I had a colleague at the first church I worked at who was a bit of a grinch. He dreaded Christmas. He was put off by the stress that Christmas produced in people: the financial burdens felt by the congregation, the mass consumerism of the season, the obligatory gatherings, and the constant pressure to show some holiday cheer.
His reasons weren’t theological. He was a really big fan of Jesus, grateful that God decided to be known in the person of Christ. The whole incarnation? He was all for it. But the Christmas season? It was too much. And so he tried to get the rest of the staff to consider the idea that maybe we should only celebrate Christmas every other year.
I laughed at first, but he made a couple of good points. Easter, he pointed out, is central in all four Gospels. Maundy Thursday, all of Holy week—also in all four Gospels—and so of course, we need to celebrate those every year. And all four Gospels record Jesus’s baptism. Let’s make that a big thing! But Christmas? We only get that story in two Gospels. John and Mark don’t have a birth story. Only Matthew and Luke. So celebrating Christmas every other year makes sense.
While I smiled at his unconventional logic, our congregation continued celebrating Christmas every single year at church. We may not get a birth story in Mark, BUT, if you are really looking for a birth story,
there is a nod, in these opening lines of the Gospel, to the celebration of someone’s birth. Let me read, again, the first sentence of the Gospel of Mark: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God …”
“Good News” is a phrase that would have been significant to Mark’s readers. Not because it was a uniquely Christian phrase. Nor was it a common phrase used in the early church. Not yet. When Mark’s audience heard: “The Good News,” they would have immediately thought of the birth, not of Jesus, but of Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor.
The birth of Caesar was known throughout the Empire as “the beginning of the good news.” This is not because it actually WAS good news for everyone. But because everyone was TOLD that it was good news. Rome tried to pull a Jedi-Mind-trick on its people by telling them all, “Augustus is the beginning of Good News for the world,” and “the god Augustus is the savior of all people.”
They said it everywhere, proclaimed it throughout the land, and had scribes write it down on papyrus and stone tablets. There are pieces of it that still exist today, which read: “the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning for the world of good news that came by reason of him.”
These bold statements were an attempt to convince people that the birth of Caesar Augustus was SO important to the world that a new calendar should begin with his birthday, that a new kingdom would begin with this political birth. These scribes proclaimed near and far that Caesar Augustus was, and would be, the bearer of good things for the people. Good News was a political statement.
But that didn’t make it a reality. Augustus’s birth was not, in fact, good news to all people living inside Roman occupied spaces. Yet to keep up the facade, everyone living under Roman rule was required to claim Caesar Augustus as a savior and gift to all people. They were asked to agree with it, or risk repercussions from the government.
For Rome, Good News was something that came from, and could only be found within, the structure of the political system. Good News was connected to power and military victory.
And the writer of Mark uses this phrase, the Good News, as his Gospel opener, completely transforming the meaning. Mark isn’t just trying to spite those in authority by taking their tagline. He wants people to take note. To consider what they have been told about Good News and see the possibility for something truly good. He is pointing to the obvious contradiction between the promises of Augustus and the promises of Jesus. To show what real hope looks like.
And that it doesn’t come in the birth of a Roman Emperor. But in the incarnation of the living God, the one the Lord prepared.
Mark starts off the Gospel with these words: “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And that line would have stopped readers in their tracks. They would have paused right there.
At verse 1. Early readers of this Gospel would have seen what Mark was doing as he relocates the promises of God, the hope, peace, joy and love of Jesus outside of the structures of Rome’s Good News.
Outside of the way of life that they knew.
For Mark, this doesn’t come through Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. In Mark’s Gospel, we have no Mary. No Joseph. No angels. We don’t even get a shepherd watching his flock by night. We get the Good News, a stolen political statement, taken from the place of power so that it could find its true power in the Gospel story. Then we get John the Baptist, dropped into the story without much of an introduction, calling people to recognize the truth of their lives and of the world. Calling people to come and be baptized. To receive forgiveness. To repent, to change direction in life.To turn around and go a new way. A message people flocked to, desperate for the promise of hope that might stick.
The poet WH Auden spent years searching for the thing to put his hope in. He had seen the brutality of life, living through two world wars and Spanish flu. Auden was notoriously untidy. He would show up to book readings in a stained and wrinkled suit that was covered with ash. He drank excessively. He wore the messiness of his own life on his sleeve. He understood despair and fear and chaos because he had lived it;
it wasn’t just something out there. He longed for order in the world, even as he couldn’t keep his own life in order.
Auden sought answers and solutions. First in political movements. And then in scientific progress. Later he became fascinated by Freud and hoped modern psychology could cure the brokenness he knew;
but in the end, despite our best psychological theories and our best political experiments, Auden lamented at how everything was just as rotten as before.
And that is when he turned toward the Anglican church. There he found a promise of hope that looked different than what these other places were offering. Something that was real and lasting. Not based in who had power or the newest paper that was written, but based in something that could outmatch the despair he saw.
And that was Christ. Whose power wasn’t anything he could fully describe, but was more real than anything he’d found elsewhere in his life. What John the Baptist saw were a lot of people like Auden,
searching for the something that would stick. Desperate for a world where the broken things are made whole. Needing hope that sticks and a love that is real and lasting.
This scene, this opening to Mark’s Gospel story, it takes place in the wilderness. Outside of the familiar. Outside of the decision-making arena of Rome. It’s not a specific location, but a symbol of somewhere outside the city and its jurisdictions. Outside of the administrative structures.
The wilderness was a place of fragility. Where life is a bit uncertain. And that is precisely where Mark begins the Gospel. Where the Good News is first proclaimed. It meets the desperate hearts of people 2000 years ago. And this Good News meets the longing and desperate hearts seeking God’s hope today.
One of the tv shows of my childhood was M.A.S.H, the show about the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital staff during the Korean War. I used to watch reruns with my grandmother. There is an episode in season four where a wounded pilot is brought into the hospital tent. Radar, the corporal who checks him in, asks his name. The pilot responds saying “My name is Jesus Christ.” The pilot wasn’t joking. He believed he was Jesus.
Everyone in the episode responds differently to him. Radar is strangely drawn to him, while other doctors and nurses think the Jesus-pilot is conning them. They think he is trying to work the system and get out of the war. Eventually, they call in the Colonel to try to scare the pilot into telling the truth. But he never wavers from his story.
He believes himself to be Jesus.
The colonel, holding in his frustration, finally asks: “You say you are Christ, and yet here you are in a hospital in the middle of a war. What would Jesus be doing here?” And with quiet tears running down his face, the pilot responds: “I am Christ the Lord. Where else should I be?”
He is absolutely right about the kind of place tear-stained Jesus would be found. A hospital in the middle of a war zone with the wounded. In a shelter for people who don’t have a home.
Right next to you when life doesn’t make sense.
This is the proclamation of the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. That Good News has come and it is for all people who are desperate for it. For all who find themselves longing for it. The Good News offers a new path and a new hope with forgiveness and restoration for anyone and everyone. And it does NOT begin in the palace of the emperor.
It is easy, today, to settle for the kind of promises of hope that Ancient Rome was peddling—that our salvation, our hope, our promises of things being made new would come from within our chosen systems. These systems aren’t bad—they will just leave us wanting. And they aren’t what Mark is pointing to in his Gospel. Mark is reminding us that hope doesn’t come from the assumed power structures. Hope comes in Jesus Christ.
Mark relocates the Good News to Jesus, who is at loose in the world. Showing up in places nobody expected. Bringing hope to all.
On this second Sunday of Advent, we find Mark pointing us toward a different kind of Christmas story. One my colleague had suggested we preach in lieu of the birth narrative. Change up the celebration.
But, honestly, this message is one we need to hear more than every few years. More than annually. This message of the Good News, redefined and unleashed into the world, this is a message that we need DAILY. We need to hear it again and again.
The message of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the son of God—it is a message of hope, breaking into this world and your life, this day, and in every season to come.
Notes
