{"id":566,"date":"2012-08-12T11:00:27","date_gmt":"2012-08-12T16:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=566"},"modified":"2019-11-26T12:57:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T17:57:38","slug":"the-beginning-of-marks-apocalyptic-gospel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2012\/08\/12\/the-beginning-of-marks-apocalyptic-gospel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beginning of Mark’s Apocalyptic Gospel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark 1:1-15<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the entire service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Mark\u2019s Gospel begins with this simple superscription in chapter 1:\u00a0 \u201cThe beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.\u201d\u00a0 The word \u201cgood news\u201d is the same as \u201cgospel.\u201d It is not a literary designation, as in \u201cthe Gospel of Mark;\u201d rather it is a word, euaggelion<\/em>, which means good news.\u00a0 When the person we call Mark begins writing, he intends to communicate euaggellion<\/em>, the good news of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But Mark\u2019s good news is not the kind of chirpy news you would find nestled in a Reader\u2019s Digest. It is not that warm and fuzzy feature that the networks tuck in at the end of the nightly newscast either.\u00a0 Mark\u2019s gospel of Jesus Christ, his good news, is apocalyptic.\u00a0 He offers an apocalyptic gospel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now to us in this great liberal chapel, such news may not sound good at all.\u00a0 We late moderns may be inclined to think of apocalyptic not as good, but as primitive–perhaps some detachable feature of early Christianity that we can take or leave.\u00a0 For those of us used to a Christianity that is reasonable or plausible, apocalyptic sounds more like the crazy relative we keep hidden away in the attic.\u00a0 We know we are related, but he\/she seems just a bit too crazy to take seriously, let alone talk about in public.\u00a0 So when Mark offers the beginning of his apocalyptic gospel of Jesus, we might be inclined to demur.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

However, a century of critical Biblical scholarship has been consistent on this point.\u00a0 The high water mark of 19th century liberalism believed that the Kingdom of God, the gospel Jesus preached (Mark 1:15) was about the inexorable march toward progress of the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.\u00a0 But the critical work of Biblical scholars like Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer made that liberal view untenable.\u00a0 These scholars reminded biblical interpreters that Jesus\u2019 gospel was not a cover for the liberal myth of progress.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 view of God\u2019s kingdom and its gospel was apocalyptic\u2014something strange to our modern ears.\u00a0Decades later, the great Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann conceded so much.\u00a0 Our scientific world had no room for miracles or three-tiered universes of heaven above, earth, and hell below.\u00a0 Faithful Christians, Bultmann said, would need to learn to demythologize this unwieldy apocalyptic message of Jesus.\u00a0But then Bultmann\u2019s own student, a scholar named Ernst Kaesemann, had pushed the problem back to the center.\u00a0 Kaesemann argued that the apocalyptic view was not easily dispensed with.\u00a0 In fact, he called apocalyptic the mother of all Christian theology!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The mother?\u00a0 Now that hits close to home!\u00a0 We might be tempted to keep a friendly distance to apocalyptic thinking.\u00a0 What reasonable and morally sensitive person today has need of mythological horsemen, stories of rapture and being \u201cleft behind,\u201d or cosmic conflagration?\u00a0 Granted, some apocalyptic texts are just problematic and Christians need to learn to think about them and reinterpret them.\u00a0 But the core of K\u00e4semann\u2019s argument about apocalyptic\u2019s motherly role is still relevant.\u00a0 The gospel is about Jesus\u2019 death and resurrection<\/em>.\u00a0 How can we really speak of resurrection apart from the apocalyptic worldview which gave it currency in the Jewish world in which Christianity emerged?\u00a0 For those of us who listen for that gospel in a late modern context, we just cannot write off mother!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Perhaps the problem is lack of precision about what exactly makes Mark\u2019s<\/em> gospel apocalyptic.\u00a0 While the spectacular visions of apocalyptic literature are hard to ignore, lately scholars have been pointing to what apocalypses do<\/em>.\u00a0 The word apocalypse itself does not mean \u201cburning judgment\u201d or \u201ccosmic catastrophe.\u201d\u00a0 What apocalypse means in Greek is \u201cto reveal.\u201d\u00a0 Apocalypses are about divine revelation.\u00a0 A brilliant scholar of apocalyptic literature, Christopher Rowland, made just such a case a couple decades ago.\u00a0 He titled his book on apocalyptic literature:\u00a0 The Open Heaven. <\/em>Apocalypses reveal something about God, something that gives a perspective in the midst of life in chaos.\u00a0 Other scholars point out that an apocalypse is a genre of what is called revelatory literature.\u00a0 In other words what makes an apocalypse apocalyptic is that it reveals.\u00a0 Therefore, the purpose of apocalyptic literature is to disclose something from a transcendent perspective\u2026and in a way that helps to make sense of some difficult anomalies of life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the Jewish and emerging Christian world, apocalyptic is an at least four-century long dialogue about the righteousness of God from the standpoint of some sort of problem of theodicy.\u00a0 Through the centuries it asks questions like the following:\u00a0 How can God be just or righteous, and these awful Gentiles have destroyed the Temple?\u00a0 How can God be just or righteous, and these Greeks force us to abandon our traditional ways around Sabbath, circumcision, and obedience to the divine law?\u00a0 How can God be just, when those who act in God\u2019s name are persecuted and killed by those idolatrous Romans?\u00a0 How can God be just when the righteous dead never receive any vindication in this world that is now so clearly in the grip of anti-divine forces?\u00a0 These are the kinds of profound questions of theodicy and the righteousness of God that writers of apocalyptic texts ask.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So now we come back to Mark\u2019s gospel.\u00a0 Just what exactly makes Mark\u2019s version of the good news so apocalyptic?\u00a0 On a general level, we can see some of the more spectacular elements of apocalyptic throughout the Markan story.\u00a0 When in Mark 1:15 Jesus comes preaching the coming Kingdom of God\u2019s reign, he announces it as gospel\/good news of God.\u00a0 What he means is demonstrated in his Galilean ministry of kingdom proclamation in the following chapters.\u00a0 Jesus heals the sick as a sign of the dawning kingdom.\u00a0 Jesus casts out demons with apocalyptic authority.\u00a0 He forgives sins, offering God\u2019s end-time mercy even now in his Galilean ministry.\u00a0 When Jesus feeds people, though they start with just few loaves and fish, there is more than enough and everyone is filled: a sign of the eschatological banquet.\u00a0 Not even nature escapes his concern. \u00a0Jesus himself contends with apocalyptic forces as he walks miraculously over the waters of chaos, and rebukes and silences demonic storms with his mere word of command.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With all these elements of the Markan gospel story we can see:\u00a0 this apocalyptic world is not just some neutral space of choice and human freedom.\u00a0 Elements of human and natural life are vividly portrayed as in the thrall of cosmic evil:\u00a0 demons, forces, principalities and powers as Paul would say.\u00a0 God\u2019s good earth has been corrupted by evil forces that require some sort of \u201cstrong man\u201d to overcome.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here we see the importance of Mark\u2019s apocalyptic revelation at the beginning of his gospel.\u00a0 Right here, in this fifteen-verse prologue to the Gospel of Mark, Mark includes his crucial moment of apocalyptic revelation.\u00a0 In the first few verses, Mark has us focused on John the Baptist, an end-time prophet sent to prepare the way.\u00a0 But even John confesses–for all the powerful signs of his ministry of repentance–that a \u201cstronger one\u201d is coming.\u00a0 Then Jesus appears.\u00a0 The text words it this way translated directly from the Greek:\u00a0 \u201cand it came to pass in those days.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThose days\u201d\u2014that is end-time talk.\u00a0 When Jesus appears in vv. 9-11, he, too, is baptized by John just as all the crowds are\u2014except when he comes up from the water.\u00a0 What Jesus sees and hears in these early verses of Mark is an apocalyptic vision.\u00a0 The heavens are opened, the dove descends, and then a divine voice that only he and we readers get to hear says:\u00a0 \u201cYou are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.\u201d\u00a0 This is an apocalyptic moment of revelation replete with open heavens, cosmic symbols, and heavenly voices.\u00a0 We who hear the text are privy to Jesus\u2019 own revelation as are no other characters in the text.\u00a0 We and Jesus know that Jesus has a messianic, prophetic identity and mission.\u00a0 As he sets out into this difficult apocalyptic world, he does so in light of this divine revelation, in light of this mysterious, transcendent perspective.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Please note further what the apocalyptic elements of this revelation point to.\u00a0 First, the heavens are not merely opened, but ripped apart, schizomenous<\/em> in Greek.\u00a0 God in this apocalyptic revelation is breaking down barriers.\u00a0 As Duke Biblical scholar Joel Marcus puts it, there is a \u201cgracious gash in the universe.\u201d\u00a0God has committed Godself to entering this broken world to fulfill God\u2019s kingdom purposes.\u00a0 Second, when the dove descends, it is not just some pretty symbol.\u00a0 The language of the dove goes back to God\u2019s original purposes at creation, where the Spirit broods over the waters in anticipation of God\u2019s creative act.\u00a0 God is not yet through with this broken created order.\u00a0 What of the aural disclosure of God\u2019s relation to Jesus?\u00a0 This is language of prophetic anointment and messianic kingship, language that reminds us of all the promises of God in the Hebrew Bible:\u00a0 the psalms and the prophet Isaiah, too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the beginning of Mark\u2019s Gospel, God reveals Godself, God\u2019s purposes and Jesus\u2019 otherwise secret mysterious identity. \u00a0We hearers are, right there at the beginning of Mark\u2019s gospel, given a transcendent perspective on the sixteen-chapter apocalyptic struggle that is about to ensue.\u00a0 What is the point?: in the midst of God\u2019s good creation, which is nonetheless in the thrall of anti-divine forces, God rips open the heavens and places God\u2019s imprimatur on Jesus in such a way that Jesus and we readers are privy to this transcendent perspective.\u00a0 We now know, even in the midst of life\u2019s most hellish conditions, that God through Jesus is committed to the fight against cosmic evil.\u00a0 God is revealed as ripping open heavens to break the boundaries that give cosmic evil the upper hand.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, Mark\u2019s strange vision of Jesus\u2019 significance may still just seem too far out.\u00a0 Apart from movies, books, and a few sectarian groups, our world is not that crazy for apocalyptic.\u00a0 We probably live our lives largely in the light of reason, and in relative comfort.\u00a0 Mark may offer an apocalyptic gospel, but on the whole, our world, our late modern reality is not buying.\u00a0 Mark may well defer to Jesus the exorcist, but when faced with struggles of mind and spirit, we late moderns are much more likely to refer<\/em> to psychologists and medical professionals.\u00a0 Mark\u2019s Jesus may celebrate eschatological banquets of an apocalyptic kingdom where all are miraculously fed, but for us these matters are better left for the rational adjustment of public policy on food, agricultural production and foreign aid.\u00a0 Jesus may rebuke storm demons and silence the wind, but we are far more likely to stick with the weather channel and its talk of low pressure systems and the jet stream as we deal with matters meteorological.\u00a0 In the end, Bultmann was right:\u00a0 our worlds are different and are not amenable to Mark\u2019s apocalyptic gospel of Jesus.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But on a second look, even we find our reasoned worlds interrupted by intractable evil.\u00a0 We experience this in multiple ways.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Personally, we experience this with the struggle with disease.\u00a0 For all our progress against cancer, there still seems to be something of a strange virulence to it\u2014the body turned against itself.\u00a0 Cancer may be a describable biological process, but we nonetheless feel compelled with our language to \u201cwage a war\u201d against it, to fight it as if it were something more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Socially, we bump into this with the mysteries of life together.\u00a0 We experience an inability to find ways of even talking with each other about solving problems like gun violence after another massacre of innocents\u2014situations where we cannot only not do something, but even imagine talking<\/em> about doing something.\u00a0 In such moments it is as if we felt we were in the grip of something that is bigger and different\u00a0 than our capacity to reason and act as free persons.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the broadest level of our shared humanity in this world, there are also those powerful experiences of corporate evil that force us to recognize the very limits of enlightened reason among free citizens to do what is necessary.\u00a0 The 20th century was supposed to represent the triumph of reason, technology, and astounding feats of human accomplishment.\u00a0 For all that, it was also the century of repeated, bloody wars and a holocaust.\u00a0 For all the talk of \u201cnever again\u201d in both warfare and silence about mass extermination, the incomprehensible bloody trail marches forward to Cambodia, the Balkans, and beyond.\u00a0 Is it any wonder that Quebec General Romeo Dallaire, the head of the UN forces in Rwanda in the 1990\u2019s, mysteriously titled his book about that awful event, \u201cShake Hands with the Devil:\u00a0 the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.\u201d?\u00a0 We sometimes experience evil in just such a way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is true that we may not have the same mythology.\u00a0 Yet we still deal with the mystery of intractable evil, ask questions of our mysterious selves, and yes, pose questions of theodicy to a mysterious God.\u00a0 Here Mark\u2019s strange apocalyptic gospel registers:\u00a0 good news for a good creation gone awry.\u00a0 It is good news in the face of the struggle with intractable evil.\u00a0 And the good news is this:\u00a0 in the face of these intractable realities, God has not given up, but comes closer.\u00a0 In Jesus\u2019 baptism, the apocalyptic news revealed is that God is not staying behind the cosmic curtain of the heavens.\u00a0 God has transgressed the very boundary between heaven and earth. In Jesus, God has been mysteriously revealed as the uncontainable other.\u00a0 This God does not remain in the holy separation of eternal otherness.\u00a0 Instead, in Jesus God is revealed as coming close with a divinely authorized risky love that leads all the way to the cross.\u00a0 This is no triumphant fix-it God.\u00a0 It is also not an aloof God of aseity and impassibility.\u00a0 This is a God who apocalyptically reveals Godself precisely as the mystery for us in the face of our broken realities.<\/p>\n

Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall captures this apocalyptic mystery in a helpful way.\u00a0 Here I paraphrase him:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

God\u2019s revealing is simultaneously an unveiling and a veiling.\u00a0 God conceals Godself under the opposite of what both religion and reason imagine God to be, namely the Almighty, the majestic transcendent, the absolutely other\u2026. God\u2019s otherness\u2026is not to be found in God\u2019s absolute distance from us but in God\u2019s willed and costly proximity to us.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In her article \u201cPreaching to Horror-Struck People,\u201d Rebekah Eckert, saw a deep connection between Hall\u2019s thoughts about the mysterious revelation of God\u2019s otherness in risky proximate love, and the story of Victor Munyarugerere.\u00a0Victor is described years later in a newspaper report about his actions during the Rwandan Genocide. \u00a0Amidst the bloody context of extermination in the 1990\u2019s we hear this unexpected news story of his<\/em> risky proximity:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Victor Munyarugerere, a Catholic lay counselor married to a Tutsi woman, used creative tactics to save the lives of about 270 people.\u00a0 Dressed up as a priest and doling out bottles of whiskey and wine to soldiers at checkpoints, he shuttled carloads of children, women and men to safety at the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali.\u00a0 \u201cI decided that I preferred to die saving people,\u201d said Munyarugerere. \u201cTutsis and Hutus are all children of God.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This risky proximity however is never just for times of extreme social and political duress.\u00a0 It is also for personal lives lived under difficult circumstances.\u00a0 Rev. Samuel Proctor, BU grad and eminent preacher and homiletician tells the story of a mother who, \u201cworking for Mrs. Cartwright from sunup to sundown every day and then coming home to cook and do laundry for her own children without a mate or the inspiration of a faithful companion.\u00a0 We saw that,\u201d Proctor said, \u201cand we heard her singing Zion\u2019s songs in the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This revelation of a God who in Jesus rips open heaven to come close is itself the core of Mark\u2019s apocalyptic gospel.\u00a0 Mark begins his gospel with this revelation to show God\u2019s loving abandon for a good creation gone awry.\u00a0 It is not an apocalyptic gospel of easy answers.\u00a0 It is, however, a word about God\u2019s love, a risky proximity, in the midst of the darkness.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the early 20th century a group of artists formed a collective in a small community just north of the German city of Bremen.\u00a0 The town of Worpswede was of no great repute.\u00a0 It sat on the edge of a long sparsely inhabited swamp-like region known as the Teufelsmoor<\/em>, the Devil\u2019s moor.\u00a0 One artist, a painter in the group, crafted a painting he called, \u201cthe Sower.\u201d\u00a0 In the picture, the sower casts his seed on the ground\u2014it is a typical motif and theme in painting from the period.\u00a0 But this artist\u2019s sower casts his seed across the landscape he came to know in the collective:\u00a0 the Devil\u2019s moor.\u00a0 As he does so, the sower casts his seed in the dark, but toward a small dawning light.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I suspect the writer of the first gospel written would have understood.\u00a0 Mark\u2019s Jesus offers the beginning of his apocalyptic gospel.\u00a0 It is a song in darkness, a seed cast across a dark landscape.\u00a0 Yet, amidst the darkness, Mark\u2019s gospel speaks\u2026a promise of dawning light.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

~Rev. Dr. David Schnasa Jacobsen<\/em><\/p>\n

Professor of Homiletics, Boston University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark 1:1-15 Click here to hear the entire service. Click here to hear the sermon only. Mark\u2019s Gospel begins with this simple superscription in chapter 1:\u00a0 \u201cThe beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.\u201d\u00a0 The word \u201cgood news\u201d is the same as \u201cgospel.\u201d It is not a literary designation, as in \u201cthe Gospel of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2517,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions\/2517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}