Eugene Peterson

What happens here [in Mark’s Gospel] is that we are invited into becoming full participants in the story of Jesus and shown how to become such participants. We are not simply told that Jesus is the Son of God; we not only become beneficiaries of his atonement; we are invited to die his death and live his life with the freedom and dignity of participants. And here is a marvelous thing: we enter the center of the story without becoming the center of the story. (Eugene Peterson, Subversive Spirituality, p. 15)