Mark 1:1-13

07/06/11 Mark 1:1-13 GUMC Youth

Tonight, we start a journey through the Gospel according to Mark. We won't spend every single week looking at Mark, but we will spend quite a bit of time in this book, looking, passage by passage, at this particular account of the life of Christ. You might be wondering, "Why do we need to go through and hit every passage? Couldn't we just skip around and just do a few?" There are lots of reasons why we are going to cover, over time, the whole book of Mark.

First, it gives us a chance to really dig into a single book, something that most people just don't take the time to do. Second, it is really easy to take what the Bible says out of its context and make it say just about anything you want it to. If we go through passage by passage, we will have the chance to understand the Gospel as Mark presented, and not just how I feel like picking and choosing. Third, there are some very tough passages in the Bible, some passages that might be a bit uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean they are any less important; in fact, they are probably even more important because of that. By forcing ourselves to look at every passage, we force ourselves to really listen hard to God, to really wrestle with what he has to teach us and that will help us to understand what God has done and is doing better than we would otherwise.

Alright, so that is why we are taking a whole book and looking at it bit by bit, but you might be wondering, "Why Mark? Why not some other book?" One of the things you will hear me say over and over again is that, since Jesus is God, if we want to understand God, we need to look first and foremost at what Jesus tells us and shows us about God. In order to do that, we need to really know the story of Jesus. So why Mark and not Matthew, Luke or John? On the one hand, there isn't a reason; we could just as easily use those other gospels. There is much to learn in each of them and any of them would be helpful. However, Mark is a good place to start for a few reasons.

First, because it is the shortest of the four Gospels. By picking the shortest, we can cover the life and teaching of Christ quicker than we could if we used the others, and we can move on to other books, like the letters of Paul, which, if we read them carefully, we find that the problems that Christians had two thousand years ago have not really gone away, that we do the same dumb things that they did a long time ago. Second, because Mark is probably the most unified of any of the Gospels; that is, Mark's story is less broken up into pieces than the others are, so we can really see how he connected things together more clearly than we can in some others. And Third, because there some fascinating themes that come out so clearly in Mark that matter to us today. Mark highlights the problem of whether we are disciples and real followers of Christ or whether we are just part of the crowd that follows him around, but who have no real commitment. Mark also emphasizes the question of who is on the inside and who is on the outside, and we will find that the people we might think should be on the inside or the outside are often the other way around. Mark is probably the most direct and, at the same time, most challenging of the four Gospels.

So let's turn to the passage itself and see what Mark has to say. Now, if you compare Mark's beginning with that of Matthew, Luke or John, you get the idea that he is rushing through stuff to get right to the story. This first passage tells us about John the Baptist, the baptism of Christ, and the Temptation of Christ. Matthew and Luke, for example, take four chapters to get through all that, and tell us the story of Jesus' birth, too. Mark seems to want to get past those early events quickly, but he still thinks they are important enough to include them.

The first thing we need to notice is that John the Baptist was not just a guy who started preaching one day. He stood at the end of a long line of prophets sent by God to deliver the word of God to the people of God. Whenever we say that, in Jesus Christ, God himself came among us, we need to remember that he didn't just drop out of the sky, with no context, but God was preparing the way over thousands of years. In fact, if Jesus came with no John the Baptist, no nation and history of Israel, no preparation, we would have absolutely no idea who he was or how to understand him. What I want to point out is that the prophets often have a lot of tough things to say to the people. They were constantly reminding people that they couldn't follow God and be just like all the other nations, but they were called to be different, set apart for God.

However, in spite of the fact that the prophets were often critical of the people, sometimes even quite harsh, we need to always remember that God wasn't just beating up on the people. Israel, as the people of God, had a special relationship to God. At any time, when Israel sinned, God could have turned his back and walked away from them. They had broken the agreement and God would have been well within his rights to abandon them. But he doesn't abandon them; he comes back over and over again. It is true that he sometimes punished them, but only because they were his people and he wasn't going to let them go. He loved them and wanted them to not run away from the God who created them and loved them.

When God sent a prophet, like John the Baptist, it was never because the people were already great people who were doing just fine on their own. God sent prophets precisely because the people weren't who they were supposed to be and didn't do what they were supposed to do. Every time a prophet came, it was a sign that God had not forgotten his people and was still reaching out to them.

This was especially true when God himself came among us as Jesus. When Paul the apostle points out how radical God's love for us is, he points out that most of the time, people don't die for righteous people. In fact, lots of righteous people have been assassinated in the last hundred years or so, which is the opposite of people dying for them. He points out that maybe, just maybe, someone will die for a particularly good person. However, God's love is not like human love, where we only die for people who we think are worth dying for. Paul reminds us that it was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us and that shows us just how much God loves us. God didn't wait until we got our act together before he came to save us. He came and did what he did long before we ever even thought of turning to him, precisely because we couldn't do it until he died for us.

So, when we see that Jesus came and that his ministry overlapped with that of John the Baptist, we need to remember that God came to a sinful people, a people who needed saving, a people not all that different from you and me. We need to remember that whenever we think about what Jesus says or does. All the people, whether we are talking about the crowd or the disciples, the people who seem to be on the inside or those who seem to be on the outside, need Jesus and all of them were sinners, just like you and me.

The next thing we see is that Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist. Remember what John's baptism was. We read that it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. I was baptized at sixteen and I clearly remember having sins that I needed to repent of and be forgiven for. You may have been baptized as a baby, but that doesn't mean that you don't have sins that you need to repent of and be forgiven for. What's amazing is that Jesus is baptized. Why does he need to be baptized? Paul tells us that Jesus was the one who knew no sin; the book of Hebrews says that he was made like his brothers and sisters, that is, you and me, in every way, but without sin. Why does he need a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin?

Matthew spends a bit more time than Mark does on this. He tells us that John didn't want to baptize Jesus for precisely this reason. And yet, Jesus insists. Why is that? Whose sins did Jesus confess when he was baptized? Yours and mine. Jesus didn't just come to die so that we could be forgiven; he also came to repent on our behalf and in our place. After all when we repent, it isn't always like it should be, is it? We say we're sorry, and we sometimes really mean it, but then we go right back to doing the same things again. Jesus repented for us, not so that we don't have to, but so we can join him and his real repentance so we can really be forgiven.

Think about what this means. Jesus is the one who takes our sin upon his own shoulders and deals with it from the inside out. When God deals with our sin, it isn't by snapping his fingers, it isn't by waving a magic wand, but by being made poor, by becoming one of us and overcoming sin as a human being, the very thing that we cannot do on our own. Our God is a God who willingly takes on the problems of others and overcomes them.

The last part to this is that Jesus was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan for forty days. Again, Matthew and Luke take much more time to describe just what this temptation looked like, but Mark just tells us it happened and moves on. However, think about what this means. You know what it is like for you to be tempted, right? What in the world is it like for the Son of God to be tempted? And yet, the Bible tells us over and over again that Jesus was tempted just like we are; the only difference is that, while you and I usually give in to temptations pretty quickly, Jesus never did. In fact, we could say that Jesus actually was tempted more severely than we are, because it doesn't take much for us to give in. We read that, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood because he was in so much agony over the temptation he was under to not follow through and give himself up for us.

Jesus is the God of the universe who came among us as a human being. There is no reason why he would ever have to be tempted like you and I are tempted. And yet, he chooses to be tempted, to overcome the temptations that you and I so often give in to, so that we might become people who join in that victory over sin and temptation by the power of the Spirit.

Mark blows right by a bunch of details and wants to get right to the meat of the actual life and teaching of Jesus, but we need to remember, every step of the way, who this Jesus is that Mark is telling us about. Jesus is, above all, the grace of God, the one who comes to save us while we need saving and not when we've gotten our act together. Jesus is also the one who takes our burdens and makes them his own, not because he has to, but because he loves us. And finally, in Christ, we see that, when God steps into our world of space and time to transform us and make us whole, he does not ignore the fact that we are tempted, often with temptation that is stronger than we are, but enters into it, enduring the temptations that we experience and even worse temptation than that, but does not give into it. He does not try to avoid temptation, but confronts it, face to face, because he is powerful enough to overcome it, even as a human being.

As we work our way through Mark and as we look at the big picture of our faith and as we tackle the tough questions that you have to ask, we need to always remember who this Jesus is that we worship and trust. He is not merely a great human teacher; in fact, he says some things that many great human teachers would never say. He is not merely someone who wants to encourage us like a motivational speaker. In fact, he might say some things that don't seem like wisdom at all the first time you hear them. In Christ, we see that our God is a God who loves us more than we love ourselves, who, in a sense, since he laid down his life so that he might not be without us, loves us more than God loves God's own self. This is the Jesus who we praise and sing to; this is the Jesus who gave himself for us and our salvation; this is the Jesus who transforms people's lives and who wants to transform ours. Let us pray.

AMEN