Description
Mark For Everyone
MARK 15.33–39
The Death of Jesus...
...There are times when I envy musical composers, and this is one of them. If I were capable of setting this brief but shocking story to music, I know how I would start. Darkness at noon: low chords on the heavy brass, a brooding, twisting melody for the cellos and bassoons, a sense of growing foreboding, of apprehension and dread. From that start, and within that atmosphere, the varied themes of the rest of the passage could grow.
You can do that quite easily in music, but most of the words we try to use, as T. S. Eliot wryly observed, slip and slide and will not stay in place. We are too used to them, as indeed Christians are too used to the story of Jesus’ death in general. We need, regularly, to find ways of making the story strange again, so that we can hear it once more as though it were new to us...
Taken from Mark for Everyone by Tom Wright