The Beginning of the Good News
Gospel Reading: Mark 1:1–8
For Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011 Year B—Advent 2
I love that Mark’s gospel starts by saying: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, son of God.”
Look, Ma, no Verb!
Grammar geeks might notice that there is no verb in that sentence. It’s more like it’s the title of the book: The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God. If it were titled just The Good News about Jesus Christ, Son of God then the book might be read as the beginning, middle, and end of the good news. If it had been titled The Beginning of the Good Short Story of Jesus Christ, Son of God then it would not be news. What makes it news is that it is something new that is external to us that we have to be told. The idea that it’s also the beginning suggests much more good stuff to come from this Jesus Christ, Son of God.
Raise Your Mug and Say “Yea!”
The term gospel was the term for the news flash that an announcer proclaimed about a victory that the empire or the king had won. It was a pronouncement of Good News. Something big had happened that had changed everything and this sort of announcement was one that elicited a response.
It’s sort of like if the owner of a crowded bar yells, “Drinks are on the house!” Everyone raises their mugs and says, “Yea!” So here, Mark’s account of the Gospel greets us with surprising gusto as we settle into the second week of Advent—the second week of waiting on the coming of God.
Everything’s About to Change
When Mark announces the title of his great work, The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God, one might think the announcement to follow would be full of power and might like news of conquering empire. But instead, enter John the Baptist with his camel’s hair and rope ensemble, looking as though he might possibly be on the corner of Main Street and Broadway holding a cardboard sign with “Will Preach for Wild Locust and Honey” scratched on it. The pronouncement of victory is of a kingdom, but, as the disturbing sight of its harbinger would suggest, it’s the Kingdom of God. And everything is about to change.
Or is it?
Unlike those first hearers we might not be expecting some victory report from the imperial front. Perhaps we’re not really expecting much at all. We’ve heard the story… Mary and Joseph…baby in a manger…little drummer boy… blah, blah, blah.
Maybe we expect only what we’ve heard before as we sit in Advent waiting for God to show up. But the thing is, if we have heard it before it is not news, its memory… it’s an internal word. We can mouth the words as they come out of John the Baptist’s mouth ad nauseam. And tragically, too often do. But that’s not the beginning of any news, let alone good news.
The Hardest Question
So…is it actually possible amidst our abject familiarity with the Christmas story to again hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ Son of God as Good and as News and as that which only just Began with the birth of Jesus and is yet to end?
Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber is the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. She is the author of Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television (Seabury, 2008) and blogs at www.sarcasticlutheran.com and Jim Wallis’ www.GodsPolitics.com. Nobody really believes she’s an ordained pastor in the ELCA. Maybe it’s the sleeve tattoos or the fact that she swears like a truck driver. Either way…she’s fine with it. Nadia lives in Denver with her family of four.
If one assumes that the good news is that the “kingdom of God is at hand,” then this cannot be anything other than good news, and good news on a daily basis, especially when the Word IS internalized to the point that it becomes reality.
I got stuck with the word “beginning”: Mark is telling us: here begins the story of Jesus – and then doesn’t begin with Jesus, but jumps at least a chapter before that to a preface that begins with this strange other guy (is John really more than the stage to set the story up that follows?).
It’s like: Here, read this book. But, hey, before you start, you should read the Little Hobbit first, otherwise you won’t really get what I’m talking about.
Pretext and context seem to matter. And interestingly, Mark doesn’t feel the need to lay out the biographical pretext of Jesus, no birth legends, no family tree or such, but he actually sets the stage with John. Or, should I say: with the prophets…
So…: story, as any story, and even my story, doesn’t begin with the “actual” beginning, but has already begun way before. With ancestors. With old great expectations. And with words that are spoken, ideas that are expressed by other authors before me… that I grow up with and then, maybe, become my own. In a new way. News. Big news.
There goes intellectual property.
THQ is what actually IS the beginning of the Gospel? Is it the grasshopper gobbler, or the prophet, or Elizabeth and Zach, or the pre-existent ethers of God’s imagination? What seems plain is that it’s not me. So, I owe somebody something. I hate that part.
Dave B-R,
Me too.
Dang.
Love,
NBW
Some translations turn the opening “non-sentence” into a sentence, and so blunt the point. The end of the book (if we accept that it actually ends at 16:8) just trails off into the future — the future which we now inhabit! The end of the good news has not yet come, as last Sunday’s Gospel attests, and we can’t know when it will come. So we wait.
Really helpful insights, friends. Makes me also appreciate the opening of Luke’s gospel even more. Jesus is on the scene in Mark’s gospel by verse 9 of the first chapter, but Luke goes through the whole story of Zechariah and Elizabeth before getting to Mary.
I believe Mark’s proclamation (greek for “Gospel” is εὐαγγελίου-to proclaim)is the never-ending story of our lives. Mark’s beginning is our ending to the story and how we live the life of love brings the kingdom of God one step closer to reality. The Kingdom of God is now and it is within so live it in love.
Here’s a thought: “the beginning” refers not only to JBap but Isaiah – this whole Jesus thing has been in the works for a looooong time.
But a question; what’s THQ mean?
TM
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. No verb… THQ… could it be we are the verb?
Seems to me that the beginning of the story is when the getting ready starts to happen. The opening sentence is a label for the story that follows, and that story begins with the one who prepares the way. It may not be the Hardest question, but one of the hard questions is how we go about straightening paths in expectation of God busting into the scene somewhere in our own lives, or in the lives of people we interact with. Is my life doing anything to prepare the way of the Lord? I want to believe that even the blind squirrel can root up an acorn now and then.