How different is Jesus. Mark begins his gospel with these words: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. But he doesn’t begin it, as Matthew and Luke do, with stories of the Saviour’s birth, but by reaching away back into the Jewish Scriptures, and by writing about a man went before, whose duty was to prepare.
But even in the first line, the title of his book, if you like, there is a sense of the direction in which he is about to go, and a sense of the situation in which Mark was writing. It is about 70 A.D. There is a war on. Radical Jews have revolted against Rome and Jerusalem is under siege. Everyone is afraid as the Roman military machine cracks down.
One sect refuses to take sides. They are the people who follow a Galilean called Jesus. Mark is one of them and, in the midst of all this turmoil, he is collecting stories and writing them down, partly as an encouragement to his fellow believers, partly as an insurance policy, to ensure that the memory survives, even if the believers all perish.
There is something bold about the title. In the midst of disaster, Mark says – here is good news. In the midst of turmoil, as society is being upended, he speaks of a Messiah, the Christ, drawing on Jewish apocalyptic traditions about God breaking into the established order of the world. In the midst of a brutal Roman crackdown, he appropriates a title which the emperors had given themselves – Son of God – and applies it to a Galilean carpenter, teacher, some say miracle worker, who had died a criminal’s death. In his first line, he issues that range of challenges to the established powers, even as they were locked in mortal combat with each other. The task he sets himself is to make sense of the present trouble.
To Mark, the key to understanding, and transcending, the present trouble is Jesus. But he realises that Jesus cannot be understood in isolation. Indeed, he makes clear that Jesus did not simply suddenly appear out of nowhere. The way had been prepared for him. He built on, he fulfilled what had gone before, not just John the Baptist, but the ancient prophets too. In order to explain Jesus, Mark looks back into the Scriptures of Israel. They are the roots of our Christian faith.
There he finds words spoken by Isaiah. He doesn’t claim that Isaiah was predicting John the Baptist but he sees an analogy between Isaiah’s words – In the wilderness, prepare a way for the Lord – and what John did and said. Isaiah was looking for God to restore Israel from Babylonian exile. In the first century, Israel was not in exile but it was under occupation. In John’s words, Mark hears an echo of the comfort Isaiah preached.
But what was this comfort, offered by John? A strange kind, to be sure. There’s not much by way of reassurance. No sense that the comforted are in the right, no sense that their oppressors are doomed. The comfort comes in the form of the word, “Repent”.
Curiously, it was a message which found an audience. People came out from the towns and cities to hear it, to consider it, to act upon it. It was a message which struck a chord with those who looked to God to deliver them from their present troubles. It was a message that those who look to God must first examine themselves to see if they are fit to stand before God, if they are prepared for the deliverance he can accomplish.
So the Good News can, at first, sound like bad news. The call to repentance and confession mean two things – they mean facing the truth about ourselves and they mean changing the direction of our lives. And many of us, most of us, perhaps all of us, don’t want to do that. We are aware that things aren’t perfect, that we aren’t as good as we might be, but what we are will do, we reason. But that’s not the message with which Mark begins his account of Jesus’ life. This, he says, this which I am about to unfold to you, is Good News, because it is news of God making a sweeping change, a sweeping change in his engagement with humanity, a sweeping change which demands sweeping changes in society and in everyone who hears and understands.
This was good news for the people who flocked out from the towns and cities to hear John preach by the Jordan and be baptised by him. It was good news for the people in Mark’s community, fearful in the midst of brutal war and oppression, and it is good news for us. All of us, if we lift our eyes from our own wee comfort zones, see that we live in perplexing times, times of uncertainty, times in which it is very apparent that there is much suffering and that not everyone is a person of goodwill. But the good news is that God is breaking into this world, that God has done so decisively in Jesus Christ and, through repentance, calls us to join with Christ in the building of the Kingdom.
Advent is the time for looking forward, and we do that, as Mark did, in part, by rooting our looking forward in the ancient stories of our faith. They provide the context for our hope. They provide the assurance that our hope is not in vain. John the Baptist reminds us that Advent, and the whole Christian life, is a time of preparation and, as God called him to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, so God calls us to prepare for his return. He calls us to prepare, not just by attending to our own attitudes, but by attending to the needs of those around us and by witnessing to the fact that God is already at work and by seeking to bring others into the fellowship of those who work with Christ. And Advent reminds us that the Christian story begins with longing, longing for a better world, a world in all its ways more closely in harmony with heaven; and it provides us with the assurance that such a world is not only possible, but will be realised, because the Christ whom the herald proclaimed on Jordan’s bank, the Christ whom Mark remembered and worshipped as Jerusalem was being destroyed, the Christ to whom Christian people have turned in every time of trouble, will come again to reign in glory.