MARK clears the decks quickly. His Gospel has hardly begun, but already John has declared Jesus’s identity, baptised him, and been arrested. Now, he fades into the background, leaving the brand new prophet centre stage.
Jesus just isn’t hanging about, either. He has travelled from Galilee, within the north, right down to the Jordan to be baptised, and now, after time within the wilderness (1.12-13), he returns north to start his proclamation of the excellent news.
It could be nice if the simplicity of Mark’s style made him correspondingly clear at this key moment, after we first encounter Jesus as a person with a message of his own. Apparently, he’s “proclaiming the excellent news of God”. But that could possibly be “excellent news about God” or “excellent news provided by God”. It just isn’t a distinction with out a difference. Good news about God may tell us only that God exists or is nice. God’s own excellent news, given us by Jesus, is the message of relationship, which provides us the courage to hope.
A god who exists, but in a transcendence so complete as to be effectively irrelevant, had been regarded as a possibility before the time of Christ. The third-century BC philosopher Epicurus was a materialist, but even he didn’t dispense with the divine altogether. As he imagined it, though, divinity had no interaction in any respect with humanity.
A god who has a message for us, and who finds human voices to convey that message to us, is a more common option in human religious history. Our God is such a one, giving words to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, now, within the Gospel, too.
Mark has to write down fastidiously to clarify how Jesus stands throughout the prophetic tradition. Perhaps people recalled Elijah’s mantle passing to Elisha (2 Kings 2.13), assumed that greater prophets should come first, and concluded that Jesus was lesser because he was later.
Mark confirms a level of continuity — Jesus carrying on John’s work — by utilizing the identical verb (kerussein) for each of them (1.4,14). But, for him, the Baptist is completed and dusted (other than the retrospective in chapter 6). Both men attracted followers, and yet we all know nothing of how John called his disciples. Here, nevertheless, Mark presents Jesus’s calling of 4 fishermen as a kairos and a krisis (the Greek word for a moment of decision, not in Mark, but frequent in Matthew and Luke).
By calling Simon, Andrew, James, and John, Jesus marks them out as special. I think that they are usually not special because they were the primary to be chosen, but, reasonably, that they were chosen first because they were special. Jesus perhaps perceived in them a courage that might not let habit or convention get in the way in which of the decision. If they’d not left their nets and followed him, attracting other disciples would have been harder; for going first would mean risking being alone — an intimidating prospect.
So, this short, easy Gospel packs a mighty punch. The opening verses of Mark’s Gospel have already given readers the divine perspective from which all that follows should be judged. This passage builds on that foundation by describing what Jesus teaches: not the entire of it, with parables, and preaching, and prophetic challenges, but what we could call the “meta-narrative” — the overarching, all-encompassing theme.
We Christians imagine in Jesus because the one who is distributed by God. So, the “excellent news” that he proclaims just isn’t primarily about God, but, reasonably, from God. Our own God-breathed conviction, based on years of immersion in scripture — years, too, of worship and prayer — is that words of the Bible are greater than just words, and that the speaker of God’s truth can also be the bringer of God’s justice and judgement. Mark gives us the proclamation that now’s the time, and that God’s Kingdom draws near.
I ask myself why the Church appoints this because the moment for us to listen to each the proclamation of the Kingdom and the decision of the primary disciples. Perhaps she does so because yearly is an absolute minimum (as with Easter and our renewal of baptismal vows) for us to reflect on the voice of Jesus, which once called each of us, inviting us to go away behind the past and embrace the life that’s life indeed (1 Timothy 6.19).
