When I first put pen to parchment, I knew: this was not just a story, but
a heralding—not a mere recounting, but the declaration of something that
demanded to be told.
This was the beginning of the good news—the euangelion—of Jesus Christ,
the Son of God. This news would change
the world.
The whole story bears the weight of that confession, whether spoken at the
start or revealed through the unfolding of his life, death, and resurrection.
I did not speak of where he was born. I gave no account of his childhood.
The prophets were enough for me. Isaiah had spoken long ago of a messenger
crying out in the wilderness and that is where I began. We believed this voice
was John the Baptizer the one who would“Prepare the way of the Lord.” It
was no accident that John appeared in the wilderness, away from the temple
courts, wearing garments rough and wild. His baptism was not a hollow ritual
but a summons to repentance, to ready oneself for a kingdom about to break in.[1],[2]
When Jesus came to John for baptism, it was not for his own sins that he
descended into the waters. It was for solidarity. With Israel. With humanity.
With all flesh. I was told how the heavens tore apart as he rose from the
river. The Spirit, gentle yet unstoppable, descended like a dove. A voice
thundered from above: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well
pleased.” An echo of Psalm 2:7.
I didn’t define the Spirit in philosophical terms—how could I? But as I
recalled what I had heard the Spirit was not some impersonal force. He moved,
spoke, descended, drove, even could be sinned against (Mark 1:10; Mark 1:12; Mark
13:11; Mark 3:29).[3] The voice from heaven declared him
beloved—but beloved sons are not spared the wilderness. The same Spirit who
descended as a dove now drove like the wind. There he met "the
satan"—the adversary.
I speak carefully
here, for I do not imagine him as a horned monster from children’s tales. The
Scriptures call him “the accuser,” and that was enough. This was not as a
personal name, but a title, a function. The function of the accuser in the days
of Job, was to seek to test the righteous.
In Mark he seeks to test Jesus. Not of his own power did the adversary
act, but under the authority of God he set out to sift and to challenge the
righteous.
In the heavenly court, the satan was the one who accused, who
questioned the purity of men’s hearts, who probed to see whether their devotion
was true or only bought with blessings. You recall how he said of Job, “Does
Job fear God for nothing?” So too, in the wilderness, the adversary came to
probe Jesus.[4]
After John was handed over—the world already pushing back against the
kingdom’s herald—Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming that the time was
fulfilled, the kingdom of God had drawn near; repent and believe the good news.
I will talk about this repentance and belief later but for now I want to express
how vital it was to the kingdom.
The kingdom Jesus proclaimed was confined, in his lifetime, to a small
corner of the world—yet it threatened the whole order of it. This was no safe
spiritual platitude; it was a challenge to Rome, to Herod, and to the temple
establishment alike.
I heard how Jesus' authority manifested. He called fishermen from their
boats—and they left immediately. He taught in synagogues—and the people
marveled, not at his eloquence, but at his authority. Even demons could not
stay silent in his presence, shrieking, “I know who you are—the Holy One of
God!” He silenced them, commanding them not to reveal him too soon.
He had authority over unclean spirits. Authority over sickness. Authority
to end hunger and thirst. Authority to call and command the hearts of men.
These were no isolated marvels, but the first clear signs that the kingdom of
God had drawn near.
As I wrote, I knew the threads I was laying down would weave through the
entire Gospel:
- Jesus' conflict with unclean
spirits would only escalate.
- His identity would remain a
mystery to many, revealed not through sword or ceremony, but through his
empty tomb.
- His miracles would serve not as
spectacles, but as restorations—small previews of a healed creation.
- The suffering and rejection he
would face were not detours, but the very road to the kingdom's
fulfillment.
Some say my Gospel
leaves too much unsaid—that it ends abruptly, that it refuses to explain what
it should make clear. Perhaps they are right. But perhaps that was always the
point. Revelation is not always shouted; sometimes it is whispered in the silence
of an empty tomb. I did not aim to resolve every question. I sought instead to
draw the hearer into the tension—to stand at the cross, to peer into the torn
veil, to wonder what kind of king dies like this.
If the story unsettles, if it leaves you asking, then perhaps you are nearer the truth. For the gospel does not arrive neatly. It rends the heavens. It disrupts deserts. It dares to call fishermen, tax collectors, and demons by name. The kingdom comes not to confirm what we already knew, but to overturn it.
It was
only the beginning. But in that beginning, the end of the old world had already
begun.
Mark-
[1] N.T. Wright, Mark for Everyone
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 2–5. Some, like the scholar N.T. Wright, have said that John's ministry was
the signal of a new Exodus²—a time for Israel to start over, not
geographically, but spiritually.
[2] Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the
Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2014), 135–137. Michael Bird, too, understands John’s
call as urgent, apocalyptic even: the kingdom was drawing near, demanding
readiness, not complacency.
[3] In the Gospel of Mark, the Spirit is
portrayed as the active power and presence of God at work in the world. Jesus
is shown to have a unique and intimate relationship with the Spirit, but Mark
does not present a fully developed doctrine of the Trinity. As Bart Ehrman
notes in How Jesus Became God, Jesus affirms the Jewish Shema —
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord" — without equating
himself with God or introducing a triune concept. This suggests that the
earliest Gospel writings, such as Mark, did not portray Jesus as divine in the
later creedal sense, and that the doctrine of the Trinity was a theological
development that occurred after these writings. Similarly, while the Spirit is
active and powerful, Mark does not explicitly identify the Spirit as God. While
I do not dispute that many find in Mark evidence of Jesus’ divine identity
through his actions, it remains that Mark himself does not articulate a
Trinitarian theology.
[4]
Bird, Michael The Gospel of the Lord,
139–140. Bird notes that this early depiction of Jesus' struggle signals that
cosmic forces would oppose him at every turn.
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