Mark
The Holy Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ according to Mark!
Mark 1
The beginning of the good news (or gospel) of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,*
who will prepare your way;
3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight” ’,
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’
‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,*
who will prepare your way;
3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight” ’,
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’
12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
There we have the opening of the Gospel according to Mark. The first eight verses of it are our gospel reading for tomorrow, December 4, 2011, the Second Sunday of Advent, Year B. Why only the first eight verses? Because of the annual flow of our Advent theme. The First Sunday of Advent is apocalyptic. The Second Sunday is about John the Baptist as God’s herald of Jesus Christ.
Mark’s opening is key to his entire gospel agenda. We have to put on our thinking caps to “get it.” As with any writing, each of the four canonical gospels has agenda, reasons, purposes, occasions for writing. Mark’s agenda is proclamatory, to persuade his audience and to move them to action. His audience, those for whom he wrote his gospel, seems likely to have been a congregation of Gentile Christians outside of Jerusalem and Judea. Mark wanted to show them who Jesus was/is and to inspire them to proclaim him.
Mark proclaims Jesus as the Son of God who came to suffer and die, unrecognized by those around him. That's right: in Mark, Jesus is basically unrecognized. His identity is known only by Mark the writer, by the audience (today that’s us), by Jesus himself because God told him who he was at his baptism, by demons whom Jesus cast out during the course of his earthly ministry, and finally by the Roman centurion who oversaw his crucifixion. In spite of all that Jesus said and did, he was unrecognized, unappreciated. At the very end of Mark’s gospel (yes, it was added onto later by people who were too thick to “get it”, too dense to understand Mark’s subtlety and purpose and so they tried to "finish the story") -- but at Mark’s own very end, the women flee from the empty tomb too frightened to tell anyone what they have seen. By then, by that point in the story, the audience (remember, today that’s us) are meant to be so frustrated with the obtuseness of everyone around Jesus that we ourselves are inspired to go out and proclaim the good news ourselves -- the good news that Jesus is the Son of God, that he came to suffer and die for us, and that God raised him from the dead.
That’s the Gospel!
TW+