Mark 1:1-3
In the hot early-morning hours of July 19 in a.d. 64, the city of Rome was preparing to celebrate a religious festival dedicated to Caesar as God. The climax of the festival would be a series of chariot races at the Circus Maximus, an arena featuring the largest wooden structure ever built. It was perched atop massive arcades of stone and could comfortably seat more than two hundred thousand people. Later it would be expanded to hold three hundred thousand.
From the northeast corner of the stadium, a column of smoke began to slowly rise from underneath the wooden superstructure. Fanned by an unusually strong wind, the fire quickly spread, engulfing the entire arena and quickly spreading to the surrounding tumbledown houses.
At first the authorities tried to battle the blaze with buckets of water, but they soon gave up. The first day the fire spread throughout the flat portion of the city. On the second day the wind shifted, driving the flames up into the hills. For five days the fire burned out of control until it reached the surrounding fields and firebreaks—buildings knocked down by Roman soldiers to hem in the fire.
Later that day the fire mysteriously broke out again and spread into previously untouched areas of the city. The second fire seemed to have been deliberately set on the property of Tigellinus, the captain of the Praetorian Guard. People became suspicious. The fire burned for two more days until finally it was exhausted.
Of the fourteen regions of the city of Rome, three were laid flat by the flames and seven more were virtually destroyed. Only four were untouched. The flames had been so hot they melted the marble of the temples. Scientists have since determined that the temperature of the firestorm reached eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
In the refugee camps surrounding the city, stories began to circulate about mysterious groups of men who were seen moving through the city, tossing lit torches into open doorways. When townspeople tried to stop them they replied, “We are under orders to allow the flames to spread.” The suspicions of the public quickly focused on Nero.
In the days following the fire he did his best to appear benevolent and supportive, lowering the price of grain and volunteering to clear the rubble at the city’s expense, but he was not able to shift the blame away from himself. Roman historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio all determined that Nero had ordered the city burned to make room for a personal building project. Though the tradition that he fiddled while Rome burned cannot be true (the fiddle had not yet been invented!), it is true that he was in Antium, his hometown, singing a song about the destruction of Troy when the fire broke out. Two days later, when he finally sailed back to his burning city, people overheard him commenting on the beauty of the flames.
--from Mark: The Gospel of Passion, Michael Card
This historical background is important to know, because it was happening while Mark wrote his gospel. Mark was writing to the Christians in Rome, who were under tremendous persecution because of Nero's craziness. In any kind of writing, you need to know the author, and you need to know the author's audience. We will get to know more about Mark as we go along, but now you know to whom he was writing, and the kind of stress they were under.
So, let's get started. My style will be to go verse by verse, looking at the text in detail, giving some Greek language background, and some of my own thoughts as we go along.
Verse One. "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."
John Mark (which was his full first name) was Jewish before following Christ. So, any Jewish Christian people in Rome would have recognized the opening of this gospel: "the beginning..." It is how the book of Genesis starts out. Mark does not have a birth story as Matthew and Luke does. He just starts right in. "This is the beginning...this is where it all starts out..."
You have to begin somewhere. All great journeys begin with the first step. All great novels begin with the first word. All great voyages begin with that first push out into open waters. If you want to accomplish anything, you can't just think about it, you have to do it. You have to start. Like our Bible reading plan. Begin! Tomorrow. This is the beginning.
"Gospel" is a word that all the Roman readers would have known and understood. Gospel is a word that means "glad tidings" or "good news." It was news that was heralded throughout the empire. The good news was sent by herald to all the corners of the Roman Empire.
Mark quotes from the Old Testament in verse 3 and uses the word "messenger." Both the word "messenger" and "gospel" come from the same word. Gospel is euangellion, and messenger is anngelos. Anngelos is where we get our word "angel" from. An anngelos is literally "one who is sent out." An anngelos is sent with an euangellion--a messenger with an announcement of "glad tidings" and "good news."
An anngelos became a description of what it means to be a follower of Jesus--we are those whom Jesus has sent out. If you've read the Gospel of John, this is one of the major themes. Jesus is one who is sent by God. And Jesus' followers are those who are sent by Jesus out into the world.
We are ones who are sent out. What you need to remember about that is that you were not meant to hide out in a church, but are sent out into the world. Your primary work as a follower of Christ is "out there." And what you do when you go out there is to share glad tidings and good news. Think about the situation I described in Rome. It would have been natural for the believers to hide out, to stay out of sight. But Mark is saying, No! The task of the Christian is to move out, be sent, and spread the gospel, even when it is scary and dangerous to do so. Isn't it great to be a carrier of good news. You don't have to say, "I have some good news and some bad news."
A guy is in the hospital with two broken legs. The nurse comes in and tells him that there's good news and bad news.
The guy asks for the bad news first.
The nurse says, "We're going to have to amputate your legs."
Then the guy asks for the good news.
The nurse says, "The guy in the next bed over wants to buy your shoes."
No good news, bad news. As one who is sent out by Christ you get to say, "I have some great news!"
Mark tells us that this good news is about "Jesus Christ, the Son of God." Christ, of course, is not Jesus' last name. It is a title. It means Savior or Messiah. By giving his readers these two titles for Jesus at the start, Mark is letting us know, this is what this story is about. Mark split his Gospel in two parts. The first half is about Jesus as the Christ. This first part ends with chapter 8 where Jesus asked the disciples who people were saying who he was. Then he asked the disciples who they say he is. Peter makes his confession at that point saying, "You are the Christ." The second part of Mark's story comes to the high point at the Cross where the Centurion says, "Truly this was the Son of God."
So, in the very first verse of Mark's story we find out who we are as believers, and who Jesus was as the one we follow: We are the sent out ones, carrying only good news, and that good news is about Jesus who is the Messiah and who is the Son of God. Pretty simple, right!?
Then Mark quotes scripture. It's from Malachi 2 and 3. From Mark's quote, the verse sounds positive. But not in the prophet Malachi. In Malachi the messenger is sent from God, presumably an angel, who will come like a "refiner's fire" who will refine like gold and silver is refined. The messenger will come like a bleaching soap that takes out all stains and makes colors brilliant again.
And what will be refined and cleansed according to the context in Malachi?: worship. From the priests role in worship that has become lazy and uninspired; to the people who offer the bare minimum of themselves and their treasure; to the preaching that was calling bad, good, and good, bad; and all that made worship of the Almighty God seem trivial and unnecessary. That's the context of the verse from Malachi that Mark uses at the start of his gospel.
Part of the reason this is important is because of what I described at the outset of this message--the whole attack upon Christianity by the Roman state led by Nero. All that was false, all the destructive forces being brought down on the church, had to be purified away. Mark is sounding the horn that, with the coming of Jesus, all that evil that is seeking to trivialize the work of God is about to be cleansed and burned away.
"...the voice of one crying in the wilderness..." What is more of a wilderness at that time than the city of Rome? Especially since most of it--10 of 14 districts--had been literally burned away. The "voice" in Greek is an interesting word. It can mean a clear, piercing tone. Think of a singer holding one clear resonant note above all the music of the other singers or instruments. Think of the piercing siren of the fire engine, that no matter how much more traffic noise there is, the siren can be heard above it all. That's what the Greek means--that one tonal voice that cuts through all else and is heard above all else. And what voice needed to be heard over all the insanity that was Rome at the time? What voice needs to be heard above all the insanity that is our time in history?
"...crying..." The Greek literally means to shout for help in a frantic way. Someone asked the great preacher William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, why he shouted so much, and was so emotional while he preached. He replied, "If I'm standing by the edge of a lake and someone is drowning out on the water, should I not shout so he can be saved?"
This is the voice, this is the crying, that Mark is trying to get our attention about at the very start of his gospel. The world is a wilderness. There are too many paths that are crooked that need to be straightened out. There are too many roads filled with potholes and covered with debris, making them virtually untravelable. Somebody needs to do something! Something has to happen, and it has to happen now!
Mark is letting us know, that Somebody is coming. That something is about to happen. The paths that are needing straightening are not just in political situations like Rome. The debris that is strewn across the road is not just twisted Roman morality in the society at large. That crookedness and that debris is in every human life. Every person needs to prepare themselves for who and what is about to come.
This is just the beginning, says Mark. The Messiah of God, the very Son of God is on the way. Mark doesn't present the meek and mild Jesus. Mark portrays the coming Jesus as irritated, indignant, impatient, and angry. In Mark, Jesus is someone who shocks us and may not meet our expectations as to how we think Jesus should be. So be ready. Have you made the way clear?
I'll tell you how, next week.
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