The reading was from Mark 1:35-45.

It is a perfectly plotted story arc. This is no accident.

Here’s the story (liberally rephrased):

Jesus, wants solitary time with God. He wants it badly enough to get up very early and go out to a quiet place. [OPPORTUNITY]

But the guys come and get him. They say, “What are you doing? Everybody’s looking for you.” He says, “It’s time to go.” [PLOT POINT 1]

They go out to the towns around the area, where he heals and preaches, and then a leper comes and asks to be healed. Jesus looks at the man with compassion and chooses to heal him, but he says, “Don’t tell anybody.” [MIDPOINT]

The leper, being a human being who has been separated from the community for whatever period of time, cannot keep from telling people, and he tells everybody he meets.

Now the crowds are so great that Jesus is forced back into the deserted places [PLOT POINT 3], and they’re still coming after him.

It’s a short passage, with the arc more of a sequence (series of scenes) than an entire screenplay. Still, someone could write a screenplay with a parallel plot that could be a riveting movie.

But as I look at it again, I see that in this story, the protagonist is actually the crowd. Jesus wants, Jesus acts, but it’s the crowd’s desire that drives the action. The crowd wants miracles, why everybody’s looking for Jesus in the first act. It’s the crowd’s discovery that he can cure leprosy that is the turning point at the midpoint. It’s the growing crowd that forces Jesus out of the towns at the second plot point, and having “lost” him, surges out to the deserted places to find him again.

I’ve heard it said that every story is one of two plot lines: “A man goes on a journey” or “A stranger comes to town.” This is both.

I said that it’s no accident that the Gospel story follows the plot outline that we now call classic screenplay structure, not because Mark was some “advanced” storyteller far ahead of his time, but because story is story is story. It’s written in the DNA of the human soul.