This is the title of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s most famous book and most controversial idea. (Because of a mistake by the printer, the book is actually called “The Medium is the Massage”, which McLuhan loved and never corrected.)
Most basically, he means that the way in which we exchange information is more important than the information itself. Or to put it much too simply: form is more important than content.
For example, the fact that we live in a hyper-connected, everything is now, globalized world shapes us in profound ways that we do not, or seldom recognize because it is simply “the air we breathe.” Thus, “what” we watch or choose not to watch (content) is probably a less significant decision to us morally and spiritually than the fact that we are wedded to our phones, able to pick and choose from an almost limitless array of media options, can build friendships with people we rarely if ever see in person, and can “talk” from behind the wall of a digital screen.
In the same way, which news source(s) we happen to consume (content) might be less significant than the fact that we are able to consume “breaking news” almost constantly and that there are advertisers paying to reach our eyeballs through a medium that is financially incentivized to keep us in a state of alarm.
I’m sharing this because “The Medium is the Message” is the title of tomorrow’s sermon––the first in our new series on the Gospel of Mark––and I probably won’t have the time to explain why and still talk about the text itself. (We do in fact have to talk about the content of Mark!)
As I was studying the first fifteen verses this week I was struck by just how exhilarating, hopeful, and perhaps terrifying that this passage likely sounded to its original hearers (they would have heard it not read it) and yet how tame it will likely sound tomorrow morning. This is not because the content is tame––far from it––but because we live in a world that on one hand, Mark could not possibly have imagined, and yet on the other, structurally speaking, is a world organized in much the same way as the ancient one he was critiquing.
Actually, that’s the wrong word. “Mark” isn’t a “critique” of the Roman Empire and the Jewish religious legalism in collusion with it; it is a manifesto for an entirely new world. It is a gospel imagining an upside-down world that reorders everything according to God’s divine justice.
Yet, we might not see this because as wealthy westerners, and as those who follow what has been the religion of the ruling class for centuries, we live in a world that has declared us the winners. Additionally, we read this text conditioned by centuries of largely white, male, bourgeois interpretation that has generally over-emphasized the importance of private spiritual application to the neglect of the political, social, economic, and structural reorganization Mark seems to have in mind.
So, the question as we begin this series is will we have “eyes to see and ears to hear” what Mark is saying? Can we begin to peel back the layers of our cultural and religious conditioning so that we can have our world turned upside-down as God intended through this text?