Setting the Stage

INTRODUCTION

The beginning . . . (Mark 1:1)

From the very start of his Gospel, St. Mark leaves nothing to chance. In fact, his first line reveals everything you need to know about the story he is going to tell:

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (1:1)

There it is. Mark’s entire Gospel in one sentence. It comes and goes so quickly that we might skim right over it. I know this already. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. It’s in the Creed we say every Sunday at Mass. But within this one sentence

is a universe of meaning—a universe filled with promise for anyone who delves into it.

Look Again

The beginning. Mark doesn’t say anything about Jesus’ birth, as Matthew and Luke do. There’s no annunciation, no journey to Bethlehem, no manger, no swaddling clothes. Joseph isn’t mentioned by name at all.

It’s not that these events are unimportant. It’s that Mark is telling the story of Jesus from a different angle. For Mark, the good news “begins” when Jesus arrives at the Jordan River for baptism by John.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Mark is going to tell us about Jesus. And he will do so by telling his story in two acts. Act One (chapters 1–8) will focus on Jesus as Christ, and Act Two (chapters 9–16) will focus on Jesus as Son of God. In both acts, he will tell us what kind of person Jesus is: what kind of Christ he is, first, and then how Jesus lived—and died—as the Son of God.

But Why?

But why undertake such a project at all? What prompted Mark to write? There’s one obvious answer and one not-so-obvious answer.

First, the more obvious answer: something had to be done. It had been around thirty years since Jesus’ death and res-

urrection when Mark wrote his Gospel. Jesus had returned to heaven and commanded his disciples to “go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15). And that’s precisely what they did. Through the preaching of Peter, John, James, and the others—and a little later, through Paul, Barnabas, and even Mark himself— people all over the known world had come to believe in Jesus.

But now, thirty years later, the apostles were beginning to die off. James was the first, executed by Herod as early as a.d. 44 (Acts 12:2). Then, most dramatically, Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome between a.d. 65 and 69. Other apostles had set out for distant lands where they too met a martyr’s death: Thomas in India, Andrew in Greece, and Simon and Jude in Syria.

With so many firsthand witnesses gone, the churches in major cities like Rome and Jerusalem and Antioch were left with second- and third-generation leaders. The line of continuity between themselves and the original apostles remained intact, but memories were fading. Future generations needed something trustworthy to help them grasp who Jesus was and why he was so important. So someone—namely Mark— needed to commit the apostles’ teaching to writing.

The not-so-obvious reason? The disappearance of the first apostles created a vacuum. And into that vacuum stepped people of all stripes. They came with their own stories about Jesus—some accurate, others not so much. The stories and testimonies about Jesus began to meld and become confused. Many of them portrayed Jesus as

a different kind of Christ and a different kind of Son of God than Jesus truly was. And that difference was causing division and scandal.

So Mark decided to do something about it, and the result is the Gospel we are going to read through and pray about over the next month.

But Who?

But who was Mark? Tradition holds that he was the same John Mark who accompanied Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey but who returned home before the mission was complete (Acts 13:5; 15:36-39). Church Fathers also identify him with the cousin of Barnabas, whom Paul mentions in Colossians 4:10, and as the same Mark whom Paul mentions as a co-worker in 2 Timothy 4:11 and Philemon 24. Finally, Peter refers to “my son Mark” at the end of his first letter (5:13).

It’s quite plausible that all these verses refer to the same Mark who wrote this Gospel. But at the same time, the name Mark (Markos in Greek and Marcus in Latin) was even more common in the first century a.d. than it is today. Not to mention, Mark never identifies himself in his Gospel. So this Mark could be any number of other figures. The short answer is that we don’t exactly know who he was.

What we do know, however, is that the Mark of this Gospel is a master storyteller. His is the shortest of the four Gos-

pels—he tells far fewer stories than the others. But the stories he does tell are filled with rich, dramatic details that have the power to move us to prayer and deeper self-reflection.

We also know that this Mark tells a story filled with conflict and tension. Early on in his ministry, Jesus’ teachings and miracles elicit condemnation and even hatred from many of Israel’s religious leaders (see 3:6). Mark portrays Jesus’ family as being not just confused about his mission but worried that he is “out of his mind” (3:21). Even Jesus’ closest disciples appear more stubborn and slow to believe than they do in the other Gospels (see 4:40). The threat of death casts a long shadow, and as the Gospel progresses, Jesus becomes increasingly misunderstood, rejected, and isolated. In the end, he dies completely alone with just a few women keeping vigil “from a distance” (15:40).

Jesus, and Jesus alone, is the focus of Mark’s Gospel. In every chapter, Mark asks us to decide whether we will stay with Jesus or join the other characters in resisting him, rebuking him, or outright rejecting him.

Good News?

Master storyteller. Innovative creator of a new style of writing. Protector of Jesus’ legacy. Challenger of the status quo. Mark is an impressive figure. But there is another title he deserves, and that’s the title he has borne for nearly two thousand years: Evangelist. Proclaimer of the good news of the gospel.

In his opening line, Mark tells us that the story he is about to relate is the good news about Jesus (1:1). But we might wonder what’s so good about Mark’s story. Jesus’ closest disciples struggle to believe in him. Religious leaders hate him. His own family tries to “restrain” him, and he dies alone (3:21). Even the women who come to the tomb to anoint his body are so terrified by the angel that they fail to carry out his command to tell the apostles about Jesus’ resurrection (see 16:8).

So just what is the good news that Mark wants to tell us? That’s the question we want to explore for the next thirty days. As we pray together through the Gospel of Mark, we’ll discover more than enough evidence that his story is filled with good news. But it doesn’t come from the main characters surrounding Jesus—his disciples or his family. It comes from the minor characters who appear for a scene or two, then disappear into the background. It comes from the outsiders and the ones who, like Jesus, suffered rejection and isolation:

• A woman suffering from hemorrhages in Mark 5 whose faith is so strong that she needs only to touch Jesus’ cloak to be healed. • The father of a boy with epilepsy in Mark 9 who humbly admits his unbelief and cries out for help. • The men in Mark 2 who believe in Jesus enough to want to tear up a roof and lower their friend down on a stretcher for Jesus to heal him.

• And most of all, there’s the centurion at the cross—a pagan soldier who may well have been one of the men who mocked and scourged Jesus—making the clearest and most convincing confession of faith in the whole

Gospel: “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (15:39).

These are the heroes of Mark’s Gospel. It’s their stories that we will examine. Because in the end, their stories are our stories. Only as we become like them will we discover the true goodness of the gospel we believe. And only as we become like them will we discover the goodness and love of Jesus, who is the Christ and the Son of God.