By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
December 2, 2012
Text: Mark 1:1-8
This week, I was in a hurry because I was really, really excited. One of my closest friends, who happens to be a minister, and I had made a booking for a guy's night out. We were going for a meal and then to watch the new Bond film. We had our meal, we finished in plenty of time, we went up to the movie theatre with our money in hand - only to find that it was sold out! You have never seen two more downcast clergy in your whole life! We began to pray: Where do we go? What are we going to do now?
My friend had a great idea. He said, “Let's get on the subway and go to another theatre.” It was now twenty-to-seven; the movie began at seven. We got on the subway, we ran like idiots through the escalators and stairs and we made it to the theatre by one minute to seven. We had a ticket. The Lord is good! We ran to our seats - no popcorn, no pop, just glad to be there. And for the next twenty-three minutes we watched trailers of upcoming movies.
We looked at each other. I said, “Did you know they did this?”
He said, “No, I'd forgotten.”
We could have made it easily without nearly taking our own lives. But, it was worth waiting for. Oh, it was worth waiting for! There was even a moment in there for theologians to cherish, and we looked at each other at exactly the right moment. It is the moment when James Bond says these immortal words: “We all have hobbies.”
And the villain, Raoul Silva, says, “And what is your hobby, Mr. Bond?”
Bond replies, “Resurrection.”
We looked at each other: that is a sermon coming up soon! It had been worth coming to the movie! We went home. We loved it.
The Gospel of Mark that we are looking at today is not at all like what happened to me this week. In fact, the irony is it is the complete opposite of everything that happened this week. Rather than there being a long, laborious lead-in to a story, the Gospel of Mark comes right out front and begins quickly. This Gospel that has been read and heard by billions of people - think about it - over two thousand years, this Gospel starts with a bang! Phebe Perkins, the Methodist theologian, said that it is the most abrupt start that you could ever have to the beginning of a book: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
No lead-in, no preparation, no trailer: straight into the text, straight into the story, forcefully from the beginning. Mark is unlike any of the other Gospels. Where Matthew begins with a long lineage outlining the history of Jesus going back many generations, Mark gets to the point. Unlike Luke, who tries to place everything in an historical setting and makes reference to Rome and the time in which it all occurred, Mark gets right to the message. Unlike John, who gives his poetic entrance and the philosophy of the Logos, and weaves its way through in a philosophical way to understand the arrival of John the Baptist, Mark gets straight to it. There are no trailers, there is no waiting: he just begins the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Now, this line is known in Latin as an incipit. This is an opening line or phrase that signifies the beginning of a message or a story or an unfolding thing. In many ways, it parallels Genesis: “In the beginning, God created......” An incipit is an opening line which states everything that follows, and sets the tone. It is often the same with some Hindu mantras or even Buddhist ones that begin with an opening line that grabs your attention, and from that everything else follows.
Nobody grasped it better than Shakespeare. In his famous Sonnet 55, he wrote the immortal words that have been known in literature for centuries: “Not marble nor gilded monuments.” A famous phrase, an incipit that captures the poetry of the sonnet that was to follow. It is a powerful thing! But, Mark is just not having an incipit at the beginning just for the sake of having a nice catchy, pithy phrase. No! Mark understands that this phrase is going to be the way in which everything else that he writes is to be interpreted: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
Why is the entrance into this Gospel so important? Why is it powerful for us? And, what should we as Christians glean from it? Well clearly, Mark is giving us here a new literary form. It is a narrative. A narrative is an unfolding story of a person from beginning to end. But, unlike many narratives, it is not just borne out of cold, hard facts; it is not dispassionate. A lot of stories are meant to convey the facts of a person's life, and often those facts are the most important things. They are cold and they are hard, almost like legal testimony, where the facts are outlined one after the other. Not with Mark!
This is not the creation of a new book that is to be deified. This is not something that needs writing in order that people might adore it and worship it. He would not appreciate the bibliolatry that often arises where people worship the book rather than the person that it is talking about. Not Mark! That is not what he is doing. He is not extolling the virtues of a book that drops down from heaven. He is telling the story, a narrative, and he is doing it for a reason.
Unlike Sanskrit, which often has very complex and meandering stories, this is a straightforward story: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” It is not esoteric. It is not particularly philosophical. He doesn't try to impress people with his language or his words: he simply tells a story for one purpose, because he wants that story to be told again. He tells the story in order that the story may be told again.
He writes this narrative in order that it might be preached and proclaimed and told. He does it in order that it might be read, because he knew that the manuscript that he wrote would not be duplicated in his era, as it is today. It wouldn't appear on iPads. It wouldn't appear on copiers or printed books. He was simply writing a manuscript in order that others might be able to tell the story from that manuscript. That is the purpose and that is the form in which it was written: to be told.
I would encourage you, and I would encourage anyone who is listening today, just take a little time aside this Advent. Just take a cold night with a hot chocolate with a little extra cinnamon bar and a warm fire, take the Gospel of Mark, sit down and put your feet up, give yourself a couple of hours, just you and Mark, and let him tell you the story. It is the shortest, pithiest, most fast-paced of all the Gospels, but believe-you-me, if you do what he wanted you to do, and you sit down and you read it as it is, you will be amazed what you didn't know. You will be amazed at what you find you get to know. You will realize that this is a form of literature unlike anything else: it is designed to be told.
This literary form, while new, is also Gospel. And we have to understand what we mean by “Gospel” because “Gospel” is “good news.” In fact, in the different versions of the Bible that you will read, some will say, “This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Others will say, “This is the good news.” Either way, that is the beginning, and the content of what is in that good news establishes the form, the way in which it is developed. The style and language that is used is determined by the content, for Mark, it is “good news.” It is good news that needs to be told.
Remember that primarily this was conveyed through the oral tradition. Remember that initially this was not told as a text, passed on and handed along, but as a story that was conveyed. That is why for two thousand years in worship there has been preaching. There has been the reading of the Word and the preaching of the Word, the encouragement to go into the Word, and the proclamation of the Word.
One of the great teachers, a preacher, in this last century is a man called Haddon Robinson. He suggests that really great preaching should always begin with something that grabs your attention. He said that it is like a flight taking off. The take-off is really important! And then, you need a really good ending, because your landing is important. Anything else in-between can be a little bit bumpy, but you have to have a good take-off and you have to have a good landing. He uses this illustration to support this, a Russian phrase, a Russian parable, and it goes something like this: it is the same with people as it is with donkeys, whoever holds them fast must get a very good grip on their ears.
The take-off is important: get the attention. That is what Mark does in this Gospel. He makes it for preachers; he makes it for readers. He makes it for people who are to tell the story to future generations: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” As John Calvin said in his Institutes, “This Gospel is the manifestation of the mystery of Christ. It is the revealing of the mystery of Christ.” It is the telling of the story of Jesus Christ. So, the literary form is Gospel. Gospel is what it is all about. But what is this “good news”? And, why is it so central to everything that Mark says?
This week, I went and did my Christmas shopping. Or, at least, I got somebody else to help me do my Christmas shopping. I know I have to get it out of the way now, because the next two-and-a-half weeks are crazy. I decided that I would give a gift to somebody that I loved who I knew wanted this more than anything else. A great deal of research went into the buying of this. There were Web searches, phone calls to advisers, conversations with people who had them and used them. Every minute detail was covered, and we got the best Kobo reader there is!
We were so excited about the Kobo we were getting! I know it was the best one, and it is wonderful to see it. I did want to make sure however that this Kobo e-reader would have the ability to download the Bible, and it does, so the person who is receiving it will be all the better for having it. Not that this should be the primary idea. I was excited to get this Kobo. It is wonderful when you can have a text in front of you and move it around electronically. If I am correct, our reader this morning did that with an iPad.
I think the Gospel is the Kobo and the story that is the text is actually the Gospel narrative. By that, I mean that the Gospel is the way that we read the story. It becomes the interpreting key to the story. You can't understand the story if you don't understand the Gospel. The Gospel is the living word. It is the Gospel that brings the page alive and gives it light. It is the Gospel that undergirds it. We do not read Mark by picking it apart and deconstructing it and ripping it and analyzing it to death. Mark didn't write it to be treated like that. He wrote it so it would be a living word that would be told from generation to generation. It is a living word.
There is a wonderful ad on one of the news radio stations. Every time I hear it, I think, “This is pretty witty!” I think it is 680 News, but I don't want to promote a radio station when we are on another one! It goes like this: if you read it, it is history; if you hear it, it is news. That is what the Gospel of Mark is! If you read it, it is history, but if you hear it, it is news. It is then passed on. It is exciting! It is good news.
The way in which he develops this is so powerful, because he starts off by looking at the very person of Jesus himself. He knows the good news is based on a person, not an idea, not on a book, not on a thought, not on a philosophy - on a person! He describes that person. Believe-you-me, he thought those words very carefully. He says, “This is the good news of Jesus.” Jesus, of course, in The Old Testament is the equivalent of Joshua: Yeshua the one who is blessed by God. He is also the Christ. He is the Messiah. It means “the anointed one”, like David. It is from the line of David that Jesus came. It was to fulfill the Messianic purpose that he arrived. The Kingdom of David would last forever because of the good news of Jesus. He is also the Son of God. He is the One with the unique relationship with the Father. He is the Son. He is the Divine One: the presence of God in our midst.
Believe-you-me, Mark knew what he was doing with his incipit, with his opening line: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Brilliant! All the Christology that you need, all the theology that you require is found in the line. It is the story line that grabs your ears and takes you to where God wants you to be.
It is because of that person that everything else that follows takes shape. I can't imagine why we take the individual stories of Jesus' life, and we sort of take them out of context. Some scholars do this. It is erroneous. It is just bad, bad form!. It takes a story that is a whole, and it sort of plucks something out. Oh, sometimes the story conveys the message, and that message needs to be heard, but to remove it from everything around it - from Gospel - makes it something that is dead. Is it any wonder that people sometimes look at the Bible and they feel spiritually dead when they read it, because they don't read it as good news!
If you read it as good news, then everything that happens in the story has a good meaning. Whether it is John the Baptist, who speaks in the wilderness and says, “The One who is coming is greater I.” Or, if it is the feeding of the five thousand, or as Mark recounts, the healing of the paralytic and the epileptic and the blind, or even his words of judgement, they are good news, because they put right a wrong, and certainly everything that leads up to his death, as dark as it may be is good news, because it is for us.
In other words, you cannot read any of the stories of the life of Jesus, apart from it being good news, because that is why it was written. That was the purpose behind it. That is the form that it took. And, that is its great power! It concludes in a sense as it began. If we arose and took off in the plane with the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, we land with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Finally, the good news comes home! Finally, all the life of Jesus meets its fulfillment. Finally, the Christian understands, and those who read it appreciate that everything else is seen in the light of that Resurrection: it is the landing and the good news is the beginning. It is the end, but in a sense with a living faith it is only the beginning. It is the thing that needs to be passed on from generation to generation, for the Resurrection, unlike for Mr. Bond, was not a hobby. For Jesus, it was the entire life: “The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” How much more exciting can you get? Amen.