Inclusio.

A Light 66.

Inclusio.

“Isn’t this where…we came in?”

If you’ve ever listened to Pink Floyd’s the Wall, you will notice that the album closes with the same piece of music that it opens with. Similarly, another Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, begins and ends with the sound of a heartbeat. In literature, when a word or motif appears at the beginning and at the end of a work, scholars call it  inclusio (a Latin phrase meaning “enclosure”). The evangelist Mark employs this literary device in his Gospel. Galilee is mentioned early on as the place where Jesus comes from; and it is to Galilee that his disciples are directed to go, if they want to see him, after his resurrection. The purpose of inclusio is usually to bracket off a section of the work in order to zero in on it. In Mark, “Galilee” bookends the entirety of the Gospel, and the message this conveys to the hearer is powerful and unmissable.

In this episode, we look at Mark 1:35-39 and how it anticipates “literarily” the ending of the Gospel in Chapter 16. That ending, in turn, sends the hearer back to the beginning of the Gospel to hear the story again.