A Gospel That Starts Running

Read Mark 1:1-15 and count how much happens. A prophecy is quoted. A wild preacher appears in the desert, dressed in camel hair, calling a nation to be baptized. Jesus arrives from Nazareth, goes under the water, and the heavens are torn open. The Spirit descends. A voice speaks. The same Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness for forty days among wild animals and angels. John is arrested. Jesus begins to preach. Fifteen verses, and we are already at the heart of the matter.

Mark's favourite word is often translated immediately. He uses it again and again, and the effect is urgency. This is not a story to be admired at a distance. Something has started, and it is moving.

Yet within the rush there is one moment of stillness. At the river the Father speaks to the Son: you are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased. Before Jesus has healed anyone, called anyone or taught anything, he is loved. His identity is settled before his work begins. The temptation that follows in the wilderness is, among other things, an assault on that settled identity, and Jesus holds.

Many of us live the other way round. We work in order to be approved, and rest only when the approval seems secure, which it never quite does. Mark's opening turns that around. For those who belong to Christ, the Father's word over the Son is extended to us by adoption. Paul says the Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God's children, in Romans 8:16. The word comes first; the work follows.

So the pace of this chapter is not the pace of anxiety. It is the pace of someone who knows who he is and what he has come to do. Take that into the day. You may have a great deal to accomplish before evening. Do it as one already loved, not as one still auditioning.