January 7th - Mark 1:1

Mark 1:1 This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. When Mark put together his Gospel, he had a very clear purpose. You might have expected him to take us through Jesus’ life story, 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 so fascinated to know about all of those things, but Mark wants to get to the heart of the matter: 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 Gospels were written in very different circumstances over the next 30 or 40 years, but it was Mark who was breaking the 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 think he was writing around the year AD 60, a full generation after the earthly life of Jesus. Mark devoted himself to describing a short period of Jesus’ life, from the time he started his public ministry to the time, after his death and resurrection, when he ascended to his Father in heaven. Mark moved at breathtaking speed from one incident in Jesus’ life to another because of his fixed purpose to declare the good news and to reveal that Jesus was fully man and fully God. Mark knew that if Jesus was merely 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 that he was compassionate and radical, and happy to stand up to the authorities, but they don’t know how to cope with the fact that he 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