Mark Week One

What’s the good word? This summer I am challenging our faith community at Messiah Cypress to read through the Gospel According to Mark. We have created a reading plan, which I will post here shortly if you wish to read along. As we read I will be offering some insights into the Gospel that I simply can’t fit into a Sunday message.

We started our journey today, Mark 1:1-13. And I offered a few insights into the Gospel of Mark as a whole. When one enters the story that Mark writes you enter a world of conflict and suspense. David Rhodes states that Mark is a world of surprising reversals, strange ironies, and strange riddle and meanings.” He isn’t wrong. As you read Mark, you will often hear Jesus encouraging his followers “not to tell anyone”.

Mark is not a simple story and it doesn’t offer simple answers either. The narrative offers tough challenges fraught with irony and paradox: to be most important, one must be least; nothing is hidden except to become known; whose who want to save their lives must lose them. And within the story, characters may think they understand their situation only to discover their expectations overturned: the disciples follow Jesus expecting glory and power, only to find a call to serve and the threat of persecution, for example.

There are two theories about when the Gospel was written. We don’t know WHO the author is. One proposal is that the author is John Mark, an interpreter of the apostle Peter, who wrote down the traditions of Jesus but not in the right order. So for the sake of simplicity we will call the author “Mark”.

Most scholars agree Mark was written first out of the Gospels and that it was written sometime between 66 and 70 C.E. During the Roman-Judean War- a revolt by Israel against Roman domination that resulted in the cataclysmic defeat of Israel as wells as the destruction of Jerusalem and the Judean temple. Therefore, Mark’s audience is a people who faced rejection and persecution in their mission to spread the word about Jesus and the rule of God. The narrative suggests that this came from BOTH Judean and Roman authorities. Mark wrote this Gospel, in part, in order to give people courage to live for the rule of God despite opposition and threat.

But what was Mark’s goal? Why write this account? Mark was clearly inviting people to put faith in the good news about the arrival of the rule of God and the way of life that the rule of God entailed. In doing this, Mark was leading the listeners and readers to become followers of Jesus. Not only that, I believe the author was also empowering these people in the face of such persecution.

As we will see in the future weeks, Mark has created a story with settings and events and characters. It is a narrative. At first it may seem sparse with a lot of gaps and breaks, but every narrative has gaps.

The journey has begun. Mark does not have a Christmas story but begins where Jesus’ ministry begins- at His baptism. It begins at the Jordan River in the desert of Judea, the place of entry into Jerusalem. The opening prophecy calls for people to prepare the way of the Lord, and that is what John came to do. Again, the narrative moves quickly as Jesus is baptized and then immediately sent out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. But again we have no long discourse between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness, just the mention of it.

This next week the story moves. As we read Mark 1:14-2:5 John is arrested and Jesus and his disciples are on the move. They head to Galilee and even dabble in crossing into Gentile territory. He will move quickly (“immediately”) from place to place, changing setting more than FORTY times. But why? To coincide with Mark’s purpose- the spread of the good news and the rule of God.

And that’s the good news for today!