The Gospel of Mark is something of a riddle. Lacking the narrative polish of Luke, the theological coherence of John, or the judiciousness of Matthew, it gives us few clues as to the perspective of the author. I think one such clue has gone largely unnoticed. It is found in what seems like a great contradiction at the heart of the work.

Early in his ministry, Jesus says to his chosen disciples, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand. . . .'” (4:11-12, quoting Isaiah 6:9, NRSV) And yet, from this point on, the disciples never really get anything right while a succession of outsiders, mostly nameless, show themselves to be people of great clarity, understanding and faith.

Mark gives the disciples a bad press, and some scholars take this as evidence that he distrusted them. Yet, his Gospel depends for its existence on the tradition they represent. It is primarily a story about what Jesus did with them and it ends—at least in the oldest ending we have for it (16:1-8)—with the angel sending them a message to meet Jesus in Galilee, as if they were about to begin the story all over again. Yet, the Gospel’s final words assert that the women who found the empty tomb and heard this message “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” A book that is hardly intelligible except on the assumption that its intended audience already knew the story of the resurrection winds up with yet another failure to grasp the message.

Mark’s book is addressed to a particular community, that of Christians, and narrates a tradition of Jesus’ teaching that lived on in that community. And, at the same time, he tells us that the disciples who preserved it did not understand it. Peter, for example, recognized Jesus as Messiah, only to rebuke him for predicting his own death at the hands of the authorities (8:27-33). And despite Jesus’ sayings about the necessity of his followers’ taking up the cross and their need for humility, the disciples are found arguing among themselves as to which of them was the greatest. At his arrest, one betrays, one denies him, and the rest disappear.

By contrast, we meet quite all these perceptive outsiders: people who had the faith to be healed by him and even the courage to be insistent with him (the Syro-Phoenician woman, 7:24-30; the father of the epileptic boy, 9:94), people who used his name to cast out demons and whom he defended against his disciples’ criticism (9:38-41), a blind beggar who dared to interrupt Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem (10:46-52), a scribe (part of a group usually seen as enemies in the narrative) whom Jesus described as “not far from the kingdom of God” (12:28-34), a poor widow whose piety Jesus held up as model (12:41-44). At the end, it was another outsider, Joseph of Arimathea, who did the pious deed of burying Jesus’ body after the disciples had fled and left the women without other help.

In this short series of posts on the scriptural witness to the tension between the universal and particular, Mark has a particularly important place. The Gospel is clearly focused on the Christian community and narrates a compendium of its tradition. This is specifically a Christian book. It belongs, one would think, pretty far toward the “particular” end of the tension. It is about how God has become the God of this particular community through the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

At the same time, it undercuts any Christian effort to claim unfailing wisdom, understanding, or insight, much less unique possession of God’s truth—the ever-present danger whenever we claim God as our own. Even though the first disciples were given the mystery (or “secret”) of the kingdom of God, they never, at least within the confines of this narrative, understand it. Nor does Mark imply that he or his generation of Christians possesses such understanding. What he hands on is the mystery itself. There remains for the faithful a lifelong journey into understanding it. And they may well meet some people along the way who have the kind of inexplicable insight that the Syro-Phoenician woman or the blind beggar had.

To put it another way, the God who works through the particular revelation of Jesus or the particular people of the church, always remains free to work with any human being and in the world at large. Even if we are steeped in the mystery, the tradition, the faith of our particular group, we remain quite good at getting its real meaning wrong and we may be found in fact less faithful and less perceptive than some outsider with no credentials at all.

This doesn’t mean that the particular is of no value. Without it, there is no story of God’s dealing with us to hand on, to learn, to interpret. But it does mean that scripture directs us to embrace both sides of the tension—both the God who has created all the world and the God who has called particular communities—wants us to lay hold on this God without trying to short-circuit the tensions involved. We find it easier to be either universalists or narrow particularists. Scripture keeps pressing us to be both at once.