youtube.com til the end of the world: "with men with big mouths" creates ANGER when Needed Pil "Rise" Great Song/Video So those that can't fathom my times of anger read Nick's superb introduction to his book. youtube.com Dedicated to Nick/ Johnny L. Cyndi L./ All Who NEVER SOLD OUT.
A PUNK ROCKER'S
ANGRY CHRIST
From an introduction by Nick Cave to the Gospel
according to Mark. In April 1999 Grove Press will
publish twelve books of the King James version of
the Bible in individual editions; each book is introduced by a contemporary writer. Cave, the lead
singer of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is·also the
author of a novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel.
He lives in London.
Wn I bought my first copy of the Bible,
the King James version, it was to the Old Testament that I was drawn, with its maniacal, punitive God, who dealt out to His long-sufferinghumanity punishments that had me drop-jawed in
disbelief at the verydepth oftheir vengefulness.I
had a burgeoning interest in violent literature
coupled with an unnamed sense of the divinity
in things, and in my early twenties the Old Testament spoke to that part of me that railed and
hissed and spat at the world. I believed in God,
but I also believed that God was malign, and if
the Old Testament was testament to anything it
was testament to that. Evil seemed to live so
close to the surface of existence within it that
you could smell its mad breath, see the yellow
smoke curl from its many pages, hear the bloodcurdling moans of despair. It was a wonderful,
terrible book, and it wassacred scripture.
But you grow up. You do. You mellow out.
Buds of compassion push through the cracks in
the black and bitter soil. Your rage ceases to
need a name. You no longer find comfort
watching a whacked-out God tormenting a
wretched humanity. That God of Old begins to
transmute in your heart, base metals become
silver and gold, and you warm to the world.
Then one day I met an Anglican vicar, and
he suggested that I give the Old Testament a
rest and read Mark instead. I hadn't read the
New Testament at that stage, because the New
Testament was about Jesus Christ and the
Christ I remembered from my choir-boy days
was that wet, all-loving, etiolated individual
that the Church proselytized. I spent my preteen years singing in the Wangarafta Cathedral
Choir, and even at that age I recall thinking
what a wishy-washy affair the whole thing was.
The Anglican Church: it was the decaf of worship and Jesus was their Lord.
"Why Mark?" I asked.
"Because it's short," he replied.
Well, at that time I was willing to give anything a go so I took the vicar's advice and read
it, and the Gospel according to Mark just swept
me up. Out of all the New Testament writingsfrom the four Gospels through the Acts and the
complex, driven letters of Paul to the chilling, sickening Revelation-it is
S
Mark's Gospel that has truly held me.
cholars generally agree that Mark's was the
first of the four Gospels to be written. Mark
took from the mouths of teachers and prophets
the jumble of events that made up Christ's life
and fixed these events into some kind of biographical form. He did this with such breathless insistence, such compulsive narrative intensity, that one is reminded of a child
recounting some amazing tale, piling fact upon
fact, as if the whole world depended upon it,
which, of course, to Mark it did. "Straightway"
and "immediately" link one event to another;
everyone "runs," "cries," is "amazed," inflaming
Christ's mission with a dazzling urgency.
Mark's Gospel is a clatter of bones, so raw,
nervy, and lean on information that the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence.
Scenes of deep tragedy are treated with such
a matter-of-factness and raw economy that they
become almost palpable in their unprotected
sorrowfulness. Mark's narrative begins with the
Baptism, and "immediately" we are confronted
with the solitary figure of Christ, who is baptized in the River Jordan and driven into the
wilderness. "And he was there in the wilderness
forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the
wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto
him." This is all Mark says of the temptation,
but the verse is typically potent owing to its
mysterious simplicity and spareness.
Christ's forty days and forty nights in the
wilderness also say something about his aloneness, for when Christ takes on his ministry
around Galilee and in Jerusalem, he enters a
wilderness of the soul, where all the outpourings of his brilliant, jewel-like imagination are
in turns misunderstood, rebuffed, ignored,
mocked, and vilified, and would eventually be
the death of him. Even his disciples, who we
would hope would absorb some of Christ's brilliance, seem to be in a perpetual fog of misunderstanding, following Christ from scene to
scene with little or no comprehension of what
is going on around them. Much of the frustration and anger that seems at times to almost
consume Christ is directed at his disciples; it is
against their persistent ignorance that Christ's
isolation seems at its most complete.
Christ's divine inspiration versus the dull rationalism of those around him gives Mark's
narrative its tension, its drive. The gulf of misunderstanding is so vast that his friends "lay
hold on him," thinking, "He is beside himself."
Even those Christ heals betray him; they run to
READINGS 33the towns to report the doings of the miraculous healer, after Christ has insisted that they
tell no one. Throughout Mark, Christ is in
deep conflict with the world. He is trying to
save, and the sense of aloneness that surrounds
him is at times unbearably intense. Christ's
last howl from the cross is to a God he
believes has forsaken him, "Eloi, rJ"' Eloi, lama sabachthani."
~ he Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of his life,
had a ringing intensity about him that I could
not resist. Christ spoke to me through his isolation, through the burden of his death, through
his rage at the mundane, through his sorrow.
Christ, it seemed to me, was the victim of humanity's lack of imagination, was hammered to
the cross with the nails of creative vapidity.
The Gospel according to Mark has continued
to inform my life as the source of my spirituality.
The Christ that the Church offersus, the bloodless, placid "savior"-the man smiling benignly
at a group of children or calmly, serenely hanging from the cross-denies Christ the potent,
creative sorrow of his boiling anger, which confronts us so forcefully in Mark. Thus the Church
denies Christ his humanity, offering up a figure
that we can perhaps "praise" but to whom we
can never relate. The essential humanness of
Mark's Christ provides us with a blueprint for
our own lives, so that we have something that
we can aspire to, rather than revere, that can lift
us free of the mundanity of our existences, rather
than affirming the notion that we are lowly and
unworthy. Merely to praise Christ in his perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Christ came as a liberator. He understood that we ashumans were forever held to the
ground by the pull of gravity-our ordinariness,
our mediocrity-and it was through his example
that he gave our imaginations the freedom to rise
and to fly.In short, to be Christlike. |
