Today we begin a new sermon series on the gospel Mark that will take us through the next six weeks, which is when Lent begins. We are doing this series for several reasons. The first is because in the lectionary, which are the recommended scripture readings for each Sunday of the year, it’s broken into 3 years, and the second year, which is what we are in now, uses Mark predominantly for the gospel reading. The second reason is that of the four gospels, Mark is my favorite, and we’ll get into the reasons for that, but I actually rarely preach from Mark. In the 4 ½ years here at Mesa View, I’ve had 9 messages from Mark, versus 49 and 44 messages from Matthew and Luke, respectively. I’ve preached a lot more from John than from Mark, and I’m not particularly a fan of John, and so for the next six weeks I, at least, get to indulge my interest in this gospel. But, I can add that Mark not being covered as much has historically been the tradition of the church, because it is much sparser than the other gospels, especially when compared to the other two synoptic gospels, which are Matthew and Luke, and these three are called synoptics because they have roughly the same synopses as each other, whereas John is just totally different in most ways. Additionally, Matthew and Luke have additional stories, such as the sermon on the mount, and others that have been popular within the tradition, and where they have the same stories Matthew and Luke tend to have fuller accounts than Mark does as well. That has led some to make a claim about Mark being too simple, and that he does not have the literary capabilities that the other gospel writers have, but that totally misses the absolute artistry that Mark displays when we pay attention to what he’s doing and let Mark tell his own story, rather than asking him to be like Matthew and Luke.
We have four gospels for a reason, and they all tell a different story, they have a different purpose for being. These days it’s harder to know that because we most often hear the gospels only in short sections, and rarely told against each other, and since they can sound the same, we think they are they same. So, let me just give one example to illustrate the point. Both Matthew and Luke give us the beatitudes, although Mark does not. In Luke we are told, “blessed are you who are poor, for yours in the Kingdom of God,” and Jesus preaches that message from a flat area, whereas in Matthew, as part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs in the Kingdom of God.” What is the difference between those? Matthew has spiritualized the message. It’s not about economic poverty, as it is for Luke, as well as being directly focused on the poor who are hearing the message, whereas Matthew is speaking about a generic group that’s out there. So, listen to what each gospel writer is telling and pay attention to their story, and for Mark, at the heart of his message is about the example and the cost of being a disciple. As we’ll see, in Mark’s gospel the disciples continually fail, they are sort of bumbling fools at times who never seem to get it, because they are being set up as foils against others, but more importantly against Christ as the ultimate example of discipleship and the cost of discipleship.
Now Mark is widely regarded as the first gospel to have been written. There are lots of reasons why that is the belief, which we’ll come back to at some point in the coming weeks, but it is unknown whether Mark created the genre of a gospel, or whether he was building upon other works that we no longer have. What we do know is that under the writings of Paul, which are the earliest writings we have, to talk about the gospel meant to talk about the cross and the resurrection. As far as we can tell from Paul’s writings, it didn’t have anything to do with the life and teachings of Jesus. But here, Mark is clearly linking the gospel to more than just the passion story and the resurrection. The entirety of Jesus’ message and life is the good news, the euangelion. Now looking at that Greek word, does anyone see some words that we use in English? (Evangelist, angel) We do know this word was used in the ancient world, as I said Paul used in, and in Roman culture it would be used about major events that could change history, such as victory in a battle, or a new emperor coming into power, and here Mark uses it to describe Jesus, not just one event, but his entire life. Again, we don’t know if Mark is the first to create the genre of a gospel, but presumably he is, and what he does is very unique.
First, this is not a biography of Jesus. Mark is not writing history, he is writing theology, he’s writing a story about God. Additionally, although some have speculated that perhaps he was mimicking what was done writing about the lives of great men, think of Plutarch’s Lives, but it doesn’t match that genre either, although Luke is fairly close to that style. Instead, we should see this as a new style that obviously has great influence on Christianity, and he begins “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and then moves right into John the Baptist. What is missing from the beginning of Mark’s gospel? That’s right it has no birth narrative, it is also missing the traditional ending of gospels as we are used to them, which we’ll get to, and so I have called it the gospel without a beginning or an end, trademark. But that first line tells us a lot. The first is that Jesus is the messiah, that’s what Christ means. It’s a title, not his last name, and Mark also tells us that he is the Son of God, a crucial element as a confession of faith as we’ll see.
But, what Mark also says is that this story begins in the wilderness. Think back to the Advent messages, where does Luke’s gospel begin? In the Temple, in the heart and center of power and of Judaism. But, for Mark, it begins in the wilderness, and large portions of the story take place outside of Jerusalem. This is ministry on the margins, on the extremes. According to the national myth of the time, Jerusalem was the center of the world, the place that the entire world would come to submit, but here, instead, Mark says that “all of Judea and Jerusalem” were going out to the wilderness. They were turning from the Temple, or perhaps turning around from the Temple, as to repent means to turn around, and going away from what was supposed to be the center, to the margins, and, as one commentator says, it was at the margin were salvation was being regenerated.
And so, that is where Jesus goes as well, to meet the one who is preparing the way. Now preparing the way for Jesus as John does has all the qualifications that we normally think of, although Mark misattributes the entire passage there in verse 2 and 3 to Isaiah, when in fact he is quoting first from the prophet Malachi, and then from Isaiah. But a thought occurred to me this week, and perhaps it means nothing as I haven’t fully fleshed it out for myself yet, but do you know what Christians were called before they were called Christians? Followers of the way. So, does John preparing the way, mean more than what we think, of just being the voice in the wilderness? I don’t know, although Mark does make more than do some of the other gospels about John who clearly sets the example, a hint of what is to come, first in his arrest, which is what precipitates the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and then his execution by the Roman authorities, so we have a definitive set of the call of discipleship being set up immediately by Mark, and then we move to the baptism.
People will often say that Jesus came in order to give us forgiveness, and while there is a piece to that, and it was a special type of forgiveness, what we see right at the start was that that was not his mission. Because the Hebrew scriptures is full of issues of forgiveness, and God forgiving, and what John the Baptist was offering was a baptism of forgiveness, but as we heard in that passage from Acts this morning, as well as what John says, Jesus is coming with the Holy Spirit, and we will be baptized with the Holy Spirit because of that, and when we receive the Holy Spirit we receive what? Power. Now Mark, as do the other gospel writers, set this story up to remind people of some great events in scripture. First there is the creation in which the Spirit moves over the water, and so Jesus baptism marks the beginning of a new order, a new creation. Secondarily, the Jordan river also plays a significant role, as the people crossed it after leaving Egypt to enter the promised land, and while it is the skies which part, not the water, it should also remind us of the exodus story of the people moving through the Reed Sea as they flee Egypt. The story also serves as a precursor to Jesus’ death, as the other time in which Mark uses the phrase for being torn, it is when the curtain of the Temple is torn when Jesus dies.
But, what we need to remember is that what we see happening in this story, that God tears the heavens and declares, this is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased, God does the same thing for us when we are baptized. That the heavens rejoice, and we are proclaimed as God’s own, as beloved sons and daughters. Martin Luther said that he would wake up everyday and tell himself that he is a baptized child of God and that was all that mattered, when things were going tough and he was under attack, he would remind himself “I am baptized,” and notice it’s not past tense, was baptized, but present tense I am baptized. Just as baptism was the initiation right for Jesus, and one the reason that we as Protestants recognize it as a sacrament is because it was something in which Jesus participated, just like communion, so too is baptism an initiation right for us. No one is born a Christian, we become a Christian through baptism, in dying to our old selves and being reborn through the waters into a life with God and with Christ. It is the time in which any distance we might believe exists between us and God disappears because the heavens are torn apart for us. We come into contact, we receive the Holy Spirit, but not so that we can keep things to ourselves, as we will see throughout Mark, the mark of a disciple is someone who is transformed and goes forth to share the good news, the euangelion, of Jesus, that the Spirit suffuses us and empowers us to be the disciples we are called to be, and so as we begin this journey this new year, we are first going to reaffirm our baptismal vows and then we are going to move into gathering around the table, and so I pray that we will remember that we are baptized into the faith and marked and adopted as God’s beloved sons and daughters, and that’s enough. Amen.
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