Today we are beginning a journey through the earliest Gospel written about Jesus, the Gospel of Mark. That title is not part of the original text. But this book came to be called the Gospel of Mark because the early church believed it was written by John Mark, a traveling companion of Paul who was also related to the Apostle Peter. If John Mark was the nephew of Peter, he may also have met Jesus as a young boy. We will consider this further when we get to the end of this Gospel.
Scholars date Mark to a time shortly before, or possibly just after AD 70. Mark is a fast-paced narrative, full of action and intrigue. One almost gets the sense in reading this Gospel that the author barely had time to write down these events because there were still so many exciting things happening in the early church.
So, let’s dive into the reading of this Gospel for ourselves. Listen for God’s word to you from Mark 1:1-8…
The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way”—
“a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.’”
And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
I want to examine this text with you by focusing on some of the key words in it, one by one. The first key word in this text is a simple one: beginning. With this word, Mark echoes the beginning of the book about beginnings, Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) Mark is sending a signal to us, his readers, that he is going to introduce us to a new beginning. It is new in the sense of being a great step forward, not in the sense of leaving everything else behind, as we shall soon see.
As a 17-year-old, Anne Graham Lotz, the daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham, was involved in a car accident. Speeding carelessly down a windy mountain road, Anne smashed into her neighbor’s car, Mrs. Pickering. Anne was too afraid to tell her father about the accident, so for the rest of the day she kept avoiding him. When she finally came home, she tried to tiptoe around her dad, but there he was, standing in the kitchen.
Anne tells what happened next…
I paused for what seemed a very long moment frozen in time. Then I ran to him and threw my arms around his neck… I told him about my wreck—how I’d driven too fast and smashed into the neighbor’s car. I told him it wasn’t her fault; it was all mine. As I wept on his shoulder, he said four things to me:
- “Anne, I knew all along about your wreck. Mrs. Pickering came straight up the mountain and told me—and I was just waiting for you to come and tell me yourself.”
- “I love you.”
- “We can fix the car.”
- “You are going to be a better driver because of this.”
Anne says…
Sooner or later, all of us are involved in some kind of wreck—it may be your own fault or someone else’s. When the damage is your fault, there’s a good chance you’ll be confronted by the flashing blue lights of the morality police. But my father gave me a deeper understanding of what it means to experience the loving, forgiving embrace of my heavenly Father."
What a wonderful picture of the kind of new beginning God offers us every day.
The second key word in this text is Gospel. The Greek word refers to good news in the sense of announcing some significant event that might make a change in world history. For example, the birth of Caesar Augustus was called “good news”. But the good news that Mark is going to tell us about was not just good news for people living in the first century. It is good news that can make a huge difference in our lives today.
The good news that Mark conveys is about a person: Jesus Christ. The name, Jesus, means “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh is victorious”. The name Christ is a title, “Messiah”, the anointed one, the deliverer long awaited by the Jews. Mark also tells us that Jesus is the Son of God. When Mark was writing, “Son of God” was a Messianic title.
Seeking the beginning of the good news about the Messiah, Mark takes us back to what was, for him, holy Scripture. Mark quotes from Isaiah 40:3, Malachi 3:1, and Exodus 23:20. Mark sees these Scriptures in a new light because of the coming of Jesus. He sees John the Baptist as the one prophesied as the preparer of the way for the Messiah.
We need to pause here and remember how long the Jews had waited for the Messiah. Four hundred years had passed between Malachi and Jesus. Seven hundred years lay between Isaiah and the time of Christ. Think about those prophets who talked about an event, a person, whom they never got to see in their lifetimes. God has distance vision far greater than our human vision. Perhaps that is why the Psalmist says, “Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him.” (Psalm 37:7) We, like the Jews of old, need to be patient with the Lord, patient in waiting for the second coming that Peter talks about in 2 Peter 3:8-10, patient in waiting for God to fulfill his purposes in each one of our lives.
Eugene Peterson once wrote …
We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by thirty-second commercials. Our sense of reality has been flattened by thirty-page abridgments.
It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate. Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In our kind of culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness…
Friedrick Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth, at least, with great clarity wrote, “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is… that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”
As 21st century pilgrims, we are very much in need of patience today to make that lifelong trek, to pursue that long obedience in the same direction. Thankfully, Mark introduces us to a great example of patience—John the Baptist. He carried out his ministry in the desert, the wilderness. Whether any of us have been to a physical desert, many of us have probably experienced a spiritual desert at some time in our lives. I am thinking of those places and times in our lives where we find it difficult, if not impossible, to experience any sort of spiritual nourishment. I think of those places and times when we feel alone and wonder where God is. Yet… God uses the desert places in our lives to prepare us for greater things and to draw us closer to himself. God used the desert in this way in John’s life, in Jesus’ life, and in the lives of countless others.
Before I left California to attend Princeton Seminary, a Christian friend of mine named Georgia, gave me a beautiful, framed photograph of the California desert. On the back of the frame, she included some Scripture about desert places in life and encouraged me to stay close to the Lord during my time in seminary.
That was not a message I wanted to hear at the time. I didn’t like the thought of potentially entering the desert for three years. But my friend Georgia was right. I did go through a desert time when I was in seminary, and I very much needed to learn how to stay close to the Lord and not get lost in the desert.
We all need those kinds of lessons in life. Therefore, God gives us many opportunities to learn in the wilderness.
Another key word that Mark associates with John the Baptist is preaching. Literally, John was a herald. In the Greek city-state, the herald did three things. First, he went before the king and drew attention to his coming. Second, the herald would call Greek citizens to important assemblies. Third, the herald would explain the rules to athletes for their competition in the games. As a herald, John was fulfilling all these roles. He went before King Jesus and drew attention to him. John called the people of Israel to an important assembly in the desert, and in that assembly, he gave them vital instructions for playing the game of life.
Specifically, John preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In a sense, this was nothing new. The Jews had practiced various ritual washings, perhaps since the time of Moses. We also know that proselytes, Gentiles who wanted to become Jews, had to be baptized first.
John’s baptism was sort of like a proselyte baptism. The startling thing is that John called his fellow Jews to be baptized. In effect, he was telling them they needed to start their spiritual life over from the beginning if they wanted to be ready for the Messiah.
Robert M. Brown begins a chapter of his book, The Bible Speaks to You, with a scroll on which are written the following words…
BE IT HEREBY ENACTED:
That every three years all people shall forget
whatever they have learned about Jesus
and begin the study all over again.
Tim Hansel writes,
While one great tragedy of the world is that many people are unfamiliar with Jesus, it is equally tragic that some of us are too familiar with him, in the sense that “we think we know, we think we really understand” the full significance of his life within us and among us.
John the Baptist called on his listeners to start their spiritual lives over again from the beginning. It’s not a bad idea for us to consider.
How did the people of John’s time respond to his message? We read that: “The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” That must have been quite a sight: hundreds of people streaming over the barren hills, to meet a very strange looking preacher by the riverside in the desert.
Why did so many people respond, seemingly so well, to John’s message? They may have been attracted by the spectacle of this unusual man preaching amidst sand and rocks. But there must have been something more to John’s preaching to bring about real confession of sin and baptism. Maybe as people listened to John, they realized that he had something they needed: simplicity and surrender. Maybe because John really believed the Messiah was coming in his lifetime, he made his listeners believe it too. And so, they wanted to be ready for the Messiah when he did come.
What might it take for us: to truly confess sin, to “mean business” with God, and begin our spiritual lives afresh, from the ground up?
John knew that his baptism was ordinary by comparison to the baptism that the Messiah would carry out. John simply baptized with water. He knew that the Messiah would baptize with the Holy Spirit.
I believe that the Holy Spirit is the key to unlock all the blessings of this passage. It is the Holy Spirit who offers us a new beginning. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings us the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in such a way that it becomes lifechanging. The Spirit gives us the gift of patience. The Holy Spirit enables us to handle the desert experiences of life. It is the Spirit who enables us to truly confess sin and receive the refreshing water of forgiveness. In short, the Spirit is the one who can make us into true Christians, Christ-in persons. The Holy Spirit is the one who enables us to begin our journey with Christ, continue the journey, and complete our course on that day when we shall stand before Jesus and see him as he is because we will be made like him. (1 John 3:2)
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