Mark 1:1-8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And 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. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He 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. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Today, after the introductions and background information, we are finally ready to start with the first of the gospel accounts to be put into written form. As I will be doing for most of this series, I’m relying heavily on Marcus Borg’s Evolution of the Word for my information.
Sometime around 70 AD, a full forty years after the life and death of Jesus someone put down in writing the first narrative account of Jesus’ life and dying. The author never identifies him- or herself by name. None of the gospel authors ever do. By the 2nd century there were apparently quite a few gospel accounts floating around and names were assigned to them just to help keep them straight. As far as we can tell it was a matter of entirely arbitrary choice, but there may have been some community memory involved. We just don’t know. Since the 2nd century this particular account has been known as the Gospel According to Mark. Mark, by the way, is a Latin name, not Hebrew, even though this gospel originated in the Jesus community located in northern Galilee There’s a bit of irony in the fact that the name Mark means dedicated to Mars, the Roman god of war.
There may have been some written works before this first gospel account – remember the Q Source I mentioned last week – but they were likely just collections of Jesus saying or teachings. This piece we call Mark’s gospel was the first narrative – the first to be written in forty years – the first story of Jesus – not just what he said, but what he did and how he did it.
To begin, I’m going to ask you to try to put aside all that you think you know about the gospels. I understand that this is really impossible - we cannot un-know what is in our minds - but give it a try. Most of us have heard these gospels all our lives. They probably tend to run into one big gospel in our minds and except for a very few particular stories, without having our bibles in hand to check right then and there, we’d most likely be hard put to say which gospel account what story comes from.
And then, for those of us who were children in a church, there is Sunday School. Now remember, before coming to ordained ministry I spent long years directing religious education programs. I have immense respect for all those volunteers who step up to teach children’s classes in church. BUT – over the years in that job I came to realize that many published Sunday School curricula are severely biased to reinforce a pre-chosen cultural philosophy and simply either written on the assumption that this is “what we all believe anyway” or deliberately slanted to push a particular view of Christian thought. Even the best curriculum is broken down into the obvious big-story points to make it easy for children to understand and in which they are stripped of all nuance. In short, a lot of what you probably heard in Sunday School was just plain wrong. And it’s almost impossible to get people to let go of that early indoctrination.
But please try.
Let’s look first at what Mark’s gospel doesn’t say. When we first began this series I quoted something that Borg said to the effect that communities remembered the things that mattered to them, and therefore each community’s memory contained different things. We can learn as much about Mark’s community from what isn’t included as from what is actually written down.
• First, there are no infancy or childhood stories. No miraculous hero’s birth. Mark begins straight off with Jesus -- a fully adult man -- going out into the wilderness to hear the wild-man preacher, John. Now, try if you can, to imagine what and how we would feel about Jesus if we took Christmas entirely out of our story. We have so many warm, cuddly emotions tied up in Christmas – the sweet little baby, the loving parents, the shepherds and the angels in the sky – even the carols and glittery trees and colored lights play a role. All these things have a subliminal influence on how we view the human Jesus. What image would we have of Jesus if we could somehow delete all that from our memory banks? Who would be left in there? Our idea of Jesus is simply light-years away from that held by Mark’s community.
• The Lord’s Prayer is nowhere in Mark - in fact the whole Sermon on the Mount is missing. This one sermon that fills three full chapters in Matthew – none of these stories or parables – not the Beatitudes – none of this is found in Mark’s narrative. Now, it is possible that the author of Mark was aware of the Q Source and didn’t include all this stuff because he or she knew it was written down elsewhere – but that is only a vague “maybe.” It is equally possible that these things were simply not within the memory of Mark’s community.
• Many of our favorite parables aren’t here – the Good Samaritan; the Prodigal Son; the Workers in the Vineyard; the Sheep and the Goats; and lots of others. If Mark were the only gospel to have survived, we would not know any of these stories.
• And most puzzling, there is no Post-Easter resurrection appearance by Jesus in Mark’s gospel. This gospel ends when the women go to the tomb early Easter morning and find it empty except for a “young man” – usually assumed to be an angel – who tells them that Jesus is risen and will see them in Galilee. The women are so terrified they run home and say nothing about this to anyone. The End.
There are two extra "endings" tacked onto this, but one was written no earlier than the end of the 2nd century and the other wasn’t written until sometime in the 4th century. It clear to those who parse out such things that they were written in a different time by different authors. Even to the untrained eye they are clearly written with a different syntax and a different style. They are unquestionably attempts by later generations of Christians to make Mark’s account match the other gospels. But even there they are interesting in that they show us how thinking had changed in a couple of hundred years so that what was never stated in Mark’s account now has become “common, accepted knowledge.”
So this the gospel according to Mark – the one that grew out of Mark’s community. There is a lot that we’d expect to be here that isn’t, but there is a whole lot that is here. And for ten years or so this would be the only gospel.
Next week we will give a brief look into what Mark’s gospel does record – what is there – what Mark’s community apparently felt was important enough to write down so it wouldn’t get lost. You might want to take a quick read through Mark this week. Since it is the shortest of the gospels at only 16 chapters, it’s a quick read. And then we’ll continue next week.
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