Peace be with you.
“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious
summer by this sun of York.”
The famous opening line of “Richard III”
—the Duke of Gloucester expressing his disappointment
over his situation.
That line in some ways sums up the
whole of the play; the line sets the tone
for the whole play.
Or think of this one:
“Midway on the journey of our life,
I woke to find myself alone and lost in a dark wood.”
The famous opening line of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
In many ways, the whole epic poem is
summed up in those words.
How about this one from Aristotle?
“All men by nature desire to know.”
The opening line of his “Metaphysics.”
In a way, the book is just an unfolding
of the implications of that line.
Or how about “Call me Ishmael”?
The great American novel “Moby Dick.”
In a way, unpacking that line
will be the work of the entire book.
Great writers —here’s my point—
put a lot into the opening line of their work.
It often sets the tone for the whole thing.
The privilege we have this week, everybody,
in the Gospel is we have the very opening
of the Gospel of Mark.
There’s a scholarly consensus that Mark is the first
of the Gospels written,
somewhere probably around the year 70.
Mark is a kind of literary and spiritual and theological genius,
setting the tone for the other Gospels
that would follow his.
Listen to his opening line:
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”
Now, can I suggest to you, Mark
—and again, the scholars aren’t entirely clear
who he was, but the ancient tradition is that
Mark was a companion of St.Peter,
accompanying Peter in Rome,
with him as Peter would preach the Gospel.
And one clue there is that Peter’s life features
very prominently in the Gospel of Mark.
Likely he was not someone who spoke and wrote Greek
as his first language, because his Greek
is kind of rough and ready.
It’s not the polished Greek of,
let’s say, Luke’s Gospel.
So is Mark a Jew who came from Palestine following Peter,
ending up in Rome?
Yeah, likely.
If he writes the Gospel sometime before the year 70,
he’s writing it precisely in the wake
of the crucifixion of Peter
and the beheading of Paul.
Think about that: these two great
patriarchs of the Christian Church,
Peter brutally put to death,
Paul brutally put to death.
Imagine what it was like for the first Christians,
those early Christians
living in that place and at that time.
At that moment, Mark, again, writes,
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”
Can I suggest now in the manner of Shakespeare and
Aristotle and Herman Melville,
this line matters a lot.
In fact, every bit of it matters.
The opening word,
“The beginning.” The beginning.
“Arche” in the Greek there. But
if you’re in a Jewish framework,
you hear “beginning, ”you’re thinking “bereshit.”
Bereshit is the opening word of the Scriptures:
“In the beginning.” In the beginning.
The beginning of Genesis, yeah, but it’s the
beginning of all things.
If a Jew hears bereshit, arche, the beginning,
what’s he thinking of?
He’s thinking of the great creative act
by which God brought order out of chaos.
Because bereshit, in the beginning,
when there was just watery chaos,
God spoke his word and from the chaos came order.
What’s the story Mark is going to tell?
It’s the story, everybody,
of a new creation,
of chaos
—and read the Gospel of Mark with that in mind.
Remember that old Hebrew term “tohu wabohu.”
That means the watery chaos, it means disorder,
what’s opposed to God’s purpose.
There’s plenty of tohu wabohu in the Gospel of Mark,
culminating in that awful Roman cross
on which Jesus is put to death.
There’s plenty of tohu wabohu,
but the opening line of the Gospel,
arche, beginning, bereshit, that means God,
by his word,
is going to bring order out of chaos.
That’s the story that Mark is going to tell.
Then he says,
“The beginning of the gospel.”
Now we hear the word “gospel”
and right away we think of sacred texts
and we think maybe of Gospel music
or proclaiming the Gospel.
And we see in very kind of spiritualized,
even religiously institutional terms.
But go back to the first century.
The Greek, “euangelion,”
E-U epsilon, upsilon in Greek means good,
“angelion,” message.
That’s why an “angelos”
is just a messenger.
A good message, good news,
a good announcement.
Well, at that time and in that place,
that was a term used
either of a general of the Roman Empire
or of the emperor himself,
when they’d accomplished some great victory,
“We have euangelion for you.”
We’ve got the glad tidings of this great military conquest,
this great imperial accomplishment.
Imagine the irony here,
the edginess of this.
Here’s this figure writing perhaps in Rome itself,
in the belly of the beast,
right after his friend Peter
had been put to death brutally,
the Church under siege probably from the environing society,
and yet he says,
I’m going to tell you about the beginning,
so the story of a new creation,
but now I’m going to tell you a story about
a military and imperial victory.
Not on the part of Caesar or any of his generals,
but in fact on the part of someone
who was put to death by Caesar
and at the hands of Roman soldiers.
I’m going to tell you the real story of victory
—it has nothing to do with the clash of arms.
What it has to do with is
the Resurrection of this
Jesus from the dead.
Yes, done to death by the powers of the world,
but now raised to life
through the ever-greater power of God the Father.
And this means that Roman power,
indeed all worldly power,
is eclipsed.
There’s a greater authority,
there’s a greater army, if you will
—it’s a nonviolent army—
led by this crucified and risen Lord.
Again, how edgy it was.
It’s always struck me when you read the beginning of Mark.
And at a time when Christians had no institutional support.
There were no dioceses and hospitals and schools,
and they didn’t have great cultural influence.
On the contrary.
But yet Mark can say, I’m going to tell
you a story about the true good news,
the true imperial victory.
So the beginning of the gospel,
now listen, of Jesus Christ.
Now in his Greek he says “Iesous Christos,”
but that’s just a rendering in Greek.
We presume Mark was a Jew.
“Yeshua Mashiach” is what he was probably thinking.
Yeshua Mashiach.
Jesus Christ, we say.
Yeshua, what’s that sound like?
To our ears, it sounds like Joshua,
and that’s right, it’s the same name.
Who is Joshua?
Someone who won a great victory,
a conqueror if you will.
This Jesus that Mark announces is also a conqueror,
though not using the weapons of the world.
But his purpose is indeed to conquer,
to become the Lord of the whole world.
Yeshua Mashiach.
Mashiach means “the anointed one,”
hence “Christos” in Greek and “Christ” for us.
Who is the Mashiach?
David, David.
Remember the prophet Samuel anoints David,
and then it says the spirit of God rushed upon David.
And David becomes the greatest king of Israel,
indeed a conqueror.
So again, Mark is saying, I’m going to tell you a
story about a conqueror.
He’s won an imperial victory.
It amounts to the recreation of the world.
But it has nothing to do with Caesar or any worldly power.
It has to do with this crucified and risen Lord,
Yeshua Mashiach.
That’s the story that unfolds.
And then just the last one, which I find fascinating:
he calls him the Son of God then.
So, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”
And again we say,
“All right, that’s a nice religious term,”
and if we’re theologically plugged in,
we might say,
“Oh, that’s a Trinitarian reference;
there’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
And all that’s true obviously.
But go back to Mark’s time, first century.
If you said in his Greek,
“Huios tou Theou,” the Son of the God
—and that’s the exact phraseology he uses,
the “Huios tou Theou,”
the Son of the God— that meant the emperor.
Because remember when Julius Caesar
was put to death in 44 BC?
Well, he was then raised to a divine status.
He was “divus kaiser”
—he was divine Caesar.
And then Caesar had adopted his relative Octavian,
who becomes Augustus Caesar, the emperor,
and he assumed the title
—because he was Caesar’s adopted son—
of “huios tou theou.”
He was son of the god.
And that becomes an imperial title.
The emperor of Rome is the son of the god.
This fascinating, edgy figure, St.Mark.
I’ve got good news about an imperial victory.
It’s about a new David, and he’s meant
to be conqueror,
and he’s the real emperor.
It’s not Tiberius, that’s not the real emperor.
This is the real emperor.
And again, he had no institutional support at all.
There was no political support for him at that point.
But yet he had the panache
and the strange confidence to say,
“I’m going to tell you the story about the true emperor.”
Now, can you see, by the way, everybody,
why they put almost
all these first Christian evangelists to death?
Because we will spiritualize this language in a kind of
harmless way, but they didn’t.
When they heard people like this speaking,
they knew what they were saying,
which is why the powers that be rose up against them.
Okay.
May we recover
—here’s my Advent prayer for you—
may we recover some of this wonderful edginess
that we find in the opening line of Mark’s Gospel
and move into the power of this proclamation.
And God bless you.