I love Kurt Vonnegut. It’s a silly thing to say because I have only scratched the surface of his writings, but I love what I have read and fondly remember videos of him being interviewed or moderating writing events. I’m thinking about Slaughterhouse V, and Billy Pilgrim becoming unstuck in time. It’s a beautiful device, exactly like we often find in Scripture, because it forces us to confront and envision a problem in a way we will not easily find in the world. To confront the horror and psychological trauma of an event like the firebombing of Dresden by depicting a person’s psyche as being so disrupted that it becomes disconnected from spacetime is to deploy a device that not only says volumes in just a few words, but also allows Vonnegut to construct a story freed from our normal expectations thereby allowing him to relate difficult concepts in surprising, fresh, and often hilarious ways.
This brings us to the gospel of Mark.
Mark doesn’t come up a lot at Advent or Christmas. The reason is simple: Mark has no infancy narrative. Not a word. Why?
I hate to say it, but it’s simply because it wasn’t important. It didn’t matter. Now, before you pick out the variety of rotten vegetable you want to throw at me, let’s remember that Christmas was not even celebrated until the year 326, some 300 years after the Resurrection. Quite simply, in the 1st century, Christmas was not a thing.
Now I love Christmas. I am not for a minute suggesting there is anything wrong about us celebrating Christmas or singing cantatas or performing Christmas pageants or hosting Christmas parties or any of the other uncountable ways we celebrate the season. Quite the opposite. What I am saying is that if we want to understand Mark and what he has to say about the coming of the Christ, we cannot expect to find the Christmas that we think we know. The mistake we should not make is to think that because Mark does not describe what we recognize as Christmas, he has nothing to say about it.
Of course, if you keep reading Mark, it gets worse. There are no post-Resurrection appearances either. So it’s not just Christmas that Mark seems to ignore, but a big part of Easter also! This was such a problem for some in the early church that most scholars agree that not one but two endings were added later to clean that up a bit. It is quite likely that Mark ended at verse 8 in chapter 16; the remainder of the present text was added later to smooth all this out and make us all feel a bit more comfortable.
Oops.
Why would Mark leave all this out? What is wrong with Mark? Nothing at all. As is often the case, I suspect it’s more likely that there’s something wrong with us. Mark is the earliest gospel, one of the earliest Christian documents. It is closest in time to the events themselves, and by that fact alone may be a more faithful witness. It was clearly a revered document, as both Matthew and Luke used almost all of it in their own gospels. As the first gospel, it was a novel and completely original piece of literature. It is foundational, and may have been the founding document of Mark’s Gentile community. Wise mentors have advised me to look in Mark first, because if Mark doesn’t include it, it may not be that important. Mark wastes few words.
So who was Mark? Again, we do not know for sure. Tradition ascribes the gospel to John Mark, a disciple of Peter and companion of Paul. What is more clear is that, like Luke, the audience was Gentile. Unlike Luke, Mark’s Greek is simpler and colloquial, with figures of speech found more in spoken Greek than formal prose. It’s interesting to note that it takes about 90 minutes to read Mark aloud in one setting, just the right length for a evening’s performance in a 1st century amphitheater, market square, or family home.
So how does Mark start his gospel? After a brief quote from Isaiah, Mark ushers us right to the Jordan River and the baptism of Jesus, the moment where Jesus begins his ministry. This makes complete sense when you think about it. We know very little about the life of Jesus of Nazareth before this moment when his ministry began. Besides the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew (again, not in Mark) and the story of Jesus in the Temple at age 12 (also not in Mark), there is no mention of what happened to Jesus as a teenager or as a twenty-something. Mark’s position is clear: nothing that happened before Jesus’ baptism is of any importance.
So we start there, and what a beginning! Think about who shows up to this baptism: God the Father, whose voice we hear; Jesus, the Christ, being baptized; and the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus as a dove. Bingo! Mark wins the profound theology prize! In two brief verses Mark presents to us not just the baptism of Jesus, but the “birth” of the Trinity! Now, of course, it’s nonsensical to speak of the “birth” of the Trinity, when the Trinity is only a human-created model that attempts to explain the nature of a God that is both beyond our imaginations and that has existed and does exist beyond the known universe. What Mark is depicting here is the revelation of the Trinity, the “birth” of our understanding of it and, most importantly, of who Jesus is. There is no more important question for the gospel writers than that of who Jesus is. Mark gives us the answer right out of the gate, only a few dozen words into his gospel. This is Mark’s Christmas, the tearing of the heavens and the coming into the world of the Christ and the Holy Spirit in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It is at this moment that all of these entities come together, and instead of shepherds watching in awe at night in their fields, we have John the Baptist and his gathered faithful watching in awe along the banks of the Jordan River.
Other images should appear to us now. The scene Mark presents of Jesus’ baptism foreshadows the Transfiguration, where once again the three persons of the Trinity converge in almost identical fashion, now on a mountaintop joined by Moses and Elijah. It should not escape our notice that John the Baptist, who was killed before the Transfiguration, was widely considered a return of Elijah. So who really was on that mountaintop? Here’s another: Mark’s depiction of Jesus’ baptism also foreshadows Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends in very much the same manner. Mark does not write about Pentecost, but Luke does, and there can be no doubt that Luke knew exactly what he was doing here. Do you see the pattern? What happens to Jesus happened to his disciples, and because we are also his disciples, these things will happen to us. Very quickly, the entire story becomes unstuck in time.
Imagine being someone in the 1st century listening for the first time to Mark’s gospel being read aloud. There were no other gospels. There was no Bible beyond the Hebrew scripture (our Old Testament). Paul’s letters were still just letters. You are almost certainly illiterate, as are the vast majority of the population, so reading is not an option. The speaker is reading the gospel to you as an invitation into a Christian community, and you hear all of the action and immediacy that infuses every scene, and come to know all too clearly that what happened to all of the disciples is open and available to you, and will happen to you! It’s not someone else’s story!
Think about this: when were Christians often baptized in the early church? On Easter! Why do you need to read about someone else’s post-Resurrection appearances when you’re about to have your very own on Easter? It’s all going to happen now. Not at some other time or place! Not to somebody else! The Kingdom is here now. A new life is ready for you now! Christ stands on the doorstep, knocking! Now!
I think perhaps this would have been one of Mark’s favorite Christmas songs:
For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute
Candles in the window
Carols at the spinet
Yes, we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute
We need a little Christmas now!
Yes! Exactly! Mark is here to say, you’ve got it! Why do you think so many of Mark’s verbs are in the present tense? Too often I fear that we modern folk, so separated in time and culture from that of Mark, see the Bible as just a big book that needs to be studied, that is about other people’s lives long ago, and that is trapped in that faraway time and place. No! If we let Mark’s immediacy shatter this glass box in which we’ve imprisoned the texts and realize that there is no book, there is only Word and Spirit available to us now in our lives today, that it is not only about our ancestors in the faith but about us, if we can get to that place, then I truly believe the experience can be transformative. Then for us, the stories truly become unstuck in time, available to settle into ours.
Here’s a beautiful approach that some offer as a way to read the ending of Mark. Let’s assume that the gospel really does end in chapter 16, verse 8. Read that ending, then immediately start the gospel over with chapter 1 verse 1: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. Do you see? The Resurrection is that beginning! It’s the answer to the hanging question at the end of the gospel, and you, the hearer, now become the evangelist! The speaker has passed the baton to you, and now you present the gospel to others. So the story becomes your own, and you’ve found yourself engaging in ministry.
In this way, it becomes doubly meaningful that Mark starts with baptism, because now we see that this baptism is also our baptism, the beginning of our own ministries. If you are baptized, think back to your baptism or confirmation. If you aren’t baptized, then consider it a possible future event. In the church baptism is that moment when we each publicly acknowledge the revelation of the Holy Spirit in our lives and make public commitments to ourselves, to God, and to the church. The promise is itself Trinitarian: it is a promise to ourselves, to God, and to our neighbors, mirroring the two great commandments to love God and neighbor as we love ourselves. Let’s be clear: we do not hold that baptism is either the first or only time this revelation of the Spirit happens; that can and does happen at any time. But baptism is our personal Pentecost, the public acknowledgment of this Advent of the Holy Spirit, and as such, is the beginning of our public ministries.
This is the point where Mark might want to start telling our stories, because the most important story is the one we write through our ministries. We are all called to ministry, to go out and do work that fulfills promises made at our baptisms. That is why baptism must be public. It’s not just making a private commitment. We are called into relationships and called to build new relationships through the power of the Holy Spirit. In doing so we build up the church. We build the Kingdom.
This is why baptism is so important. This is perhaps why Mark starts with it. Mark helps us keep our eye on the prize. Because when in ministry, when you’re at the soup kitchen, when you’re counseling a troubled teen, when you’re in a hospital room praying with a grieving family, the only thing that matters in that moment is the love that you bring into that space through the power of the Holy Spirit.
In my youth the Holy Spirit was the hardest person of the Trinity to understand. God as Creator made sense, as did the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. But the Spirit seemed hard to nail down (little did I know!) But now, I find that the Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity that I understand best because it continually disrupts my life in marvelous ways! The more I see it the easier it is to see. It’s a continuous positive feedback loop. Honestly, a great deal of the Christian walk is simply learning to recognize the Holy Spirit in our ordinary day to day lives, and in doing so, we transform our lives into ministries.
So this Advent, if you are baptized, remember your baptism, and be thankful. Hear Mark’s call to release your baptism so that it becomes unstuck in time, an event you experience once but renew continually. Hear Mark’s call to immediacy and urgency, not out of panic or fear, but from the simple fact that there is no time like the present because there is no time except the present. That is where we meet God, in the eternal present, in an eternal life that is here now and available now and always, completely free and unstuck in time. I leave you with the Carpenters:
Christmas future is far away
Christmas past is past
Christmas present is here today
Bringing joy that will last
Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas!
Next up – God’s Advent: An Imperial Upheaval
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