Unleashing Mark’s Gospel

“Our age is numb. It’s numb to beauty, to goodness, to truth, because it’s numb to grace, and ultimately numb to God. And that means it’s a good season for the preaching of Mark, because Mark is a Gospel that preaches well when understood, a radical Gospel for an age grown numb.” 

It is an opening to draw one irresistibly into a book described by Dr. Scott Hahn as, “One of the most exciting and readable commentaries I’ve ever read.” He would know. Dr. Scott Hahn is the author of more than 40 books and holds the Fr. Michael Scanlan Chair of Biblical Theology and the New Evangelization at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he has taught since 1990.
 
Loosing the Lion, was written by Dr. Leroy Huizenga, the Administrative Chair of Human and Divine Sciences and Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Mary and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Bismarck. It is a commentary on St. Mark’s Gospel, presented as a radical liturgical proclamation that “might rouse postmodern people to faith.” 
 
An apocalyptic time
 
Loosing the Lion explains Mark’s Gospel as an intense and shocking story. It is, after all, the story of a holy war, where the culture begins to encounter the living Jesus and the Christianity that will not be stopped. 
 
It is a startling message to those who think of Mark’s Gospel, or any of the Gospels, as dull or ordinary. Huizenga laments the numbness of our culture and points to the sobering statistics that post-modern apathy he blames on “accommodation, moralism, and gimmicks” within our churches. And so, he dispensed with all that and instead gave a lively explanation of a time and events that were a part of the cultural revolution that is Christianity.
 
“Mark is bold, intense, even weird at points.” Huizenga explained. “If someone made it into a movie it would look postmodern and edgy, with flashbacks, irony, and surprise.”
 
Mark’s Gospel is especially relevant to the 21st century West, according to him, for two reasons. “First, it's about God in Jesus leading an apocalyptic holy war against sin, death, hell, and the devil, and so it's interesting,” he said. “It’s not that sort of boring, middle-class moralistic thing most people assume is Christianity. It really upsets common preconceptions. Second, it's countercultural.”   
 
Because Mark's Gospel emphasizes the absolute necessity of the cross, Huizenga said it is a challenge for Protestants more comfortable with a "theology of glory,” than one on the cross.
 
But if we focus only on the glory, he explained, then it turns God into one who serves us. “It's idolatry; it's like we're making a god in our image who looks like us and gives us what we want,” Huizenga explained. “The theology of the Cross, however, insists that the very fact of the crucifixion reveals how wicked the human race is; Jew and Gentile—thus all humanity—conspire to murder God's Son. Before the Cross saves us, it first reveals to us the hideous depths of our sin. It tells us we're not OK, that God isn't there to cater to our worldly desires. So, the Cross both damns and saves us, revealing our sin but also our salvation.”
 
“Mark's Gospel is intense,” Huizenga said, “presenting an intense Jesus sent into the crisis of a world trapped in bondage to rescue it, storming Galilee and surrounding regions, exorcising and healing, and storming Jerusalem, throwing himself on the Cross.”
 
His inspiration for writing Loosing the Lion was to aid busy priests and deacons with a ready resource to preach Mark like Mark himself did, for a deeper encounter with Jesus. It is also especially for everyone who loves sacred Scripture.
 
Conversion to the Faith
 
Huizenga earned a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in New Testament from Duke University as a proclaimed evangelical Presbyterian. Although he had been baptized Catholic and raised Lutheran, in high school he had a serious conversion experience and started hanging out with evangelicals such as Baptists and Pentecostals.
 
During his doctoral studies, he received a Fulbright Grant to study and teach at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany. When Huizenga took his first job at Wheaton College in Illinois, the country's flagship evangelical institution, he felt the weight of responsibility for the theological formation of his students.
 
“I found the lack of real theological authority a problem,” Huizenga explained. “Students would come to me with their deepest questions about God, life, death, sex, war, pain, sacraments, and so on, and I could give a good answer, but another faculty member could give an equally reasoned but different or even opposite answer.”  It bothered him that they all believed the Bible as inerrant and the supreme authority, but couldn't agree on what it meant on crucial, fundamental issues.
 
It was when Huizenga and his wife Kari began to ask deeper questions about marriage, and ran into the theology of the body, that he found the Catholic answers compelling. 
 
“It's said you can be for Rome or against Rome, but not indifferent to Rome,” Huizenga said. “I think it was Chesterton who talked about how converts really get pulled to the Church once they stop resisting. I found myself in that situation, longing to be Catholic, longing for the Eucharist, and so entered an informal process with a local priest, and was received back into the Church of my baptism at the Easter Vigil of 2011.” His wife followed him into the Church the very next year.
 
Huizenga landed a job at the University of Mary in 2011 in his home state of North Dakota, glad to be returning to “God's country” to work, raise their three children and ice fish as often as his wife and the weather permits.
 
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