Mark 1 Where Would a Gospel Begin? (1:1)

Israel in exile heard these words through the prophet Isaiah:

“How beautiful upon the mountains
    are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news,
    who announces salvation,
    who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

The “good news” Isaiah announced as promise Mark proclaims as fulfilled. Fulfilled in Jesus Messiah, Son of God. In fact, he apparently created the genre of “gospel” as an account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfilment of God’s story with Israel and the world.

The word “gospel” refers to an announcement of an event that changes things in the wider public world. That’s what it meant when the Romans used this word to announce a great military victory, the accession of a new emperor, or the birth of an heir to the sitting emperor. Mark believes that the world has been changed by who and what happened through this Jesus.

In this statement, the title to his gospel, Mark tells his readers the “time” they live in. Greek had two words for time. “Chronos” (chronology) was linear time, minute after minute, week after week, and so forth. History as chronicle. What Henry Ford famously described as “just one damn thing after another.” But there was also “Kairos” time. Filled time. Time pregnant with meaning. A day of reckoning of some kind. A time of waking, being “woke,” as we say these days.

“Beginning” and “Messiah” (“Christ” = Messiah) are the two clues Mark gives for us to tell time accurately. In the story he tells of an obscure Galilean peasant crucified as a traitor by the Romans he finds the high point and decisive display of God’s plan for the world. A plan Jesus has enacted bringing a new state of affairs in the world to be. Public change, political change, personal change.

What has happened Mark alludes to with the word “beginning.” This good news has to do with a “beginning.” Again, we have an allusion to the Old Testament, perhaps to its most famous and first verse: “In the beginning God created . . .” Some deny this and claim the “beginning” means only the onset of the ministry of Jesus. Like the translation in the Good News Bible: “This is the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It began as the prophet Isaiah had written . . .” But might there not be more in “beginning” than a historical marker? Might it allude to “the” beginning as well, to Gen.1, and draw in the resonance that this “beginning” in Jesus grows out of and embodies God’s “big picture” plan for the word?

Calling Jesus “Messiah” points in this direction in my view. It ties Jesus to the whole history of God with Israel and with the world. Messiah in much of Jewish thought in Jesus’ time was the special agent God would send to rescue them from their oppressive overlords, drive them out of town, rebuild the temple, and restore Israel to its premier place among all nations. This Messiah would rule both Israel and the world. It’s this story from which he emerges and in which he enacts (for more on this story see the “Preface to God’s SCRM Story”).

Mark ends his title with “Son of God.” This term used in this context means more than its use to refer to Israel’s human kings and less than the Second Person of the Trinity of Christian theology not had not yet developed. Cranfield is probably right to suggest this refers to Jesus’ special sense of relation to the Father (Mark, 55) as we see later in this chapter at his baptism. “Son of God” will develop into more as the church reflects on it in the early centuries of its life but historically it means that Messiah, a human figure in Jewish thought, when applied to Jesus takes on more than human (but not less than human!) resonances. We will note these resonances as we meet them and that way see how Mark fills out this title.

In short, in Jesus a new day, new age, new creation has dawned! Because it is the new age of God’s fulfilling his gracious plans for all of us and everything, it is truly “good news.” And that’s what Jesus Christ means to Mark. The story about him and the good news he came to proclaim and live out converge in its retelling. It is both Mark’s words about Jesus and Jesus’ Word to us from God.