Holy Disruption: Discovering Advent in the Gospel of Mark

Presbyterian pastor Daub debuts with an enlightening look at what the Gospel of Mark can teach contemporary Christians about Advent. She interprets Advent broadly as the “coming of Christ into our lives and world,” and contends that it is a “thoroughly countercultural event” that calls on Christians to upend the “prevailing social order.” Unlike Matthew, Luke, and John, Mark omits Jesus’s birth and childhood, which, for Daub, suggests that the incarnation of God is found not at the Nativity but in Jesus’s ministry and sacrifice. Unpacking the apocalyptic strain in Mark, Daub notes that “apocalypse means ‘to reveal’ ” and posits that the book seeks to prepare Christians for Jesus’s second coming and “God’s righteous reordering of the world.” The author suggests that Mark portrays Jesus as a radical who “assertively and vigorously confronts” those who perpetuate injustice, as when Jesus tore up the inside of the temple in protest of the money changers doing business there. Daub’s creative understanding of Advent opens illuminating and fresh ways to think about what it means to celebrate the incarnation, and progressive Christians will appreciate Daub’s call to hold accountable modern analogues of the temple (e.g., “our Congress or our banking and lending institutions”). This activist-friendly exegesis makes for a bracing take on the Gospel of Mark. (Sept.)