εὐθὺς

Mark 1:29-39 (Gospel for Sunday, Feb 5, Epiphany 5)

29 And immediately they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. ³⁰Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her immediately. ³¹He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

32 That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. ³³And the whole city was gathered around the door. ³⁴And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

35 In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. ³⁶And Simon and his companions hunted for him. ³⁷When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ ³⁸He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do. ³⁹And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Years ago in Apalachicola, Gulf Coast College offered various evening courses, English, math, Old Testament, New Testament, science, and other subjects. For some years I taught the Bible courses, and one of the college’s requirements of students was an essay of certain length. My own requirements also included several short papers through the semester. One student, a recent high school graduate, had turned in short papers that were pathetically incompetent; but his term paper was just brilliant, so well done that it seemed not possibly to have been his work, nor even likely the work of a friend or family member. Suspicious! This was before the internet, though, and I couldn’t just type phrases, sentences, paragraphs into a search engine and hit “search.” So I came to the Panama City Library and began looking through encyclopedias. Sure enough, after an hour or so, I found his paper, lifted word for word in its entirety from Britannica or one of the others.

Bible scholars can look at the Hebrew, or Greek, and tell lots of things about the writers of particular texts, things that may be evident even in a short snippet. Whether an Old Testament text uses “God” or “Lord” to name the deity in the Flood Story of Noah, for example, is indicative and informative; or whether King Saul is a hero or a scoundrel. In the New Testament, words and expressions and the christology of a text can make it obvious whether Paul wrote a letter or someone else wrote it later in Paul’s name. The reader just has to be alert and notice.

Whether it’s Mark Jones writing a college essay, Mark Twain writing Tom Sawyer, or Mark the Evangelist writing “the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” every author has writing habits that give character, personality and identity to the work. Every writer also has agenda, an audience, reasons for writing, a story to tell, information to convey, a case to make, action to impel, a requirement to satisfy. Epiphany is a Season to notice such things.

The gospel according to Mark has such character. Mark portrays Jesus’s disciples as clueless, oblivious. From start to finish, they never figure out who and what Jesus is, even though it’s so obvious to the reader. In fact, practically nobody knows who Jesus is except the devils he casts out! Part of Mark’s agenda, in my view, is to leave the reader so frustrated with the obtuseness of the people around Jesus, that the reader feels driven to go out and proclaim the gospel. As Paul says in the 1 Corinthians reading for Sunday, “necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” There are many such things in Mark, some of them noticeable in just a short paragraph or two. There’s what scholars call the “Markan secret,” in which Jesus orders those around him not to tell who he is; why? we don’t know, it’s a puzzle! And there’s “immediacy” in Mark’s writing, he rushes Jesus through the story, uses the NT Greek word εὐθὺς “immediately” forty-one times, eleven times in chapter one alone.

Mark gives us lots to notice in our gospel reading for this coming Sunday, including Jesus’s power to heal, that he teaches in synagogues, that there’s a rush to tell the story, that crowds are attracted to Jesus, that he is compassionate, that he lived in Capernaum by Sea, who his friends were.

Jesus even tells us why he came: He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." He came not to heal and cast out devils, that was just a power he exercised out of compassion to help people he met; he came to proclaim the kingdom of God.

TW+