Mark’s Story: The Opening Days

January 23, 1994

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Scripture: Mark 1:14-20

I was afraid when I announced that I was restricting myself to just the 1st chapter of Mark as the preaching focus for the month of January that I was perhaps biting off less than I could chew, as it were. That’s a lot of sermons to try to squeeze out of a limited amount of material. I wasn’t sure but that I’d run out of gas before I ran out of month.

I shouldn’t have worried. You can dig nearly anywhere in Biblical soil and find unlimited ore for profitable mining... except maybe parts of Leviticus and the Book of Obadiah.... but with Mark there’s an absolute embarrassment of riches. His Gospel is so compact, so concentrated, so condensed that almost every verse cries out for elaboration. We’re not going to finish even one chapter of Mark this month.

I heard Bishop John Branscomb say one time the first sermon he ever preached...way back there in his youth... in his very first homiletical outing, enthusiastic and green, he preached, he said, on Creation, the 2nd Coming of Christ, and Intervening Events. He said the next time he was supposed to preach, he didn’t have anything left to say.

It does seem that way at first, but once you get into it, as he well knew, once you get going, you find it just the opposite..... YOU NEVER FINISH. There’s always more. It’s an inexhaustible Book with inexhaustible riches.

The reading for today is a prime example. Mark 1:14-20, the reading for the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany, 7 verses again. Mark is telling his fast-paced story of Jesus--- not to give a biographical account, remember..... Gospels are not biographies...Gospels are SERMONS. There are a lot of questions we’d like to ask along the way, but Mark doesn’t have time for that. He’s not writing a LIFE of Jesus....He’s writing about the life that can be FOUND in Jesus.

He’s writing to share some good news about a remarkable personality, about how God has already changed the world through Him...AND NOW CAN CHANGE YOU.... He doesn’t have time for a lot of interesting but irrelevant details.

Jesus is 30 years old, already grown---no birth or infancy stories in Mark. He’s been baptized by John in the River Jordan, been bathed in the Lord’s anointing on Him to be God’s man, been driven out into the Wilderness for testing---the Spirit literally “drove” him out, Mark says... but sustained and strengthened Him, too. AND NOW, with the thrust of His ministry shaped, molded, forged in the crucible of that experience, He emerges from the desert into the public arena to get on with His work.

Can you imagine what must have been the heady exhilaration of those opening days? His ardor, His enthusiasm, His idealism... even His physical energy must have been at peak level. Remember how you felt your first day on your first real job? Multiply that exponentially.

Mark, characteristically, gives almost no elaborative detail. Nouns and verbs, mostly, that’s all... actions words, poured out breathlessly, in tumbling form, one rushing headlong after another... just the barebones outline.

But you can feel the muscle of the intensity. “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the good news of the Kingdom of God.”

AND THE MINISTRY WHICH CULMINATES IN THE REDEMPTION OF THE WORLD IS UNDERWAY.

Don’t you wish you could have been there? Well, in a way, we can be. Not physically, anymore, of course. That’s not possible. We can’t be literally transported back through time to another era, and another location. But through Mark’s words of witness and testimony, through Mark’s story, even from this distance, we can sense, and feel, and experience the power and charisma of this One about whom he is so anxious to share.

TIME AND DISTANCE, SOMEHOW, FALL AWAY WHEN THE GOSPEL WORLD IS ENTERED WITH IMAGINATION. Inspiration, I think, is what we call it---the power of words to summon the WORD. Mark does it here through his exuberant evocation of Jesus of Nazareth in the dawning days of His ministry.

Will you let me choose 3 words in this passage....3 of Mark’s words to look at more closely. They’re all verbs applied to Jesus. In the spirit of Mark, I’d like to use them this morning to help us focus on the central figure in the story. Mark wants us to focus on Him, because he knows Him, believes in Him, and wants to share Him.

1) The first one, the first verb, is PREACH. “Jesus came into Galilee preaching”, Mark says, and with that a whole constellation of images lights up.

Jesus was a preacher before He was anything else. It’s not all He was, and some of the other aspects of His ministry, especially looking at it in retrospect through the prism of the Resurrection may tend to push the importance of this role for us into a corner.... Jesus the Redeemer, Jesus the Battler with cosmic evil.... Jesus the Teacher, the Healer, the Exorcist, the Friend of children, the Advocate for the poor.... He was all of these. But first, before any of those other things, He was a preacher.... “Jesus came preaching....”

It suggests to me at the very least a kind of legitimation of what we often simply dismiss as a fragile, frail means of communicating trust from person to person. Preaching as a practice probably needs that legitimation.... It needs something in the Public Relations department.

Don’t preach to me, we say, usually with a heavy negative connotation. I don’t want to hear a sermon about it.... Preserve me from being bombarded with by a bunch of preachments.....If you haven’t said those very words, you’ve probably thought them. SO HAVE I.

It’s not hard to identify with that. Most of us would join that club in a minute. We’ve seen too much, and heard too much preaching that warranted negative reaction.

I remember agonizing through a sermon one time at Annual Conference, along with about 1800 other fellow sufferers, and when it was mercifully over, I asked someone who was also there what he thought. He said, “You know, the only way that guy could have said less would have been for him to speak longer.”

We’ve all been through it.... dull, repetitious, obvious, boring.... or bombastic, judgmental, sanctimonious, patronizing.... A lot of things can be bad about preaching. It can be insipid and innocuous, all fluff and no substance. Algeline Palti used to describe the location of her house in Wales as being “20 miles from everywhere, and very beautiful.” Too many sermons have exactly that latitude and longitude.

There’s nothing inherently sacred about the act of preaching that automatically bestows on it efficacy and power.

BUT JESUS CAME PREACHING. That’s how He opened His public ministry. That was the method He chose to inaugurate the wonderful good news announcement of the SOVEREIGHNTY OF GOD. “The time is fulfilled. NOW... RIGHT HERE IN THE MIDST OF YOU...RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES.... “The kingdom of God is at hand.”

Gosh, I wish I could have heard Him preach.

I don’t suppose He stood behind a big protective box like this. I love pulpits, and I love this pulpit. It’s majestic and evokes a feeling of strength, seriousness, dignity.... It elevates the position and the one who speaks from it, lends authority to what is said. It does something to you to stand here.... It’s been more than 7 years now, going on 8, and still every time I step up into it, I feel a kind of... what is the word, a kind of luminousness, a kind of spiritual electricity.

But a pulpit can also be a barrier as well as a springboard. It can stand between preacher and people, and inhibit real contact. Its very elevation and placement, while enhancing prestige can at the same time create a kind of wall of separation.

I doubt if Jesus ever had the luxury of preaching 6 feet above contradiction as I can do. When He preached, it was just He and they, joined, bound in intimate contact through the magic of His words. Matthew even tells us that the greatest sermon ever preached, the magnificent Sermon on the Mount, was delivered while He was sitting.... sitting down, and the disciples came to Him.

Preaching is more than oratory, more than verbal pyrotechnics, more than clever crowd manipulation. D.T. Niles put it the best way I ever heard it defined. He said it’s essentially “one beggar telling another beggar where he has found food.” I like that, and while the first part of it obviously doesn’t apply to Jesus, it’s a vivid, unforgettable image.

Jesus came preaching... announcing, sharing, conveying, telling, offering to people hungry to hear it fresh news about the truth of the universe.

Jesus and John, John the Baptist, both proclaimed essentially the same message, but there was a fundamental difference. The Kingdom is at hand; repent and believe the Gospel. THEY BOTH SAID THAT. But here’s the twist. John preached repentance in order to prepare for the coming of the Kingdom. Jesus preached repentance BECAUSE of the coming of the Kingdom.

It’s here, already here, and the exciting thing is, it’s embodied in the proclaimer. The good news has come. Jesus Himself is the Good News, the incarnation of the pledge of God that He is with His people, always, forever, unendingly, unfailingly. That IS good news, isn’t it? The heart of the universe, the core of reality, the ultimate, irreducible truth about life is that what’s there at the center is not antagonistic to us, but is FOR us, is on our side. One of the old hymns that we don’t sing much anymore,[1] and ought to, says it, Frederick Faber’s hymn, “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy.” The 3rd stanza goes, “For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind; And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.”

That’s the good news. Jesus came preaching that radical message.

Could He have chosen some other way to get the news out? Well, sure, I guess so. If He had lived in another time, and in other circumstances, maybe He would have. We’ve been hearing a lot these days about the information explosion, the new electronic highway that will plug us into the world from our living room easy chairs.

The simple act of preaching from “one beggar to another beggar” seems pretty puny in

comparison with today’s possibilities. Maybe even back there other means were open to Him. George Buttrick reminds us that “Jesus could have written books.” Maybe He could have founded a school with a curriculum.

Instead, “He came preaching.” That’s how He chose to do it. He entrusted His most precious sayings to the blemished reputation and precarious memory of His friends.”

There’s something deeply heartening about that, something profoundly encouraging. When you’re tempted to wonder sometimes if it makes any difference at all, you can hold on to that. Words spoken in faithful witness CAN effect change, can influence eternity, just as His words did in the opening days.

Wherever Christ’s word is spoken, and taught, and expressed, and lived, today as in Galilee, there is God in the midst.

Jesus came preaching, and with His preaching came life. Now I’ve spent too much with the first word so I’ll have to hurry.

2) There are 2 other words in the passage this morning that I want to touch on, but I’ll have to treat them succinctly. Mark would certainly approve that. They’re both found in the 2nd half of the lesson, the aftermath, or result of the preaching.

Mark says “As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen.” SAW is the verb...past tense of see. Jesus came preaching, Jesus came seeing.

Somebody should write a book sometime on the EYES of Jesus...maybe somebody has. NO ONE who ever lived, before or since, had the VISION He had.... X-ray vision I’m taking about, of course, the ability to see inside.

The Gospels are filled with references to it.... He looked at the rich young ruler in Luke’s story, and saw the possibilities in him if he could just be liberated from his love of things. He saw the faith of the men who lowered the paralytic through the roof of the house to get their friend down to Jesus. That story is in the very next chapter of Mark. “When Jesus saw their faith”, it says, He healed the crippled man on the spot.

And there is that breathtaking moment with Simon Peter, after the arrest, when Peter is following behind, but not too closely. He wants to be there, but can’t face the cost of what it takes to admit his relationship. Right after He denies even knowing who Jesus is, they lead the Master by to the next stage of His trumped up trial. Luke says in words that almost tear the heart out by the roots, “The Lord turned and looked at Peter.”

That’s all. That’s all it took... He just looked at him... and Peter’s defenses collapsed like a card house.

The eyes of Jesus could look straight through you. In our passage today, Mark tells us, “Jesus saw...saw Simon and his brother, casting their net into the sea.” Then a verse later, again, He SAW James and John, the sons of Zebedee, mending their nets.”

It’s a telescoped incident, I suspect, as Mark relates it, a distillation into a single, brief moment of an event that happened over a period of time. It’s unlikely that this was the first time He had ever laid eyes on them.

But Mark the Gospel writer, Mark the preacher himself wants to convey more than just biological perception here. He wants us to know that Jesus perceived something beyond mere external appearances. He SAW those men... saw leadership and the potential for tough courage in the blustery personality of Simon... saw tenderness and sensitivity in his younger brother, Andrew..... He saw zeal and determination, spirit and daring in James and John, those sons of thunder as they came to be known.

NOBODY else had seen it yet. Nobody else knew it was there. Maybe even they themselves didn’t know those qualities in their incipient stages were in them. BUT JESUS SAW NOT JUST WHAT WAS, BUT WHAT COULD BE. And that’s where everything they were subsequently to develop into for the transformation of the world, and the glory of God began.

The pertinent question now is WHAT DOES HE SEE WHEN HE LOOKS INSIDE YOU? What does He see there? I’m sure He sees some things you’d rather not have Him see..... No doubt there are some frailties, some hostilities, probably some resentments, some old wounds, or even some black, polluted memories of things you’ve done that to this day you’ve never dealt with. HE KNOWS WHAT’S IN THERE.

He knows it all. He can see it all, even if no one else can. But does He also see, as He saw in those 4 fishermen by the Lake that day, the spark of something good, something noble, some latent talent, some burgeoning impulse of generosity or sacrifice? Is that there, too?

Does He see something beautiful in you, the person you can be, the person you’d like to be, the person you have the potential to be, the person even now resonating with trembling anticipation?

THAT’S WHAT HE’S LOOKING FOR. Don’t hide from those eyes. He can deal with the negative stuff. He can take all that past, that blackness, that poison from yesterday and wrap it up in a package and destroy it. He can forgive it because He’s the Son of God and forgiveness is at the heart of His mission. Why do you think we call it good news? LET HIM DO IT FOR YOU.

And then let Him take what’s left, the dreams, the idealism, the yearning to do something decent and worthwhile for God, the best you, the real you.... Let Him take that good He sees in you and really do something decent and worthwhile with it.

Jesus came preaching, Jesus came seeing.... He saw something good in those fishermen. He sees something good in YOU.

3) Now one final verb in the story... very quickly. Not enough time to do it justice, but you can’t leave it out, because here’s where it culminates.

Jesus came preaching, Jesus came seeing.... Are you ahead of me? Jesus came inviting, beckoning, summoning. The verb in the text is call. It says, “As He went a little farther, He saw James, son of Zebedee and his brother who were in their boats mending the nets. Immediately He CALLED them, and they left their father....and followed Him.”

Did they know what they were getting into? Did they realize what lay ahead? I don’t think so. NOT THAT DAY.

They had a long way to go. The record is too full of evidence of mistaken ideas about discipleship.... misunderstanding, misinterpretation.... It was these same two who even after being present at the Transfiguration, who even after being in the inner circle, being exposed over and over to His priorities, and seeing first hand His self-effacement and His humility, had the gall to ask if they could sit at His right and left hand when the Kingdom was finally consummated.

I don’t think even a Methodist preacher would have that much chutzpa.

No, they didn’t know all they were getting into. They’d be learning, and training, and growing, and disciplining from that day until their deaths.... Before it was over they’d go through hostility, and abuse, and ridicule in excess of anything we can even imagine.

But I’ll bet you every dollar I have that if you were to ask them, if it were possible somehow to ask them, at the end of the journey, if they had any regrets that one day back there on the shore of the Lake they responded to a call from Jesus of Nazareth to come and follow Him......they would either laugh in your face at the very ridiculousness of the question, or they would solemnly shake their heads in emphatic denial.

FOR THEY COULD NEVER GET AWAY FROM THAT CALL....There was something in HIM that made them go and stay with Him. WHAT ABOUT YOU? Where does purpose begin? And meaning, and fulfillment, and wisdom, and freedom, and life? Ahhh, Mark knew. They begin with a CALL, an invitation to come follow a MAN sent from God, who came preaching, and seeing, and calling.... calling to Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John, and you..... and me....and the world. What’s holding you back?

Do you know the old spiritual, “I have decided to follow Jesus, No turning back, no turning back, the 2nd stanza goes, “Tho no one join me, still I will follow, and the 3rd stanza is, “The world behind me, the Cross before me...

No turning back, no turning back.

Sing it with me…

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[1] That was true when this was first preached, however the hymn has emerged and is sung more frequently now.