Imagine
you’re a denizen of Galilee in around 70 CE, some 40 years after the
crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s wartime: some Jewish radicals have
revolted against Rome and Jerusalem is under siege. You’ve got family trapped
in the city, and you’ve heard things are pretty bad ... food and water are
scarce; children and the elderly are in grave danger. Everybody feels caught
between edgy Roman soldiers and extremist guerrillas, and opinions about what
to do are sharply divided as well. Some feel that God has raised up strong
leaders for their salvation, while others favor the safety and known quantity
of Roman rule. Rome itself is in chaos—it's had four emperors and four
assassination—bam,bam, bam, bam!—and the latest is Vespasian, former general of
the besieging army.
In
the midst of all this, you sneak into the home of your friend Jacob where a
house church meets. Despite the scorching weather, the shutters are closed
against prying eyes; after all, your faith is still illegal, and its just a
year after the death of the great persecutor Nero. And there in the sweltering
candlelight, the writer we’ve come to know as Mark starts to read his gospel.
And he begins by
poking sharp sticks into the eyes of not one but two political establishments.
Here’s
what you hear: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of
God.” The first stick is calling Jesus Christ—Greek
for Messiah—and the corresponding eye is that of Mark’s own religious
establishment. Messiah means “anointed one,” and laying it on Jesus confers enormous
theological and political meaning. Theological because of the unspoken
acknowledgement that the one doing the anointing is the God of Israel and Jacob
and Moses, and political
because Jewish expectations hold that the Messiah will kick the Romans out on
their collective keisters, reestablish the House of David and reign over a
restored Israel.
The
second stick is poked firmly into the eye of the Roman establishment, and consists of calling
Jesus the “Son of God, a title claimed by whatever Emperor is sitting on the
throne, in your case Vespasian. So, in the very first sentence of his gospel, Mark
succeeds in signaling to anyone who is paying attention that what follows is
one dangerous document, seditious to both sides of the power equation.
And
you can’t help but wonder which side will catch up to you first—the Romans or
the Jewish religious establishment. They both have tremendous power over you .
. . the Romans the power of the sword, the power to take your life and the
lives of everyone you love. The religious authorities—the San Hedron and the
like—had the the power of God, the power to isolate you from your religious
faith, the core of your being. And in many ways, that would be worse.
All
of that is packed into Mark’s opening statement: references to (and
provocations of) two power centers, two establishments with control over
everyday lives. In one case exerted by threats of physical violence and the
other by violence of another sort—religious dogma held too tightly, a power
structure embedded in the throws of self-preservation, more interested in
external compliance than internal transformation.
But
wait . . . There’s more! There’s something else in that first, concise
statement, and it’s called “good news!” And you wonder: how on God’s green
earth do you justify calling this story of an itinerant preacher—born literally
in a barn and
executed ignominiously by the two powers —“good news?” Doesn’t sound like any
good news you’ve
ever heard of . . .
And
so you settle in to hear what the evangelist has to say, he probably won’t read
the whole thing tonight, but you’re curious enough to stay tonight. And it can
be argued that all of what follows in Mark’s gospel—the first one out of the
four written—it can be said that all of what follows is an explanation of that
first sentence: what does it mean to call Jesus the Christ and at the same time
Son of God, and especially, how can we say that anyof it’s Good News?
Well, the first thing Mark does is to put it
in context, and the context he puts
it in is that of the prophets. Now, prophets were a diverse lot, from shepherds
like Amos and Moses in his later life, to priests like Isaiah and Jeremiah, but
the thing that they all had in common, the thing that made them prophets were that
they were mouthpieces for God. They relayed the word of God to the people of
God. This may or may not involve predicting the future, but it more often
involved judgement. Which was why prophets weren’t always beloved of the people
to whom they prophesied: they were noted for saying things their employers
didn’t want to hear.
Prophets
were characteristic of the Semitic peoples; there’d been twelve or so of them
in the Hebrew religion, depending on who you count as one, and there would be a
passel more of them in Islam, including their central figure, Muhammad. And so
quoting prophets puts this “good news” squarely in line with the past, as well
as the future, of middle eastern culture.
And note how Mark does it—he compares the situation to
what was spoken by God through the prophets: “the voice of one crying out in
the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”. And
it’s one of the most famous passages in the prophets, spoken by God through
second Isaiah, the one in Babylon exile, and one—not coincidentally—that I we
just read.
And
you stand there, listening to Mark read in the lowering dark, when your world
seems to be splitting asunder, fracturing apart, and you know the passage he is
quoting, and you realize that not only does it in compare John to the original
one crying in the wilderness of Babylonian exile, it conveys the central
message of that Isaiah passage as well: comfort. Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, where people are starving . . .
People you know,
people you love,
people who are competing with dogs for scraps in the streets, who are going
hungry so that their children will have what meager food there is . . . speak
tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her
penalty at last is paid, that she will be delivered
from the the horror of the Roman siege.
And
you begin to get an idea of what this “good news” is all about: it’s about hope. Hope for your people,
hope for Jerusalem, but not unalloyed
hope, because Mark slips in a mickey: he begins
his quote from Isaiah with one from Malachi: “See, I am sending my messenger to
prepare the way before me,” and you know that
passage as well, and it’s about repentance, the turning away of Israel from her
bad behavior, and sure enough, when he introduces John the forerunner, the one
he’s just compared to that long ago wilderness guy, he says he’s proclaiming a
baptism of (a) repentance and (b) forgiveness of sins. Israel, in the throws of
God-sent punishment for its sins, isn’t going to get off scott free. It’s going
to have to turn away, to repent from those sins.
And
John’s a prophet all right, you can tell by what he wore—he’s was dressed in
camel hair, held together with a leather belt, standard prophetic garb, and
although Mark tells you what he ate—honey and bugs, for Pete’s sake—he politely refrains from
mentioning the smell. And although John was baptizing on his own, without
benefit of being a member of the Jewish religious establishment, what he was
doing wasn’t all that
different from business as usual: it was akin to the ritual baths prescribed
for Jews so that they would be forgiven their sins, language that was code for
being welcomed back into Temple fellowship.
But
you know that John was just a forerunner, and in addition to baptizing, he’s
proclaiming the mission of the one before whom he was running. Somebody more
powerful than he was coming after him, he said, one whom he himself was “not
worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” And that in itself impresses you, ‘cause
prophets aren’t noted for their humility. After all, it’s hard to be humble
when you’re a mouthpiece of God. But it’s what the difference between John’s
mission and this new person’s was that makes you sit up in your seat: John
baptizes in water, he says, but the new guy will baptize with the Holy Spirit.
Suddenly,
goosebumps prickle your arms, and a breeze springs from nowhere in the
shuttered darkness, guttering candles and causing the hair to spring up on the
back of your head. And you can take what John says as either being baptized with the Holy Spirit or in it, but however you take
it, it makes you shiver. Because although you don’t know exactly what the
Baptist means, you do
know that it’s radically different from what’s come before. You know that this
is a game-changer, a disruptor of the status quo, a radical redesign of the way
things are. Water is one thing, it does the liturgical trick, perhaps, it gets
you wet and restores you to God’s good graces, but it it doesn’t last. It’s
external, it dries up
, and you’re susceptible once again.
But
Spirit is in-spir-ation, inspiring, empowering, it is the very breath, the very
motive force of the Divine. It is God’s Spirit that swept over the face of the
deep, that filled the heroes of old, that powered, and continues to power, all
of creation. And if God’s Spirit can power all that, it can certainly power you. The Spirit is God’s
agent on earth, God’s motive power, and this new guy, the one John foretold, is
baptizing in it. Maybe there is hope after all. Amen.
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