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Looking up content for: Mark 1:1-8 (posted on 11/28/2005)
Comments and Observations
- We need John the Baptist if Advent is going to have any real traction in our lives. It’s a tough thing to sell, however. As Fred Craddock once put it, John is not the kind of holiday guest most people would care to have at their parties. John is shrill. He’s given to dramatic gestures. He’d probably spill eggnog all over someone’s nice Persian rug as he waved his arms through the air, urging people to take stock, to straighten up and fly right before the face of God.
- Yes, there’s a reason John the Baptist appears in no one’s front yard crèche/manger scene (even though John would fit there better than the Magi who are often included). There’s a reason we find no “John the Baptist Keepsake Ornaments” decorating anyone’s Christmas tree. There’s a reason John rarely shows up in even the best-loved Christmas carols sung in churches worldwide. And the reason is this: John blows the roof off from over our heads. John reminds us that Christmas is not a serene season of light and fluffy goodness. John reminds us that if we don’t greet the Savior with repentance, contrition, and a sincere desire to change our ways, then the Savior we meet may well have some unpleasant things to say to us.
- But we need John. True to form, Mark’s presentation of John is the briefest of all the gospels. Mark has no Christmas narrative, no stories of where Jesus came from. Apparently he judged that neither did he need one. Instead first John and then Jesus himself simply appear to us, walking straight at us from out of the wavy heat vapors rising up off the desert floor. “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” Mark wrote as his opening sentence. This is where the gospel begins, not in a stable, not in a manger, but out in the desert. Of all places.
- We begin where Isaiah began: in the place of death, the place of uncreation, the place of tohu webohu, of the chaos that once characterized the entire universe before God stepped in to impose his creation cosmos. God builds his highway to salvation and he begins it in the place of death. But then, where else would we need this particular highway if not precisely there?
- Mark begins his gospel in the place of death. How very different our own holidays are! We thoroughly resist death at Christmastime. When we hear that someone died close to Christmas, we somehow feel worse about that death than we would have felt had it happened on, say, July 21 or September 5. We’ve so allowed Christmas to be turned into a happy-only season that we can scant conceive of a gospel like Mark’s that finds hope in Jesus in the midst of death. But this, Mark says, THIS is the beginning of the gospel. It begins with John. Because if it does not begin with John, we will never be ready for the Jesus whose way John prepares.
Questions to Ponder/Issues to Address
- Mark tantalizingly says in verse 1 that this is “the beginning” of the gospel, but we could always ask precisely what constitutes that beginning. How far does this beginning extend? Through verse 8? All the way through verse 20? Or is Mark saying that his entire gospel—the whole thing from John the Baptist to the women’s silent fleeing of the tomb in Mark 16:8—constitutes only the beginning? It could be “fun” to play with such questions in an Advent sermon. For some people Christmas comes but once a year and when it’s over, so are any religious thoughts for a long while to come. A comedian once said, “Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people just once a year!” But if even Mark’s entire gospel is the merest “beginning” of who Jesus is and what he means, then we know this is a story that never ends and that has an ongoing narrative component to it every day of our lives.
- The First Sunday in Advent centered on more apocalyptic themes related to the second coming/advent of the Christ. Now the Second Sunday in Advent gives us John the Baptist’s strong message. Neither theme fits with pop notions of what Christmas is all about but for that very reason, we need to let John speak in our congregations lest we get even more subsumed into our trite culture of glitz and shallowness. Everybody loves a baby, including the baby in the manger. Far too many people, however, keep Jesus as an infant all year long lest he grow up and have some things to say for himself. Mark 1 reminds us that Jesus did grow up and he came with an even more powerful and bracing message than even John himself had proclaimed by the Jordan River.
- In short, John the Baptist wakes us up from our culture-induced holiday slumbers!
Textual Points
- As noted above, scholars have long debated what constitutes “the beginning” to which Mark refers in verse 1. But if we take it to mean the entire gospel, that opens up some intriguing homiletical possibilities. After all, Mark begins somewhat abruptly with the sudden appearance of John the Baptist and then Jesus as adults (with no backstories on their origins). But this is also the gospel with a very abrupt ending as the women flee the tomb saying nothing to anyone due to their great fear. Mark seems open-ended and abrupt on both ends of the gospel. Is he trying to tell us something?
- Tom Long once tantalizingly suggested that Mark’s gospel ends in silence as a way to goad the rest of us to speak. We know that the greatest story ever told cannot really or finally end in silence. It must be told! Just that is our job and maybe by ending in a fearful silence, this was Mark’s subtle message to us as readers. Also, Long notes that the angel at the tomb in Mark 16 tells the women to go to Galilee to see Jesus. But as readers of Mark, where is Galilee? It’s in Mark 1:14. Galilee is where Jesus’ ministry begins in Mark’s opening chapter. So maybe the angel’s call to go to Galilee is a cue for us as readers of Mark to go back to the beginning and re-read the whole thing. Now that we have been to the cross—which alone unlocks the full meaning of Jesus’ life, work, and ministry—we can fruitfully re-read the story through new eyes.
- So maybe “the beginning” of the gospel puts us into a kind of never-ending loop wherein we ever and anon absorb, live out, proclaim, and then proclaim again and again the old, old story of Jesus and his sacrificial love for us all.
- Similarly, Christmas may be the beginning of Jesus’ story, but it’s not the end! Those who treat Christmas as an isolated event that happened (but also ended) long ago and far away do not understand Christmas. They are not even close to understanding it!
Illustration Idea
Illustration Idea: The following story comes from Fred Craddock’s sermon “Have You Ever Heard John Preach?” and illustrates “the moment of truth” that John the Baptist forced onto all who heard his fiery call to repentance:
Fred Craddock tells the story of a missionary family in China who was forced to leave the country sometime after the communists took over. One day a band of soldiers knocked on the door and told this missionary, his wife, and children that they had two hours to pack up before these troops would escort them to the train station. They would be permitted to take with them only two hundred pounds of stuff. Thus began two hours of family wrangling and bickering--what should they take? What about this vase? It's a family heirloom, so we've got to take the vase. Well, maybe so, but this typewriter is brand new and we're not about to leave that behind. What about some books? Got to take a few of them along. On and on it went, putting stuff on the bathroom scale and taking it off until finally they had a pile of possessions that totaled two hundred pounds on the dot.
At the appointed hour the soldiers returned.
"Are you ready?" they asked.
"Yes."
"Did you weigh your stuff?"
"Yes, we did."
"Two hundred pounds?"
"Yes, two hundred pounds on the dot."
"Did you weigh the kids?"
"Um, . . . no."
"Weigh the kids!"
And in an instant the vase, the typewriter, and the books all became trash. Trash! None of it meant anything compared to the surpassing value of the children. Sometimes we all face "the moment of truth." Sometimes events crash into our lives in so shocking a way that we are instantly forced to view all of life in a new light. Suddenly what had previously been of value to us comes to mean absolutely nothing--we're only too happy to leave it behind. That was the effect John the Baptist had on all who listened to his cries.