February 9th - Mark 1:1
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When Mark put together his Gospel, he had a very clear purpose. You might have thought he was going to take us through the life story of Jesus, but he doesn’t.
He totally disregards the first 30 years of Jesus’ life. He doesn’t tell us about Jesus’ birth, education, employment or relationships. We would be fascinated to know about all of those things, but Mark wants to get to the heart of the matter - which is that Jesus was nothing other than the Son of God. He was the Messiah, the one that the Jews had been anticipating for centuries.
It is generally agreed that Mark was the first person to write a Gospel. Matthew, Luke and John’s were written in very different circumstances over the next 30 or 40 years but it was Mark who was breaking new ground. He was probably relying on Peter’s eye-witness account of Jesus’ ministry, and it is believed that he wrote it in Rome. Many scholars believe that he wrote his Gospel around AD 60, so that’s a full generation after the earthly life of Jesus.
Mark devotes himself to describing a short period of Jesus’ life, from the start of his public ministry to the time, after his death and resurrection, when he ascended to his Father in heaven. Mark moves at breath-taking speed from
one incident in Jesus’ life to another because of his fixed purpose to declare good news, and reveal that Jesus was fully man and fully God. Mark knew that if Jesus was just a human being his life story might be interesting, but it wouldn’t be good news. It was precisely because Jesus was both man and God that he was able to open the way for people to find life in all its fulness.
These days, Jesus is warmly spoken about by many people. They love the fact that he was compassionate, radical and happy to stand up to the authorities. But they don’t know how to cope with the fact that Jesus was the Son of God. To our society, we have nothing less than good news to share as we declare, with Mark, that Jesus was both fully man and fully God.
QUESTION
How do you relate to the fact that Jesus was both God and man?
PRAYER
Loving God, I thank you for the good news. Help me to let it shape every part of my life. Amen
Released on 9 Feb 2023
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