Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel, Third Edition

Chapter 3: The Settings

63 CHaPtEr 3 the settings settings provide the narrative with a “world” where events take place and characters act. Settings in a narrative include the cosmic depiction of space and time, the cultural ethos, and the political configurations of the story world, geographical locations, humanly constructed spaces, and so on. In an unfolding story world, settings are not incidental backdrops to events. Rather, settings serve many functions: generating atmosphere, providing the occasion for a conflict, revealing traits of the characters as they interact with the settings, and evoking associations present in the culture of the audience. Settings may convey important themes and even provide the overall structure for a story. Together, settings provide the conditions—the possibilities and the limitations— within which the characters chart their destinies.1 To disregard setting is to miss a great deal about a story. Consider, for example , how the setting can determine the action of a story: the atmosphere of the sea in Moby Dick or the world of small country estates in Jane Austen’s novels. The South provides the formative context for Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. In The Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Eudora Welty’s short story “The Path,” journeys give structure to the story and reinforce the quest of the characters. If the settings of these stories were altered, the stories themselves would be changed significantly. Similarly, in Mark, the settings are related to the actions and the events of the story in a variety of ways.2 The cosmic setting provides the divine-human stage for the events that drive the plot. The sociopolitical setting (Israel under the Romans) projects an atmosphere of oppression and threat. The journeys of Jesus and the disciples around Galilee and up to Jerusalem provide the structural framework for the narrative as a whole. On this journey, physical settings serve thematic development: private and public contexts, Israelite and Gentile territory, the desert, the sea, and others. Settings are crucial to specific episodes: the occasion 64 Mark as story for conflict (work on the sabbath), the cause of action (no food in a desert), and the force that drives an episode (a storm at sea). At minimum, settings in Mark set the mood and give commentary, sometimes ironic, on the action. Settings in Mark are seldom neutral. Throughout Galilee and at his entrance to Jerusalem, Jesus receives an enthusiastic reception. Yet Jesus also moves in a hostile world and encounters antagonistic powers in highly charged situations. In Galilean towns and synagogues, he confronts violent demonic forces and antagonistic authorities. In Gentile territory, he meets a legion of demons and a crowd of angry residents. In the hostile atmosphere of Jerusalem, he faces overwhelming political opposition. As a dimension of setting, the “time” is also highly charged. The sabbath day poses an occasion for the threat of indictment to Jesus. The Passover festival, a volatile celebration of national liberation from slavery in Egypt, intensifies the conflicts in Jerusalem and provides a highly meaningful context for Jesus’ death. When we consider settings in the context of ancient performance events, the challenge of a performer-as-narrator was to suggest settings of place and time by means of verbal emphasis, gesture, and movement in the performance space and, in so doing, to draw audiences by imagination into the world of the story so that they “see” the various settings and grasp the ways in which these settings figure in the meaning and impact of the story. A performer of Mark could assume that audiences would be familiar enough with the settings in the story for them to make sense. In this way, the narrator could take some things for granted with the audience and, at the same time, indicate how they would like the audience to think about those settings. What follows are depictions of the various kinds of settings as they are portrayed in the story world. the Cosmic setting The larger setting of Mark’s story is the “creation that God created.” This creation is a closed and bounded cosmos, a flat earth with heavens extending from the earth up to where God dwells.3 The heavens are encompassed by a canopy above the earth on which are hung the sun, the moon, the stars, and “the powers in the heavens.” On mountains, the characters are closer to the heavens, while clouds bear the divine presence down from above. The “four winds” originate from the “ends of the earth.” The nation of Israel...