhelming. But even with so many choices I have often found myself wanting when people ask me for a good Christian book to read. Desiring to engage them, challenge them with the story of Jesus, and ultimately have god’s spirit transform them, I seldom know what to recommend. The books that have been most impacting for me have often been too academic, aimed at the theologically trained community, and far from concise. And the books that are most accessible to a wide audience I have often found to be shallow, superficial, peripheral to Jesus (often taking the teeth out of his teachings), and not transforming of one’s whole life.

I have also seldom understood the goal and purpose of most Christian books, even though I have read hundreds myself. Was the goal of the author to simply impart information? To entertain? To make me a better citizen? To comfort me? To assure me that I am doing enough or that I need to do nothing? To underwrite the status quo? What should the goal of a Christian book be anyway?

It seems to me that the goal of every Christian book should be to connect the reader to Jesus, giving space for his spirit to make holistic transformation in the reader’s life. The god of Jesus is changing and fixing the world and so our goal should be to join in with that in any way possible, even though that will inevitably be deeply uncomfortable and convicting at times. If a Christian book is not part of the transformation of god’s world, what good is it?

As a result of my dissatisfaction with a lot of Christian literature I have found myself wanting to just tell people to read the four canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). I am hesitant, however, because I know from personal experience that the gospels are initially strange and distant narratives that, in our Sunday-school-story world, can feel like nothing but a series of random sayings or supernatural tales about Jesus. Being 2000 year old stories, written in a language and culture we do not understand, it is hard to know how to get much out of them, to understand what they are trying to do, and to figure out why they are so important for the church (the community of those who follow Jesus). In fact, most American Christians probably functionally ignore the gospels in their everyday lives, for they have been told that the Christian faith is really about the acknowledgement that Jesus died for my sins in some sort of abstract divine exchange. If this is what the Christian faith is about, then the gospels are a complete waste of space and time, for they focus on nothing of the sort.

It took countless hours of study, but the gospels eventually became the backbone of my own growth and transformation as a Christian as I began to realize that they were the absolute heart and center of the Christian faith. Sadly, most Christian resources I have encountered have functionally ignored the gospels as cohesive teaching narratives that should be the heart of Christian formation for all ages. Even the resources that have no intention of being divorced from the gospels oftentimes end up standing alone or functionally replacing the gospels.

And so I began this work, desiring to come up with a way to tap into the ancient resource of the gospels without replacing them, while hoping to open some eyes to Jesus and the fact that because they confront us with Jesus of Nazareth the four gospels are absolutely, without a doubt, the most important books for every single Christian.

As I embarked on this endeavor I was influenced heavily by Ched Myers’s Binding the Strong Man.¹ Ched’s ground-breaking book opened my eyes to the Jesus that was presented in Mark’s gospel in a way that nothing else ever has and it challenged me to read and reread the gospel itself time and again. The importance of his work for my own conception of the gospels and Jesus cannot be overstated. The problem though is that I have not found Myers’s work easy to recommend to others. It is a deep, scholarly work of five hundred pages that leaves a lot of readers either too intimidated or feeling ignorant because of their lack of theological and historical education. It is my hope that I have captured a great deal of Myers’s insights and combined them with my own in such a way that they are accessible to a wide audience.

I also wrestled with the question of what translation of Mark’s gospel to use. After much deliberation I made the decision to freshly translate Mark’s gospel from the Greek. In my translation I was faithful to the grammar and word order of the original Greek where possible and only deviated for clarity of communication. I chose to make some very different word choices from most English translations in order to highlight the meaning of words that have often been obscured by overuse or much religious piety. When possible I tried to translate a single Greek word with the same English word in every situation in order to point the reader to some of the important repetitions in Mark. I worked under the assumption that Mark does not include any detail superfluously and uses all details to create a deep, symbolic (and yet thoroughly historical) picture of who Jesus was/is and what god is doing through him. Because the gender system of Greek is so different than English I chose to translate many things as gender neutral (like translating neighbor/near one as fellow creature in order to highlight that the way of Jesus is not human-centered but is about all of god’s creation) or feminine in English in order to better represent the way that the Greek works (like translating Jesus’ call to discipleship as If anyone wants to follow after me then she must say ‘no’ to herself, pick up her cross, and follow me in order to highlight that Jesus’ call is for all people, including women, who have a very special place in Mark’s gospel). Additionally, I chose to not capitalize the word god because it is not a proper noun or name, but a generic reference to the divine and means many different things to many different peoples, cultures, and individuals. But I did go ahead and keep the pronouns for god as masculine because of Jesus’ own reference to god as father. This is not because god is either male/female or a patriarch/matriarch (he is definitely neither) but simply because, in Jesus’ worldview, god is father while the creation seems to be mother (hence Jesus’ own reference to receiving many mothers when one leaves everything to follow him and the scriptures declaring you are earth and to earth you will return [Gen 3:19] and naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will return [Job 1:21]).

With all this in mind I set out to put together a resource that could be accessible to an adolescent and yet challenging and deep enough for even the most mature and educated. I wanted to put together a concise learning tool that could be handed to even those with no previous knowledge of Jesus. And most importantly, I wanted a resource that pointed away from itself and challenged people to be immersed in the transforming story of Jesus that is handed down to us in the beautiful narrative of the gospel of Mark that is so much more than disconnected Sunday school lessons. It is my humble prayer that the resource that follows is one that does this very thing.

I invite you on a journey. I invite you to put aside all the assumptions you have about who you think Jesus was/is and I invite you to encounter Jesus as Mark presents him to us. My hope is that through this little book you will read the gospel of Mark repeatedly, meet Jesus, hear his call, and follow. The creator of the universe is fixing our broken world by setting all things right and, in Mark’s gospel, says three key words to us about Jesus, Listen to him. I pray that as you hear the call of Jesus, which comes to you from Mark’s gospel, that you will take part in the reign of god that is breaking into our world.

1

.

Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,

1988

.

Acknowledgments

This project could have never been done without the love and support of my Christian community in Kansas City, KS (Julie, Scott, Stephanie, Karis, David, Ben, Jenny, Jude, and Jesse). Scott and Stephanie, I particularly thank you for walking through life with me and allowing me the freedom to spend countless hours learning the gospel of Mark and putting this book together. Scott, I can still vividly remember the car ride where this idea first came to fruition as we lamented the lack of resources for teaching people the basic story of Jesus.

Mom and Dad, thank you for first introducing me to Jesus, making him the priority in your lives, and supporting me as I have tried to destroy my life for his sake. Dad, in 2004 your recommendation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship forever altered the course of my life as it boldly challenged me to take Jesus’ teachings seriously.

To all those who were part of my bible study on the gospel of Mark, I thank you for your year long patience with me as we wrestled with Mark’s story of Jesus—your walking and learning alongside me taught me so much. Jason, your time and willingness to edit the entire manuscript with me was invaluable, as was your friendship and encouragement. Jack, your proofreading and copyediting help was such a great blessing. Alexis and Branden, your artistic gifts made the map come together so beautifully on such short notice.

To the creatures of god’s beautiful creation (large and small, animate and inanimate), your sacrifice has enabled me to eat and live and I pray that I might be able to continually give such love in return. When I have had the ears to hear, you have pointed me to Jesus and taught me service and humility—your voice has indeed gone out to all the earth (Ps 19).

And finally, Julie, my love, your love, care, encouragement, humility, and eyes and ears for Jesus prepared my heart and mind to make this book a reality. Thank you for everything.

Introduction

The story thus far . . .

In the beginning god created all things, including our own earth of intricate and diverse communities of life, calling it all very good (Gen 1:1–31). God called mankind to serve and care for this harmonious garden (Gen 2:15), but mankind rebelled by placing themselves above the creation, trying to be like god by determining what was good and evil (Gen 3:1–24). This rebellion led to the first murderer building a city (Gen 4:1–17) and it culminated with the great city and tower of Babel that reached for the heavens (reaching for power over the creation like god) before god intervened to slow this destructive endeavor of mankind (Gen 11:1–8). Mankind had