The Beginning of the Good News
Mark 1:1-20
1st Sunday after Christmas
December 27, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
My experience with submitting myself to someone else's reading list is that I inevitably have two questions: 1) Why in the world did they put that on the list? and 2) Why didn't they include this? Maybe that's just me.
I have the same struggle with lectionaries. After all lectionary is simply a reading list that selects and arranges Scripture lessons for the Christian year. Inevitably, some of my favorite readings are left out and some readings are included that I for one could have done without.
There is a value in submitting ourselves to a lectionary as to any reading list. It is helpful for our spiritual growth to be confronted by and to have deal with an unfamiliar or even uncomfortable reading. Like oysters we produce pearls precisely at the point of irritation. So maybe there is good news here.
It's not that I don't understand. There are only so many "Christmas texts" available. In fact, only two of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament mention Christmas at all. Matthew and Luke tell the stories of Christmas-- I won't call them comfortable exactly, but at least they are familiar. Mark and John write gospels without any mention of Jesus' birth. Half of the gospel writers found it perfectly acceptable to tell the good news without birth stories.
Not only that, if you would give me a pair of scissors, I could easily snip a little here and cut a bit there and end up with versions of Matthew and Luke without any Christmas stories and, if you did not know that they were supposed to be there, you would not be able to tell they were missing.
All of this suggests that, except for a few historical accidents, Christians might never have celebrated Christmas at all.
Having said all that it's still a little odd to come to church on the third day of Christmas and find that the lesson for day has nothing do with Jesus' birth. It's a problem built into the Narrative Lectionary folks' commitment to use one gospel in each of four years. So what we have instead of a Christmas story is a reading that begins, "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ," and immediately launches into a description of John the Baptist. He came demanding repentance, wearing camel skins, and eating wild honey and grasshoppers. That's hardly likely to evoke "visions of sugar plums," is it?
It is inevitable that Christmas, whether a day or a season, will come to an end. Some songs wish that Christmas could last all year, but that isn't how it works.
To wish that Christmas could last all year is understandable, but misses that Christmas, as a celebration of Jesus' birth is the beginning of something. Where Matthew and Luke have Christmas stories, Mark has, "The beginning of the good news." Sooner or later we will have to move beyond "the beginning" to the something else.
As usual, there is more than one way to read that phrase. We could read it as a simple introduction to the book of Mark. The ministry of John the Baptist leading to Jesus' baptism, then, is the beginning of the good news. The rest of Mark continues the good news.
Or, "The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ" is a sort of title for the book. In that case the Gospel of Mark itself is "the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ."
Since Mark was the first gospel writer and didn't have a style book to guide him, there isn't any way to decide for certain which of these choices is the right one. As so often happens when we read the Bible, it comes down to a decision we have to make as readers. Our translation, The Common English Bible, picked the first choice, but I find the second choice more interesting, so I'm going with that one. I know that's pretty arbitrary. Humor me.
If Mark's gospel is the beginning of the good news, where does the good news go from there? Mark imagines its own sequel, but doesn't tell us how or when it would be written, nor by whom.
What makes the most sense to me is that the life and message of the early Jesus community is that sequel. The Church is that sequel. We are that sequel.
Sooner or later--later, if you'd ask us-- but sooner or later the Christmas story that we tell, hear, celebrate, and sing must yield its place to the Christmas that we live. Howard Thurman said it best, or at least very well, in his poem, "The Work of Christmas":
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.1
In the next few days we'll finish our Christmas leftovers, we'll take down our trees and put away the decorations. And the work of Christmas will begin. "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ" will have its sequel in us.
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Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas (Richmond, Ind: Friends United Press, 1985), 23.↩
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