I want a faith and a language about faith that delivers me more fully to the world I’m alive in and matters to the life I’m actually living in that world. Don’t you? If I hear a phrase like “Jesus saves,” which I very much believe, I don’t want it to register like a number on the Richter scale. I want to be thinking about being saved from forces that might stop a pendulum clock, cause walls to creak, or throw objects upward into the air. I don’t want to hear about the saving power of Jesus in ways that don’t relate to the ways I know I need to be saved. Wouldn’t you agree?
Mark seems to be telling us that there is not a point that can be extracted from the stories. The point, or the power of Jesus’s message is only experienced from within the stories. Maybe because, as Flannery O’Connor put it, “A story really isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase.” The gospel, according to Mark, can’t be paraphrased. It must be entered. Trusted. Experienced. That’s how all true stories work.
What would it mean for us to be icons – at work, at home, and around this city with everyone we encounter? What would it mean to look at each situation we face, even our biggest problem or our deepest hurt, as an opportunity to be raised up to the eternal presence of God, and to invite others to be raised up alongside us? What would it mean to write your whole life as a prayer?
Our names for God, our concepts of God, our doctrines of God are not God. They are tools. Tools whose sole purpose is to bring us near to God.