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And then it happens: death. Jesus' death is narrated carefully and precisely. No incident in his life is told with this much detail. There can hardly be any question about Mark's intent: the plot and emphasis and meaning of Jesus is his death. This is a carefully defined death. It is defined as voluntary. Jesus did not have to go to Jerusalem; he went on his own volition. He gave his assent to death. This was not accidental death; this was not an unavoidable death.

It is defined as sacrificial. He accepted death that others might receive life, "his life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45; cf. 14:23-24).

And it is defined in the company of resurrection. Each of the three explicit death announcements concludes with a statement of resurrection. The gospel story as a whole concludes with a witness to resurrection. This does not make it any less a death, but it is a quite differently defined death than we are accustomed to dealing with.

Tragedy and procrastination are the words that characterize our culture's attitude toward death. The tragic view of death is a legacy of the Greeks. The Greeks wrote with elegance of tragic deaths—lives that were caught up in the working out of large, impersonal forces, lives pursued with the best of intentions, but then enmeshed in circumstances that canceled the intentions, circumstances indifferent to human heroism or hope. The death of Jesus is not tragic.

The procrastinated death is a legacy of modern medicine. In a culture where life is reduced to heartbeat and brainwave, death can never be accepted as such. Since there is no more to life than can be accounted for by biology—no meaning, no spirituality, no eternity—increasingly desperate attempts are made to put it off, to delay it, to deny it. The death of Jesus is not procrastinated.

It is essential that we counter our culture by letting Mark's storytelling shape our understanding of death and eventually come to understand our own death within the rich dimensions and relations of Jesus' story.

The ascetic and the aesthetic
Right at the center of Mark's text is a passage that I designate as the "spirituality" of the text: 8:27-9:9. It is set at the center of the gospel story so that one half of the Gospel, the multiple Galilean evocations of life, falls symmetrically on one side, and on the other side, the single-minded travel to Jerusalem and death.

This passage consists of two stories. The first story, Jesus' call for renunciation as he and his disciples start out on the road to Jerusalem, provides the ascetic dimension in spirituality. The second story, Jesus' transfiguration on Mount Tabor, provides the aesthetic dimension in spirituality.

The stories are bracketed at either end by affirmations of Jesus' true identity as God among us: first, Peter saying, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God"; second, the voice out of heaven saying, "This is my beloved son, listen to him." Human testimony at one end, divine attestation at the other.

These stories are organically connected. They are the two-beat rhythm in a single spiritual theology, not two alternate ways of doing spiritual theology. The two stories bring together the ascetic and aesthetic movements, the no and the yes that work together at the heart of spiritual theology.

The ascetic. This is God's no in Jesus. Jesus' words are succinct and stark: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me" (8:34). The ascetic life deals with life on the road.

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July 13 1998, Vol. 42, No. 8