Christmas Stories: Mark – The Good News

Today we begin a new sermon series called “Christmas Stories,” and over the next four Sundays we’re going to be looking at each of the four Gospels and what they say (or don’t say) about the birth of Jesus and what it means for us.

 One of the convictions I’ve had over the years is that we tend to approach Christmas with a lot of different ideas about what Jesus’ birth actually means and how each of the Gospel writers’ unique voices and perspectives are often subsumed by our desire for tradition over the text. Our Nativity sets are a classic example. Mary and Joseph ride a donkey to Bethlehem, even though as poor Galileans they probably walked the 70 miles or so to Bethlehem. We think of the “inn” as a hotel, but it was mostly like the home of a relative with no room for privacy for a birth, thus the need for a stable. We have Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus is a wooden stable, and not the cave under the house he was most likely born in (When you visit Bethlehem, you go down under the Church of the Nativity to his traditional birthplace). We have the shepherds and the wise men all there at the same time, even though the stories in Luke and Matthew are very different. According to Matthew, Jesus would have been two years old when the wise men showed up.

 All of these are minor quibbles that only seem to matter to historians and theologians and stickler pastors. What’s more important, though, is that the message of Christmas has become quite sentimentalized in our culture, more concerned with feeling than meaning. In this series, I want us to take some time before Christmas to explore the biblical witness to Jesus’ coming through the lenses of the four Gospels. Each has a different story to tell us, and each story is important to understanding the whole.

 We begin with Mark, which many scholars believe was the first of the four to be written, not Matthew, which comes first in our Bible. The reason that Mark seems to be first has to do with its style of writing—it’s short and choppy and moves through the story at a breathtaking pace. Mark employs the word “immediately” to move the action along and a lot of what Jesus teaches in Matthew and Luke isn’t in Mark. We might call it the “Reader’s Digest” version of the Jesus story.

 Mark is one of the “synoptic” Gospels (synoptic means “seen together”). Matthew, Mark and Luke are very similar in many respects, and are quite different from John’s Gospel, which many scholars believe was written later and has a more developed theological focus. We’ll talk about that more when we get to John on the last Sunday of Advent.

  Slide02 This chart explains how many scholars view the interaction of the synoptic Gospels. The theory (and I stress that it’s a theory) goes something like this. Mark was written first, and there are parts of Mark that seem to be copied verbatim in Matthew and Luke, suggesting that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, like any good historian would. If Mark’s Gospel contains some of the remembrances of Peter, as many maintain, then it represents a very early tradition, thus its priority.

 Matthew and Luke, however, have similar material common to each other that is not in Mark, namely a lot of the teachings and parables of Jesus. Notice how the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke are very similar. Scholars theorize that there was another source out there that both Matthew and Luke drew from, and they call it “Q,” which is short for the German word “Quelle” or writings. If you were to find the Q source, you’d be forever famous!

 Still again, Matthew and Luke seem to have their own sources—like their different birth narratives. Telling different versions of the same story isn’t unusual even today. I mean, how many biographies of Abraham Lincoln are there out there, each taking a different slant? Historians are always emphasizing different things and, when the historians are also theologians like the Gospel writers, they tell the story in a way that communicates to their particular audience, like a preacher crafting a sermon for a specific congregation.

 That’s the theory about the Gospels’ interaction. There are others out there, too, but for our purposes, we’re going to assume that Mark is first. That leads us to a curious problem when it comes to Christmas stories however. Mark doesn’t have one! No shepherds, no wise men, no angels, no manger. Just this:

 “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” This sentence acts as a kind of thesis statement for the breathless story that follows.

 “The beginning” – It’s interesting that both Mark and John, the two Gospels without a birth story of Jesus, use this word to kick off their stories. “Beginning” in John evokes a memory of the creation story from Genesis 1. In Mark, however, “beginning” seems to be more associated with the coming of Jesus himself. Jesus’ arrival was the beginning of a new era in history, a new movement of God in response to the crisis of sin and death. In Jesus, God was launching a new project, a new and unusual way of saving the world and redeeming his creation.

 Jesus’ story is thus the “beginning” of something specific—“good news.” Now, here’s a phrase that is often misunderstood. In Greek, “good news” is translated from one word: “euangellion,” which is where we get “evangelism” from—spreading the “good news.” “Good news” is the core the teaching of both John the Baptizer and Jesus, but that good news is always connected to the Kingdom of God.” Look at verse 14:

 “Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news.’”

 The “good news” for Mark, and for the other Gospel writers, is always tied to an announcement that God’s kingdom had come. What is the kingdom of God?

 Let’s first define what it is not. It is not “heaven” in the traditional sense—a faraway place where God lives and where the holy go to live with God in spirit. In the first century, “kingdom of God” was a political phrase, a phrase ripe with meaning. “Kingdom of God” meant that God’s reign and rule was coming upon the earth—that God was going to return to Zion and set things right. The Roman oppressors would be kicked out, and God himself would sit on Caesar’s throne. “No king but God” was the shout of revolutionaries in Jesus’ day. Announcing the kingdom meant that you were announcing that God was about to do a new thing, that the old structures would be overturned. It wasn’t merely good news for some future heavenly bliss, it was good news for the here and now.

The kingdom of God was the core of Jesus’ preaching and his work, but his announcement was somewhat curious. Instead of announcing the kingdom with military might and strength, he said that the work of the kingdom was love, especially love for one’s enemies. Instead of the kingdom being good news for the religiously pious and the wealthy, Jesus announced that it was the poor, the outcast, and the sinner that were valued by God and that those who thought themselves righteous had better think again. Jesus ate with people who were sinner, and healed those whose diseases and infirmities kept them on the fringes of society. He touched the unclean and made them clean as a demonstration of what the kingdom would be like.

 Of course, he taught about the kingdom as well—teaching in parables. Mark doesn’t go into the parables, but the concepts are present throughout. Jesus was announcing the kingdom of God in his actions and his words, and doing so in a way that would indeed be good news to the poor and outcast, and bad news to the powerful.

 John the Baptizer, who was the forerunner of Jesus, announced that the kingdom was coming in the person of the Messiah. He baptized people out in the desert for forgiveness of sins—circumventing the religious system of first century Israel, where everybody knew that forgiveness was only offered through sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. John was dressed and acted like an Old Testament prophet, like Elijah. Like a prophet, he stood apart from the systems of power and proclaimed God’s word under God’s authority. Mark tells us that John’s commission came straight from God as prophesied by Isaiah – “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” God was coming to set things right, just not in the way that they expected!

 It was not just the message of the good news of the kingdom that mattered, however, it was also the messenger. Mark modifies the “good news” by saying it is the good news of “Jesus Christ.” Christ is a messianic title, it is not Jesus’ last name! Christ is a Greek translation of the Jewish word “messiah,” whom the people of Israel had longed for since the time of the exile to Babylon. The “Christ” would be the one who would restore Israel’s autonomy and greatness, he would be the one who would defeat Israel’s enemies, purify the Temple, and rule as God’s anointed King. People in the first century did not think of the Messiah as a divine figure, the second person of the Trinity, but rather a human whom God had chosen to be Israel’s representative and ruler.

 As Mark’s story unfolds, we learn that Jesus is the Christ, but not exactly in the way they thought. He would defeat Israel’s enemy, but instead of Rome, Jesus saw the enemy as Satan, evil and death. Instead of shoring up the Temple building and its rituals, Jesus proclaimed that the Temple would be destroyed and a new one would rise in its place—in his own person. Indeed, Jesus would not only be Israel’s representative, but God in the flesh dwelling with his people. He would be King not by fighting with weapons, but by dying on a Roman cross and taking on all that evil and death could throw at him. His death on the cross, which is the focus on Mark’s Gospel, is his coronation!

 Then there is this other title. Not only is he Christ, Mark calls him “Son of God.” This is another loaded phrase in the first century. Augustus Caesar, who was the Roman ruler when Jesus was born, was the first Roman emperor after the end of the Roman republic, and he declared himself divine. “Son of God” was thus a title that he appropriated for himself, as did many of the emperors to follow. Mark tells us up front, however, that Jesus is the true Son of God, over and against Caesar and any other pretender.

 Instead of a story about Jesus’ birth, Mark gives us the story of Jesus’ baptism. For Jesus, the baptism is not for repentance but for identification—he identifies with the people of Israel and is identified as God’s own Son with the whole Trinity present. God’s voice speaks, the Spirit descends like a dove, and the Son is marked as God’s own beloved.

 Where Matthew and Luke talk about Jesus being the Son of God via his divine conception and his birth to Mary, Mark understands Jesus as God’s Son through God’s own identification of him in his baptism. The baptism of Jesus thus functions as Mark’s “birth story,” defining the time at which Jesus the Nazarene is revealed to the world as Jesus the Christ, the very Son of God. It is not the angels who proclaim him, it is God himself.

 Mark’s Christmas story is a great one to begin with because it reminds us that we, too, are God’s sons and daughters because of what Jesus has done—his grace given to us through baptism. For us, baptism represents a new birth, the beginning of a new story, and marks us as belonging to God. In baptism, God’s word proclaims to us that we are his beloved children.

 If we take Mark’s story to heart, we might recognize that Jesus’ baptismal “birth” isn’t just something that we celebrate once a year. When we baptize someone, when we remember our baptisms, we are incorporated into Jesus story. We receive the good news that God in Christ has come into the world and has done something about the sin and death that keep us from experiencing the joy and liberation of God’s kingdom. As our liturgy says, in baptism, we are “incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation and given new birth through water and the Spirit.” Jesus’ beginning marks our beginning as his people and our future as people of his kingdom.

 One of my favorite things to do as a pastor is to baptize little ones, holding them in front of the congregation to mark their initiation into God’s family and his love. What is always fascinating to me, though, is that moment when I take the child from her mother’s arms and hold her. Now matter how agreeable the child is, there is a momentary panic in their eyes as they search for a familiar face. Sometimes they whimper, sometimes they wail, but most of the time they quickly adjust and start to focus on the face of the one who is holding them. They seem to want to reach out and touch the face, even if that face has a goatee and a microphone that needs to be torn off!

 Recent studies have shown that babies may be better at recognizing faces than adults are. In fact, humans start out with the ability to recognize and remember a wide range of faces even among races and species different from our own. Somehow, as we grow up, we begin to lose the ability to recognize faces, probably because we are too busy and too self-focused to pay attention and look deeply.

 Mark wants us to recognize that we need to recapture our ability to recognize faces, particularly the face of God revealed in his Son, Jesus Christ. We don’t know what he looked like, and the Gospel writers don’t even try to describe him. We know him instead by his life and work, his death and resurrection. We know him because he has brought good news, and his kingdom has come near among us.

 The first Sunday of Advent marks the first Sunday in the beginning of the Christian year. May it mark for us a new beginning as well. As we remember Jesus’ baptism, and our own, and be thankful! 

 

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