I am just the voice of one who is greater than this; after me comes the one more powerful than I, one whose sandals I am unfit to untie…I answered to the One who gave this message to me, the voice still resonates in my soul; The voice still rattles my bones – “Prepare the way, make straight paths for him, you will baptize with water, He will baptize with the Holy Spirit. I am just the voice of one who is greater than this; but I am still a sacred voice, and I will not be dismissed.
Jonah cries against the city of Nineveh warning of imminent destruction. Isaiah cries out against the sin of Israel, Jeremiah against the sin of Judah, both warning of imminent destruction. John cries out against our own sin, and then unlike Jonah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, John shows us the solution to our sin, he introduces us to the person of Jesus Christ.
So begins the Gospel of Mark. John the Baptist comes and goes making a brief appearance at the beginning of Mark, but his brief appearance, and lower status should not lead us to dismiss his ministry. John the Baptist sets the stage for the rest of the gospel: John calls the people out into the wilderness, he calls us out of our civilized lives with all its distractions and urgencies to the wilderness where we can see what we really need in our lives – the almighty God.
The Gospel of Mark is the earliest scroll that takes the words of the Apostle’s about Jesus’ life and places them into written form. Before the Gospel of Mark people had testimonies from eye witnesses about Jesus, and they had the Old Testament Scriptures to refer to about prophecies concerning Jesus, but they had no written document. So Mark sets out to create a book that congregations can have with accurate information about the ministry of Jesus here on earth.
The author of the Gospel of Mark is seen by scholars to be a man named John Mark. He was a Jewish Christian whose mother Mary owned a house in the city of Jerusalem where people from the original Christian community met. So the person of John Mark can be traced back to the very first group of people who gave their lives over to Jesus Christ. John Mark was surrounded by people who were there when everything started. John Mark probably knew most people of significance from the gospels or knew people who knew the people of significance in the gospels. He is a man who is immersed in the testimony of Jesus Christ. His mother’s house was the house that the apostle Peter went to after his release from prison in Acts 12:12. Can you imagine being a young person at home with your mom and the Apostle Peter drops by your house first, the very first thing, to let your family know everything is ok? How cool it that? What does that tell you about the importance of John Mark’s family in the early Christian community? John Mark has a solid family behind him; John Mark is no stranger, no outsider to the happenings of early Christianity or to the testimony of Jesus Christ.
John Mark also spent a significant amount of time with the Apostles Paul and Peter. Paul at first views John Mark as irresponsible, which he probably was, and refuses to take him along on a second mission trip, we see this in Acts chapter 15. Paul was later reconciled to John Mark, and they become very close as they do extensive work together. John Mark was with Paul during his imprisonment in Rome. We see how close they have become as we see Paul instructing Timothy to bring Mark to Rome while he is in Prison because Paul saw him as so indispensable.
When Peter was writing his letter of 1 Peter, John Mark was in Rome with Peter, no doubt helping in any way he could. In fact, John Mark was so close to the apostle Peter, that Peter refers to him as his son in 1 Peter 5:13. If that is not an endorsement, I don’t know what is. Further, we see that John Mark was the cousin of Barnabas, Col. 4:10 “My fellow prisoner Aristarchus sends you his greetings, as does Mark, the cousin of Barnabas.” We have before us a gospel from a man who was very much, in the thick of things, this is the real stuff.
The earliest reference concerning the Gospel of Mark is from around the year 140 from Papias, Bishop of Hieropolis. The bishop cites the testimony of an elder, saying: “Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatever he remembered of the things said and done by the Lord….” The testimony is not presented as Papias’s opinion, but as the word of an earlier authority. Then, from about the year 175, Irenaeus writes on the Gospels: “And after the death of these (the apostles) Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also transmitted to us in writing the things preached by Peter.” Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria also concur with this around the year 200. In fact when Peter’s preaching from Acts is compared to sections of Mark there is a striking parallelism and the voice of Peter can be seen by comparing some passages. For though Mark was not with the Lord Jesus in his lifetime, he hears and records the testimony of one of the closest disciples to Jesus – Peter. It appears that the content of the Gospel of Mark is derived from the apostle Peter and placed into literary form by Mark. What that means is this: The Gospel of Mark is the testimony of the Apostle Peter about the person of Jesus Christ, who was, by the way, one of the closest people to our Lord Jesus. Awesome.
Mark is generally dated as written somewhere between the year 60 and the year 70. Mark could have started his writing before Peter died, but he definitely would have finished it after Peter’ death. Some scholars have offered theories that Mark was written much later, but to this date, there is no substantial basis for revising the date written between 60 and 70. In other words, there is no reason to take any challenge to these dates seriously.
All of this taken together tells us this: Because it is dated as one of the earliest writings; because is was written by a man immersed in the lives of the earliest Christians and the most significant Christians of the day; Because what we have before us is not just John Mark’s own thoughts, but the testimony the Apostle Peter – What we hold here is precious, reliable, real and should be taken very seriously. With the utmost sobriety. For when Jesus speaks in this gospel, you can be pretty certain that those are the words of Jesus…and Jesus’ words are very challenging. This isn’t a child’s tale or a work of fiction, this is true and reliable testimony.
With the significance of who John Mark was in mind, let us move to our Scriptures this morning. By the way, I’m sure thankful we call this the Gospel of Mark instead of the Gospel of John Mark because I would always be getting it confused with the Gospel of John.
Now the term Gospel was not just a Christian term, it wasn’t a word that the Christians invented, but was common term among the general population. To the Romans it meant “Joyful Tidings” and was associated with the cult of the emperor, whose birthday was a celebrated festival in the whole known world at that time. People all over the empire would celebrate the emperor’s birthday. The theme of the festivals was always that, because the emperor came into he world, the world is now changed in a significant way that has brought us great joy – so we celebrate. An inscription from about 9 B.C. from Priene, refers to the emperor Octavian saying, ”the birthday was for the world the beginning of joyful tidings which have been proclaimed on his account”. This inscription is very similar to Mark’s first line and it clarifies the purpose of the scroll of the Gospel of Mark: A historical event has occurred which introduces a new situation for the world and this significant event brings us great joy. Mark writes in this manner using the term gospel, so that the average Roman would understand the significance of the proclamation of Jesus as Messiah. They would read it and immediately understand where Mark was going with his story. Like the birth of a Roman emperor, Mark claims that Jesus, the son of God brings a radically new state of affairs to mankind and the following pages will tell us how.
So in verse 1 Mark leads us in the significance of the change that has happened by using the term gospel; but being a man of the Word, Mark immediately moves to Scripture to back up his story with authority, and he starts with the prophet Isaiah. The explicit reference to Isaiah shows that the gospel receives its proper interpretation in light of the Word of God – the prophetic word of the old testament. This points to the difference between a Roman gospel and a Christian gospel – the Roman gospel looks to the past, at an event that has already taken place, while the Christian gospel, states that something has happened in the past, but it also looks forward not only to the future, but to the eschatological future when Jesus Christ will hold dominion and authority over all things.
Taking a look in your bibles at verse 2-3 we see that the Isaiah quote is actually a composite quotation of Exodus 23:20, Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3. Though this seems an odd thing to do for us in our day, to gather several scriptures together as one, this particular passage was commonly fused this way by rabbis of the day. This was not an unusual thing. So Mark is using a common well known rendering of these verses to summarize the beginning of Jesus ministry – in fact this rendering may have been familiar to many of the readers of the gospel in his day.
This is a gospel about Jesus Christ, but it doesn’t start with Jesus does it? it starts with the person of John the Baptist, why is that? John, who is a prophet in the tradition of Jonah and Isaiah calls people to repentance, but like we saw in the beginning of this sermon, he goes a step further; He not only points out our sin calling for our repentance, but he also introduces us to the solution – Jesus Christ. Verses 2-3 show that John is the one who is setting the stage for Jesus to launch his ministry. How does he do this? Verse 4-5 tell us: John is in the desert, sometimes called the wilderness calling people to repentance and baptism.
Baptism appears to be a unique activity of the prophet John, and so much so, that he is simply known as, The Baptizer. While baptism was known and used in Israel, John appears to be using it in a unique way. John called for the familiar repentance that other prophets called for, but then he goes a step further. He insists on, an act of baptism to go with the commitment to repentance the person just made. John is asking people to repent, and he wants them to take an action, a public testimony to hold testimony to their commitment to change.
Now in the earliest OT prophecy, repentance means to return to the beginning of the history of God’s people – a return to the wilderness. A willingness to return to the wilderness shows the acknowledgement of Israel’s history as one of rebellion and disobedience and a willingness to go back and begin again once more. So this is why John is out in the wilderness having the people come to him, rather than being inside the cities and villages as was the case in Jesus’ ministry because he is calling people back to the beginning, back to the time when Israel was in the wilderness right after coming out of the land of Egypt. He is calling them back to the beginning of their relationship as a people with God. A couple of weeks ago we saw that the first step of repentance is to stop what your doing and turn around. Here we see John showing us that after we stop and turn around we need to go someplace – and that place is back to the basics, back to our relationship with God….before all this stuff got in the way of our faith.
John is described as wearing camel hair clothes and a leather belt around his waist. Some of us may have a camel hair sport coat, something we may have paid a pretty penny for, but I would imagine that John’s coat was a little less…refined. Why does Mark tell us this about John the Baptist? It was at the Jordan that the prophet Elijah disappeared, and Elijah dressed in the same manner John the Baptist dressed. So John shows up at the Jordan, like a Cinderella man, out of nowhere, and people think, “This is Elijah retuned”. We even read about John the Baptist in Luke 1:17 “And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” John is not Elijah reincarnated, reincarnation is nonsense and is not in any way biblical. Resurrection yes, reincarnation, no. But because John comes in the spirit of Elijah, spirit meaning like, “she has great school spirit”, because he comes in the spirit of Elijah, Jesus ministry is set to go – because it is acknowledged that Elijah must come before the Messiah. Matt. 11:12-14 “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it. 13 For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. 14 And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come.” So John fulfills prophecy and sets this up for Jesus saying, (verse 7-8) “After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” And then Jesus shows up in verse 9.
So a crisis of decision is created. People committed to the ministry of John now have to move from repentance to allowing God to change their lives. Jesus, He receives the sign of repentance when he is baptized, not for his own sins, but for the sins of the world. He also acknowledges the judgment of God upon Israel, which he will free those who believe in Him from. Additionally, Jesus in his baptism is endorsed by the Father, which is the voice in verse 11, and by the Holy Spirit which is seen in the symbol of the dove.
Elijah comes, Jesus receives the sign of repentance for us here today, He is endorsed by the Father and the Holy Spirit and heads into the wilderness…..
When we look at verses 12-13, in these brief verses we see what it means for Jesus to heed John’s call to the wilderness. Moses and Elijah are men of the wilderness, so is John the Baptist, and so we see, is Jesus. This is an introductory theme of Jesus ministry – calling Israel out into the wilderness, calling us out to the wilderness, which is what? Going back to relationship with God. Jesus out in the wilderness, confronts the loneliness, the wild animals – the context here is not a lush paradise, but a dry wild place, Satan’s realm. In the OT blessing is associated with cultivated, inhabited land, the wilderness represents the place of a curse. So Jesus goes out into the place of the curse being tempted by Satan and at the same time being attended to by angels. Jesus is here for 40 days, prevailing and then moving out into the world.
Here is what we can take away this morning: First, and very clearly, the Gospel of Mark is the real and authoritative Word of God, every phrase has extensive meaning for us. So when we read this book, we should read it not as literature, but revelation from God. Second as Isaiah, John and Jesus were called out into the wilderness so are we –and that call into the wilderness is for us as believers to not only repent, stopping in our sin and turning around, but it means we are to then go back to that sweet relationship with Jesus before all these distractions of civilized life overtook us. This, says John Mark, is where we need to start in reviving our relationship with Jesus.
I hope the material in this sermon has been helpful to you as you strive to reach your congregation’s needs. May the Lord Jesus be with you as you prepare your own powerful message for your congregation.
Peter
