Mark 1:1
“Good News Begins”
January 1, 2012 - Epiphany Sunday

         “It was a dark and stormy night,” was the phrase that came to mind as we drove my daughter to the airport at 4 a.m. Friday. After the first use of that phrase, Edward Bulwer-Lytton continued his novel Paul Clifford, “the rain fell in torrents.” “Dark and stormy night” has since become a stereotype for the beginning of potboiler novels. In Peanuts, Snoopy was always starting his own novel with those words. It’s a throwaway line, a cliché.

         The first verse of Mark’s Gospel might sound like another throwaway line: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Familiar as we may be with the main character and the story, it’s tempting to jump right over it. We know what Mark is about. Let’s get on with the action.

         But we’re going to spend the year before us reading Mark’s Gospel together. Let’s begin, on this first day of the year, where he began. Let’s spend some time on his beginning. Why did he start this way? Why did he think this was the beginning?

         Most Bible scholars think “Beginning of the good news…” is a title. There’s no definite article, no “the” in Greek. It’s just “Beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ…,” like something Mark wrote across the top of the page before he began. So they say it’s a title, but only for the first section, verses 2-8, the preaching of John the Baptist. The good news about Jesus began when John the Baptist called for repentance and baptized people in the Jordan River.

         But John isn’t the beginning, is he? After all, we’ve just celebrated Christmas. Mark doesn’t have the actual start of the story, does he? What about the virgin Mary and Joseph and the angel Gabriel? What about Bethlehem and the manger and the shepherds? Where are the heavenly host and the magi and cruel King Herod? Mark’s got none of that. So where does he get off saying this is the beginning?

         Historically, Mark’s Gospel is the beginning of the good news or “Gospel” of Jesus Christ. It’s the first Gospel, the first to be written. If you compare it to Matthew and Luke, it’s much shorter. As we see looking at the baptism and temptation of Jesus, what Mark covers in a couple verses is expanded into many verses by the other two. The general consensus is that Mark wrote first and then Matthew and Luke sat with Mark in front of them when they wrote their own Gospels. They took his basic outline and told it their own ways, adding new information. Mark is the beginning because it was written first.

         Mark couldn’t have known any of that. When he wrote that first account of what Jesus said and did, he wasn’t aware there would be three more accounts, with his being the first of four Gospels. So to say this book was the beginning could not have meant the first of some sort of series. As innocent and simple as it looks, the word “beginning” here is a bit of a puzzle. Let’s set it aside for now and take the next major word in line, “good news.”

         There’s a single word translated “good news” here. In Greek it’s euangelion. In English it’s often “Gospel,” from an Old English root godspell, which meant “glad tidings” or just what we read here “good news.” From the Greek word transliterated we get “evangel” and all the words that come from it: “evangelism,” “evangelize,” “evangelical.”

         This word “gospel” was important to Mark. He used it seven times. Matthew used it only four times in a longer book. Luke and John didn’t use it at all. Before anyone ever had the idea of “gospel” as a literary genre, Mark saw what he was writing as a unique category. He may have picked up the term from his association with Paul, who often talked about his own ministry as preaching “the gospel.”

         Mark expanded the idea of gospel good news. For Paul it was mostly about the death and resurrection of Jesus and our reconciliation with God through Him. Mark made “gospel” a bigger story about the life and ministry of Jesus, telling us much more about the Man who is at the center of our faith.

         For us it’s worth a pause on January 1, 2012 to remember that we do have true good news here. When we open the paper or flip on CNN or click on Google and are overwhelmed by all the bad stuff which gets reported as news in our world this year, let us remember that right here we have a 2,000 year old story which is still good news. Natural disasters, wars, murders, corrupt politics and declining economies are not the whole story of our world, of our lives. There’s good news, truly good news.

         That’s also true for our own stories. The job you didn’t get, the test you failed, the ugly lab report, the argument at home, the bills you can’t pay, the relationship which ended—none of those are the only news for you. In Jesus Christ, the Son of God, there is good news, good news for you and me that reaches beyond and cuts through all the bad news.

         Which all now invites us to move on to the most important thing about this Gospel, this good news. The Gospel, the Christian faith, is not just religious conviction, not just spirituality, not just a positive frame of mind. The good news is that there is someone, a real person, who cares about us and came into this world to help us. That person is someone greater than we are, someone who can save us.

         That’s what His name means. Mark doesn’t spend any time explaining it like Matthew does, telling us what the angel said to Joseph. But the name Mary and Joseph were told to give the child, “Jesus,” means “God saves.” It’s the Greek form of the Hebrew name “Joshua,” or “Yeshua,” as some Jewish Christians like to say. The whole purpose of Jesus coming into our world, into our lives, is summed up in His name. He came to save us, to save us from sin, to save us from death, to save us from ourselves. That’s good news.

         The next word in the text looks like it could be Jesus’ last name, “Christ.” And we often say it just like Mark does here, “Jesus Christ,” like “John Smith” or “Mary Taylor.” Yet “Christ” is not so much a name as a title. That’s why it’s sometimes turned around in Scripture, “Christ Jesus.” Christ is a Greek word that means “anointed.” It’s the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word, “Messiah.”

         Right at the beginning, Mark wants his readers to understand this key fact about Jesus. He is the fulfillment of all the Hebrew expectations for the “Anointed One” who would bring God’s kingdom to completion. That’s why the very next verses are quotations from Malachi and Isaiah, Old Testament prophets. Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the fulfillment of all the Hebrew Scriptures predicted. Mark quotes Jesus Himself farther down in verse 15, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.”

         With that one word, “Christ,” we get the good news that Mark unpacks throughout his book. Jesus is the fulfillment of a plan God worked on for ages and ages. Jesus is not just a wandering preacher made into a legend by credulous peasants. Jesus is God’s answer for all that has happened and that will happen in our world. The good news of Jesus has been set up and prepared for by everything God was doing up until Jesus came.

         In the same way, you and I can see that Jesus is God’s answer to all that’s happened in our own histories, in our own lives. Whether you had a good family life or experienced terrible abuse, whether you messed up every time you turned around or whether everything you did came out golden, whether you were blessed with loving people around you or have felt lonely all your life, God was preparing you for Christ Jesus, just as He prepared the Jewish people for His coming.

         The last phrase of verse 1 is Mark’s particular theme for his Gospel. Jesus is not only the Christ, the expected Messiah, He is “the Son of God.” Unfortunately, this phrase got left out in a couple of the oldest manuscripts of Mark, so there is some doubt whether Mark wrote those two words, “God’s Son.” It’s a complicated, interesting question keeping textual scholars in business. But the simplest answer is that there are actually six words in Greek here, all with the same ending, ou. It’s very possible a tired scribe would write tou euangeliou Iesou Christou, and then glance back at what he’s copying from, see the same ending on huiou Theou, and think he was done, leaving out the last two words.

         So unless you have the TNIV in front of you, your Bible translation probably puts it in, “Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” It makes perfect sense for the whole of Mark. Right away down in verse 11, God calls Jesus His Son. And at the climactic moment near the end, just as Jesus dies on the Cross in Mark 15:39, the Roman centurion comes to the conclusion Mark began with, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

         Mark leaves out what we ordinarily think of as the Christmas story, but he doesn’t leave out Christmas. By calling Jesus God’s Son, he gets the heart of what Christmas is about. The Child born in Bethlehem is more than just another human being. In Jesus, God gave us something from Himself, gave us His own beloved Son as verse 11 says. Jesus is a new beginning because God in Him is doing something brand new.

         That phrase, “the Son of God” is the answer to all our feelings that God does not really care. When we lie awake at night in worry, when physical or emotional pain eats at us, when those we love are suffering, it can feel like God is aloof, distant, or simply not there. But by giving us what was closest to His own heart, His beloved Son, God shows once and for all that He cares, cares enough to sacrifice for us what He loves most.

         Verse 1 is a good beginning. In just a few rich words and names, it sums up the Gospel story Mark wants to tell. But we’re still left with that first question. What exactly did he mean is the beginning? John the Baptist? The baptism and temptation of Jesus? The first preaching and first disciples and first miracles Jesus did? Where does the beginning end?

         I’m going to come back to this on Easter and say more as we read the end of Mark, but right now I’d just like to float for us the idea that verse 1 is a title for the whole book. Mark’s whole story, the ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus is what he calls “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark didn’t know the end of the Gospel story. The end was yet to be written. The Gospel begins in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but the ending is written in the heart and life of everyone who believes in Him.

         That was true in Mark’s own story. The best guess is that the author here is the John Mark who appears in Acts 15 as a young man who deserts Paul and Barnabas on the first Christian mission. It’s possible he also appears in his own Gospel as the young man who followed Jesus as He was arrested in chapter 14, verses 51 and 52. But when the soldiers tried to grab him, he left behind the sheet wrapped around him and ran away naked.

         Mark’s personal story turns out much better than it began with Jesus. After running away twice, he grew up in his faith, reconciled with Paul and became the first to write down the Gospel story. I think he may have felt something similar needs to happen in every believer’s life. We meet Jesus, we hear the good news, but as we grow up and grow deeper in Christ, the end of the story is still being written. The good news is still being told.

         That’s how I hope we can read Mark together this year, as the beginning of the great good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God. And my hope is that His good news will keep on being written in our own hearts and lives as we learn and grow together. May God fill this coming year with great good news for us all in Christ our Lord.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj