Feasting on the Gospels--Mark

A Feasting on the Word Commentary

Cynthia A. Jarvis, E. Elizabeth Johnson

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781611643879
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Feasting on the Gospels is a new seven-volume series that follows up on the success of the Feasting on the Word series to provide another trusted preaching resource, this time on the most prominent and preached upon most preached upon books in the Bible: the four Gospels. With contributions from a diverse and respected group of scholars and pastors, Feasting on the Gospels includes completely new material that covers every single passage in the Gospels, making it suitable for both pastors who preach from the lectionary and pastors who do not. Moreover, these volumes incorporate the unique format of Feasting on the Word, giving preachers four perspectives to choose from for each Gospel passage: theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical. Feasting on the Gospels offers a unique resource for all who preach, either continuously or occasionally, on the Gospels.

Mark 1:1–8

¹ The beginning of the good news 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 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 country-

Theological Perspective

Most stories in the Bible begin with a human being—Abram and Sarai, Naomi and Ruth, James and John. Yes, there are exceptions—the creation story most especially. Two of the four Gospels begin from the human side—with a genealogy in Matthew, and Zechariah and Elizabeth in Luke. Even John, which begins with the creation through the Word, includes “all people” in the opening verses of its Prologue (John 1:4). Mark simply begins with “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (v. 1). Yes, Jesus is human as well as divine, but the human side of Jesus’ advent (his birth, his childhood, his call) gets no space in Mark.

Mark is the story of an invasion, an invasion of this world by God and God’s reign. Most human invasions involve some preparation—planning out the route, softening up the resistance, spreading some propaganda regarding the invaders. In some very basic way, John the Baptist serves this purpose. However, in Mark, even John’s work seems perfunctory, and rushed, and orchestrated somewhere offstage (“John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness,” v. 4). This is an invasion that is going forward without any invitation. This is an invasion that neither expects nor requires any real receptivity on the part of those for whom the invasion is planned (as the whole Gospel will make clear; nobody “gets” it, with the exception of the demons and the centurion, 15:39). This is an invasion that only begins in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (the last of which gets almost no coverage in Mark), because it is an invasion that is still going on.

To say that the Gospel of Mark emphasizes God’s initiative in salvation is a gross understatement. This is not a story of a people crying out and God coming down (as in Exodus). This is not a story of God infiltrating the world through the righteousness of Joseph (Matthew) or the obedience of Mary (Luke). No, this is the story of a God who will bring in his reign, come hell or high water. Ready or not, here God comes!

One way to think about this is to focus on Mark’s hearers, a mostly Gentile community of believers under persecution in the 70s CE. They would prefer a Messiah who would appreciate their willingness to work with him toward the overthrow of the empire that has them in its grip. He could nurture a group of dedicated disciples, train them in the disciplines required for his service, then lead them on to victory. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and his faithful minions.” However, this Gospel ends with the death of a suffering Messiah, and the women running away in fear. Take that, you revolutionary zealots!

Another, and perhaps more productive, way to think about this is in relationship to us. It is not just that we would prefer a victorious Messiah to a suffering Messiah. That is relatively easy to swallow. What is a tad more difficult to accept and give thanks for is a God who is coming regardless. No asking or preparing or cooperation on our part at all. You call that “good news”?

Yes, by all means, yes. Is that not what this beginning, theologically, is all about?

This then would be a good occasion to review some basic theology, like “prevenient grace.” We thank God not only for coming to us, but for preparing our receptivity to God’s approach, no thanks to us. “This effectual call is of God’s free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, who is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it.”¹ Yes, this is an invasion.

This would be a good occasion to think a little, theologically, about how we share this news with others. Do we wait until we see signs of approachability and receptivity and cooperation on the part of others? No, we start living out the reality of the kingdom now, come hell or high water. “The mission of God in Christ gives shape and substance to the life and work of the Church. In Christ, the Church participates in God’s mission for the transformation of creation and humanity by proclaiming to all people the good news of God’s love, offering to all people the grace of God at font and table, and calling all people to discipleship in Christ.”² Again, this is an invasion.

This might be a good occasion to think a little about how we go about worship. Do we make it more accessible, more user friendly, more intelligible and adaptable to the norms of our communities and cultures? Not if it gets in the way of an invasion, the invasion of God’s presence and reign made manifest in Jesus Christ. In that great paraphrase of Psalm 98, we might join in singing Isaac Watts’s words: “Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Let earth receive her King. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing; and heaven and nature sing, and heaven, and heaven and nature sing.”³ Every Lord’s Day is an invasion.

Yes, it is true that much of Mark’s Gospel will deal with how this invasion upends our expectations, revealing a Messiah who rules from a cross, not a throne. It thus will demand a deep and sacrificial response on our part. Now, at the beginning, let us note how this good news begins. With an invasion. At God’s initiative. The bus has left the station. Get out of the way, or get on the way. Yes, get ready. Good news is coming—like fire.

RICHARD N. BOYCE

Footnotes

1. The Westminster Confession of Faith (6.065), in The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part 1, Book of Confessions (Louisville, KY: Office of the General Assembly, 2002), 134.

2. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part 2, Book of Order (Louisville, KY: Office of the General Assembly, 2011), 1.

3. The Presbyterian Hymnal (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 40.

Pastoral Perspective

The Gospel according to Mark begins with one of the finest opening lines in biblical literature. This grand sentence introduces the story of Jesus as good news.

Today there is a heart hunger for good news. One unofficial means of documenting this hunger is through church prayer chains. Nearly every congregation has one, and it is almost always fully occupied with the concerns of parishioners, their family members, and friends. Meanwhile, every congregation is full of concerns that never make it to the prayer chain because people keep their thoughts stored in their hearts until they utter them to God. Someone has cancer. Another is looking for work. Here a heart is heavy with grief, and a dreadful worry weighs upon another soul. There is no end to the list of concerns. Tennyson’s line still obtains: “Never morning wore / To evening, but some heart did break.”¹ The pastoral task is to speak to these broken hearts, offering the strength and help to be found in God’s good news in Jesus Christ.

Today there is a particular hunger for good news from religion. Religion has become associated with bad news, harsh attitudes, and caustic spirits. The treatment of women, of children, of gays and lesbians, of different races, and even of visitors to our church pews has led to the idea that religion, not only Christianity, is something that comes down hard on people. The more negatively religion is perceived, the less appealing the life of faith appears. We have before us a golden opportunity and responsibility to do what Mark did for the world, when he opened his book the way he did. We can present the Christian message as good news.

Today there is a heart hunger for good news rooted in something historic. Many of us moderns suffer from a kind of tyranny of the latest. Under this tyranny we tend to think the times in which we live are unprecedented in terms of their difficulty and complexity. David McCullough had this tyranny in mind when he wrote 1776. His book about that crucial year in American history was his response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Without denying the severity of those attacks or their impact upon the nation, he reacted against those who stated that our country had never before faced an ordeal that severe. McCullough wrote 1776 to say we had faced such a time before and had survived.²

Some such word can be helpful today. Think only of issues facing the church. There is no question that life in twenty-first-century North America poses strong challenges to the church. A people faced with these difficulties can think them unprecedented, and so strong that congregations have impossible odds against them.

Pastoral help can come from digging down into history, particularly in Scripture, to discover the resources to be found there. Mark anchors the story he is about to tell in the Scriptures, particularly in the prophets. The material from Isaiah was more than six hundred years old when Mark put it to use. He realized he was writing for the present, but he drew upon the past. Like Mark we can find yesterday full of profound help for today. Stability can come when we see that the faith we profess has seen people through all manner of circumstances, and there is no reason to believe it will be undone by those that we face.

Moving to something more specific than the general need for good news, think about the present-day need for a word about guilt. John the Baptist’s message and work turned people toward the forgiveness of sin. People flocked into the wilderness to hear him. Even taking the hyperbole of Mark 1:5 (“all the people”) into account, and so lowering our estimates of the crowd, it must have been at least large enough to attract attention. John must have gained this hearing because his message about forgiveness spoke to a real need that was troubling souls.

Look out upon any congregation. The presence of guilt, though carefully hidden, is not difficult to see. A middle-aged daughter is torn between the time she would like to spend with her husband, children, and grandchildren, and the attention she feels she has to give to her elderly and increasingly frail mother. A father in his seventies is estranged from his son, and he feels much of it is his fault for failing to be a better father. Sitting nearby is a couple whose marriage survived the infidelity of one of them, but that one still lives with the guilt of having been untrue. Not far away is a youth who has the fresh memory of one of those fights adolescents have with parents; hurtful words were spoken, and they cannot be taken back. All this is present on a single Sunday, considering only one side of the sanctuary. The whole church hungers for some good news concerning the guilt they feel. Speak about this helpfully, and people will come out to hear, even as they came to John.

The idea of the wilderness presents another pastoral theme. Mark must want us to notice the wilderness, for he mentions it twice. The pastoral task is not necessarily one of helping people see that their lives can be likened to a wilderness; important as diagnosis is, diagnosis is not yet treatment; much less is it cure. The larger pastoral task is helping people hear the word of God in their wildernesses.

Mark provides clues as to what the resources in the wilderness are today. He points to Isaiah, and to John’s ministry of proclamation and baptism. He heralds the coming Christ. Effective pastoral care and preaching and teaching today, speaking to persons who experience some expression of wilderness in their lives, picks up on these clues and points people to the strengthening help of God found in Scripture, assembly, preaching, sacrament, and, above all, in Christ himself.

MARK E. YURS

Footnotes

1. In Memoriam A.H.H., 6, lines 7–8, in Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 209.

2. Justin Ravitz, “Author Interview: David McCullough,” www.bomc.com. May 21, 2005.

Exegetical Perspective

Mark’s introduction to his narrative anchors the church’s gospel in continuity with Jesus, Scripture, and John the Baptist.

The Church’s Gospel Is in Continuity with Jesus (v. 1). The discussion here presented understands 1:1 to be Mark’s title for his narrative as a whole (as in the NRSV). The word “gospel” (euangelion), “good news,” refers to the church’s message of God’s saving act in Jesus, the message proclaimed by the church of Mark’s day and ours. It does not here refer to a book representing the life and teaching of Jesus, a meaning the word did not attain until the middle of the second century. Thus Mark 1:1 does not mean “the Gospel begins here” (a gratuitous comment in any case).

Mark’s first word, archē, can mean “beginning, source, and/or norm.” English has no single word with all three connotations; here it has overtones of all three English words. There were many versions of the Christian message in Mark’s day, as in ours. Not all were equally valid, and some were dangerously perverse. The author wants to provide direction for how the gospel can be authentically proclaimed. He does this not by stating a creed or list of principles to which the Christian message should conform, but by claiming that the narrative to follow is the beginning, source, and norm for the church’s proclamation of the gospel.

The church does not merely continue the message of Jesus, but proclaims its faith that, in Jesus, God has acted definitively to reveal and make real God’s own character and saving action. The church does not replicate Jesus’ own message. In the light of Easter, the church proclaims God’s saving act in the Christ event, but can do this legitimately only if the church’s message is inseparably bound to the story of the crucified and risen Jesus.

The Church’s Gospel Is in Continuity with the Scripture (vv. 2–3). In Mark, Jesus appears on the stage of history for the first time in 1:9, when he comes to be baptized by John. Prior to any action on the narrative stage, the audience hears an off-stage, transcendent voice speaking in the words of Scripture (actually a mélange of three different texts [Exod. 23:20; Mal. 3:1; Isa. 40:3]). Mark claims, as does the New Testament in general, that the plan of God revealed in the Jewish Scriptures finds its goal and fulfillment in the event of Jesus Christ. Mark is distinctive in presenting these Scripture texts as a transcendent scene in which the “I” that speaks represents the voice of God, speaking to “you,” a second transcendent figure, “the Lord” (the text of Malachi has been adjusted to get this effect). It is not until Mark 12:36, in a similar use of Scripture, that Jesus the Messiah is explicitly identified with the transcendent Lord. The Lord has a “way,” and God is sending a messenger before the Lord to prepare his way.

Thus, before the narrative curtain opens, the audience has a transcendent framework within which to interpret...