Mark: Forming Disciples for the Way of Peace (Critical Essay‪)‬

The invitation to write about my experiences while learning and telling the Gospel of Mark by heart reminds me of an invitation found in "The Godfather": "Let me make you an offer you can't refuse." Since learning and telling Mark by heart has probably been my most significant life-changing experience, I know of no way to respond without also providing some autobiographical context. This, then, is a confessional essay in the tradition of the Confessions of St. Augustine about what I have learned about Mark, about Jesus, and about God through this paradigm-altering experience. The initial impulse to learn Mark by heart came in the research stage of my dissertation on Mark's passion-resurrection narrative at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York in the summer of 1970. I had been an inner-city pastor in black and Latino churches in New York and Chicago in the mid-sixties and actively involved in the civil rights movement. The spring of 1968 was the spring of the student protests and the occupation of Columbia University across the street to the east, which had a major impact on UTS. Then, in the spring of 1969, I participated in the student protest at UTS in response to the Black Manifesto by James Forman at Riverside Church across the street to the west. That summer I wrote my first published article, "The Rich and the Poor in Theological Education" (Motive, February, 1970). These were revolutionary times.