On our first Sunday, we picked a fight with gMark’s opening sentence. “Good news,” evangelion, “Son of God,” “Lord’: every one of those was Caesar’s vocabulary first, and the gospel writer lifted the whole set and proclaimed it over an executed Galilean Jew.
We found two levels running through the text: what Jesus did, enact a Kingdom already breaking through, in the present tense, and what the writer did a generation later: wrap that proclamation in the trauma of the year 70, with the Temple sitting in charred remains. And I handed you a thread to hold from last time. One violent Greek verb, schizō, to tear, to rip open, is used at exactly two moments in gMark — the heavens torn at the baptism, and the Temple curtain torn at the death. Keep holding that thread. It pays off on the last Sunday.
This week, we go back to the start and watch the Kingdom arrive.
Not as an idea, but as a body, walking out of the desert.
Lesson One · No Christmas
So here’s the next strange thing about this earliest gospel: There is no Christmas in gMark. None. No manger, no shepherds, no star, no wise men, no Bethlehem. This first Gospel skips every last bit of the nativity and opens on a grown man leaving the wilderness and walking straight into a fight. The writer had the option to begin where gMatthew and gLuke begin: with His birth. This was a later, theologically different choice. But this gospel starts with a single word, “archē” (beginning/foundation), and then sets you in a desert and a confrontation. So here is what I want you to sit with: whatever gMark means by “the beginning,” it isn’t a birth.
So what’s actually beginning? And why would the Gospel written first have no need at all for the Christmas narrative?
So John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the whole Judean region and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John] and were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with[g] the Holy Spirit.”
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him. MARK 1:4-13
Let’s start with what the text doesn’t say, because the silence is deafening.
• gMatthew opens with a kingly genealogy, a virgin birth, and visiting magi.
• gLuke gives you a lowly manger, the shepherds, and the angels over Bethlehem.
• gJohn climbs higher than both, to a Platonic prelude before time itself.
Three of the four Gospels open with a grand overture. While gMark, the earliest gospel we have, shares none of this with you. One line pierces through the darkness, “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ,” and by the fourth verse, he is seeking out a wild man in the desert eating locusts.
It can be a shock. The nativity stories you love were written a decade or more after gMark, by other writers, for their own good reasons. This writer didn’t drop the birth. In fact, they never reached for it. And when our earliest gospel witness feels no need to tell you that the story starts in a stable, you might lean in and ask where they think the real beginning is.
The answer is the wilderness,
and this narrative choice made sense to the ancient Jewish heart.
The wilderness is where Israel became a people: forty years between slavery and the land, the place of the Abrahamic covenant, where God met his people with fire and with bread. It is where the prophets went, where Elijah heard the still, small voice. So when this Gospel opens in the Judean desert, it is grounding itself in the fundament of all Jewish spirituality.
For gMark: in the beginning, there was an exodus. Not a birth, but a departure.
Both gMark and the translated Greek text of Genesis begin with archē: in the beginning. With the weight of this word, both texts announce a new creation. In Jewish texts, auspicious beginnings are declared defiantly into the dark.
And look at who gets sent out there first. John the Baptizer, clothed in camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist. That is not a wardrobe note; it is another Markan quotation. II Kings describes the prophet Elijah in precisely those words, and nearly every Jew reading this during the Roman-Jewish war would have caught that similarity on the spot.
As Amy-Jill Levine keeps insisting, and she is my guardrail all five weeks on the Jewish texture of this book, John the baptizer stands squarely inside Israel’s own tradition of prophetic renewal: the wilderness preacher calling the people back, the way Isaiah’s voice once cried out to prepare the road. The good news does not begin by leaving the Jewish people behind. It begins in Jewish soil, wrapped in Jewish scripture.
Then the baptism, and here is a detail I am only going to name, not unwrap, because I’m giving you the payoff later. Jesus comes up out of the water, and the heavens are torn open. There is our verb again: schizō, the violent one. Not opened gently. Ripped. I’m leaving it there on the shelf for you. Just keep it there for now.
And then what’s with the speed? The Spirit doesn’t lead Jesus into the wilderness; the text says the Spirit drives him — throws him out there. And immediately — that word, euthys in the Greek, which gMark uses more than forty times — immediately he is among the wild beasts, and immediately after that he is in Galilee announcing that the time is full. This is the texture of the entire Crisis Gospel: breathless, urgent, no room to catch your breath. gMark does not stroll through the Holy Land like Rick Steves. It’s pace is not the tic of a travelogue or historian. It is, itself, also a theological argument.
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him. MARK 1:14–20
Watch where all that speed goes first.
The moment John exits the stage in Roman shackles, Jesus walks into Galilee and says the line this whole lesson has been circling toward — the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. Let’s pause here for a moment. It is the first time in the entire Gospel that the Kingdom is named, and it is named as something that has already arrived, near enough to demand an answer. Repent, and believe in the good news. There is the evangelion again from our first lesson, no longer a slogan stamped on a battle. It is now a summons.
Then, in the same breath, the same immediately: Jesus walks the shore of the sea, sees four fishermen at their nets, tells them to follow him, and they drop everything and go. Not after they sleep on it. Immediately, they left their nets. That is the irruption at the beginning of gMark. The Kingdom does not knock politely and wait to be asked in. It hauls these men out of the water mid-cast. So I ask now that you do something for me: fix these four in your mind exactly here: Simon, Andrew, James, and John. They drop their whole life to follow a stranger out of the desert. We are going to walk with these men for three more Sundays, and we are going to watch these same four, the ones who left everything, turn out to be the ones who cannot see what is standing right in front of them in the end. Remember that they started their journey with nothing held back.
Because here is what the missing manger is trying to tell you: This is my mentor, John Dominic Crossan’s instinct, and it is mine: the Kingdom of God, in this Gospel, is not a doctrine you are born into by blood and land. It is an event that breaks through history. It irrupts. It interrupts what Crossan referred to to me many times as the normal mode of civilization. A baby in a manger is a beginning you can admire from a safe and tender distance. A grown man erupting out of the desert, with a torn sky over his head and a clock already running, is a beginning that demands you do something. gMark skipped the cradle because Christmas isn’t his message. The writer didn’t want you watching a life unfold. They wanted you to be ambushed in the Judean heat, that you might thirst no more.
Lesson Two · Authority You Can See
With John in prison and Jesus now on the scene, the gMark will answer the next logical question: what kind of authority does Jesus have? This is our Greek word for this Sunday: exousia, “authority.”
They went to Capernaum, and when Shabbat came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.
Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching — with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. MARK 1:21-28
There it is, in black and white.
The crowd in the Capernaum synagogue was astounded, for he taught them as one having authority, exousia, and not as the scribes. The text draws the contrast itself, and we have to read it carefully, because a careless reading could turn it into a slander. The scribes taught by citation, and there is nothing ill-fitting about that. It’s how a wisdom tradition stays honest: you ground your ruling in your teachers, in precedent, in the chain of those who reasoned before you. That is a beautiful kind of faithfulness, and one I live my own life by. The Gospel is not sneering at scribal learning. Rather, it is marking Jesus as something genuinely strange inside their world, a man who teaches as though the authority simply rests in him. Authority by citation versus authority by act. The whole claim of gMark is that Jesus leans into the second kind.
And watch how the claim gets proven. Not by Talmudic argument. No, rather than reach for a rabbinic passage in the synagogue library, a man with an unclean spirit arrives to settle the whole debate. Ironic, isn’t it? That in a 16-chapter gospel where all of Jesus’ closest friends fail to recognize who Jesus is, the crowds and authorities too, it’s the demons who get it first.
“I know who you are,” the unclean spirit screams, “the Holy One of God.” And what does Jesus do with this confession? He muzzles it! “Be silent.” The Gospel does this over and over, the truth gets spoken, and Jesus hushes it — the why is a thread for another Sunday. For now, I just want you to sit in that strangeness.
The Kingdom shows up, and its authority isn’t the kind to debate citations with evil.
Rather, it expels evil and proves its point by healing and doing.
If you want gMark’s most visceral case of rebuking evil, it sits a few chapters ahead: the man among the tombs, so torn apart that when Jesus asks the spirit its name, the answer is Legion. That is no coincidence of vocabulary. Legion was the Roman army’s word for a regiment of soldiers, and the most harrowing picture of bondage in the whole gospel names the thing holding this man after the occupying Roman army, which is then cast out and drowned in the sea. Here, a private struggle is made public expulsion and vindication. Expel the demon, and you expel Rome from the land.
When [Jesus] returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door, and he was speaking the word to them. Then they came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.”
Now some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves, and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— “I say to you, stand up, take your mat, and go to your home.” And he stood up and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” MARK 2:1–12
Then a paralyzed man was lowered through a dug-open roof by four friends who would not take no for an answer. Notice that Jesus does not say “rise.” Not first. First, he says, your sins are forgiven. And the scribes sitting there think something entirely reasonable: who can forgive sins but God alone? That objection makes sense! It is good theology, built on the Torah. So Jesus does the visible thing to prove the invisible one, so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority — exousia — our word again, now climbing, authority on earth to forgive sins, and he tells the man to take up his mat and walk. Authority over demons; now authority to forgive. The claims are getting larger. The friction is starting.
It is the same move when, a chapter earlier, he reaches out and touches a leper, lays his bare hand on someone no one was permitted to touch. For Crossan, this is the very heart of the thing: these healings are not merely medical, they are social. To touch the untouchable, to forgive without a priest, to eat with the wrong people, is to reach into a world sorted by purity and status and shame and start un-sorting it by hand.
Crossan calls what Jesus enacts a “brokerless kingdom” — a Kingdom with no middlemen, where you do not climb the ladder through the proper authorities to reach God’s mercy, because the mercy has climbed down the ladder to you.
The Gospel of Mark gives you that un-sorting as an actual scene.
Jesus walks past a tax booth, past a tax collector named Levi, a man his neighbors would have despised as Rome’s bagman skimming his own people, and says the same two words he said to the fishermen: follow me. Then Jesus goes to dinner at his house, and the table is crowded with “tax collectors and sinners,” the exact people a holiness-minded teacher was supposed to keep his distance from. When the objection comes — why does he eat with them? — his answer is the whole Kingdom in a sentence: those who are well do not need a physician, but those who are sick. I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. That is not a theory about mercy, but mercy pulling up a chair at the wrong table.
One Sabbath [Jesus] was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food, how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions?” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for mankind and not mankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”
Again [Jesus] entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They were watching him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. MARK 2:23–3:6
Which brings us to Shabbat, and here I have to slow down, because this is the single easiest place in the whole Gospel to get the text catastrophically wrong. The disciples pluck grain on the Sabbath; some Pharisees object, and Jesus says the line everyone quotes: the sabbath was made for mankind, and not mankind for the sabbath. The wrong way to hear that, and a Christian reader can be tempted to hear it exactly this way, is: there go the rigid, legalistic Jews with their rules, and here comes Jesus to set everyone free with grace. But let’s set that reading down. It is an old contempt dressed as theology, and it has wounded real people. It still does.
Here is what is actually happening, from a Jewish perspective.
What counts as honoring Shabbat was a saucy, loud, internal Jewish debate. It still is. Debating Halacha, the Jewish Way, is in fact one of the principal methods of Jewish worship. Here in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is not standing outside of his Jewish identity, attacking it. Rather, he is standing with both feet planted inside it, arguing, and the position he takes is a thoroughly Jewish one: the conviction that the Sabbath serves human life runs straight through Jewish tradition, and is later formalized in the principle that one should always set the Sabbath aside to save a life.
So when Jesus heals the man with the withered hand and asks, "Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” he is not abolishing Jewish Halacha. Jesus is arguing from inside Jewish Law, in its own idiom, about what the Law is supposed to be for. That is not Jesus versus the Jews. That is a righteous Jewish internal family dispute, written down for the instruction of the nations.
And then the line that closes this whole opening movement — and it is a dark one. The Pharisees go out and conspire with the Herodians on how to destroy him. Hold that lightly, and please do not let it curdle into “the Jews wanted Jesus dead.” That is a slander this Gospel is not making, and history does not support. Notice instead who pairs up: the Pharisees, a religious renewal movement, and the Herodians, the party of the puppet kings who openly served Rome. Religious power and imperial power find common cause against this man. Why both end up wanting him gone is a question for our Fourth Sunday. For now, just remember the result. By the end of chapter three, acting as though the Kingdom is already here has made Jesus very dangerous.
So the Kingdom shows up, proving its legitimacy through righteous action. But when Jesus finally does explain, in a parable, the people start picking sides.
Lesson Three · The Same Seed, Different Soil
So far, the Kingdom has been impossible to stop.
It erupts.
It acts.
Demons obey.
The paralyzed walk.
The day itself bends to it.
Then Jesus sits down by the sea and tells a story about a farmer scattering seed, and the story is about all the ways the seed fails. Birds eat it. Rock scorches it. Thorns choke it. After two lessons of unstoppable power, the Gospel hands you a parable whose whole subject is everything that doesn’t take. The authority that nothing could resist can be resisted after all, by the most ordinary thing in the world: the ground.
Again [Jesus] began to teach beside the sea. Such a very large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the sea and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on a path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” And he said, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!”
When [Jesus] was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything comes in parables, in order that ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’ ”
And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: when they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. But they have no root and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are those sown among the thorns: these are the ones who hear the word, but the cares of the age and the lure of wealth and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing. And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” MARK 4:1–20
This is the parable of the sower. Or really, the parable of the soils, because the farmer and the seed never change. Only the ground changes. The same seed falls on a hard path, on thin rocky dirt, among thorns, and on good earth, and only the last of them bears anything. Here is the thing I most want you to see, the reason this story sits right here: the parable is about the reception of the very thing the last two lessons put on display. The Kingdom showed up in person. It erupted; it acted with an authority that made demons obey. And the Gospel’s next move is to tell you that even that, even the Kingdom arriving in the flesh and acting in broad daylight, does not land the same way in every heart.
The seed is flawless. The soil is the variable.
So watch the text’s arc climb.
First the Kingdom erupted: it broke through. Then it disrupted: it acted, it crossed lines, it made enemies. Now it turns out to be contested: received here, refused there, choked somewhere else. That is the arc of the whole Gospel of Mark.
A word from Levine to keep us honest, because the parable form gets misread too. Parables are a Jewish teaching form, alive long before Jesus and long after him, and their job is to provoke, to unsettle, to refuse to hand you the meaning so that you have to climb in and wrestle for it. A parable is not a ‘secret code’ that hides the truth so the in-crowd can feel clever (despite what a lot of movies and junk theology will espouse). A parable is a hook. It encourages the hearer to do something. I want you to keep that in your pocket, because the very next lines are some of the hardest in all of the Gospel of Mark.
Jesus says something that, taken the wrong way, could sound terrible.
To the disciples, he says, ‘to you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God,’ but to those outside, everything stays in parables, so that they may look and not perceive, and listen and not understand. That could be taken to mean that God deliberately blinds people from the truth. But two things I want you to hold while pondering this.
Jesus is quoting. Those words come from Isaiah, the prophet sent to a people he is told from the very start will not listen, a commission soaked in heartbreak (not contempt for fellow Jews).
And second, and this is the part that detonates the whole “insiders versus outsiders” reading, look at what happens the moment Jesus finishes. He turns to the disciples, the supposed insiders, the ones just handed “the secret,” and he has to explain the parable to the disciples, because they don’t get it either. “Do you not understand this parable?” he asks. “Then how will you understand any of them?” The inner circle is bad soil, too. So, this dividing line is not the faithful insiders against the blind outsiders. In this Gospel, the insiders also keep missing it. Hold onto that one. It owns the whole of our next Sunday together.
This is where the late Marcus Borg comes to our aid. He explains this passage like this — it’s not hearing versus not hearing, but hearing versus understanding. People in this Gospel hear constantly. Understanding is the rare thing. From this parable forward, that gap becomes the engine of the whole gospel narrative — running all the way down to a blind beggar outside Jericho who, of everyone in the book, finally sees.
So, what does it look like when the Kingdom shows up in person? It looks like an irruption — a man walking out of the desert; not a nativity, but a torn-open sky behind him. It looks like an authority (exousia) who proves by doing. And it looks like a field of soils, where the same seed meets a hundred grounds, and only some of them open. The Kingdom comes with awesome authority, and it still waits to be received.
The seed isn’t the problem in gMark. It is the ground that receives it.
In the beginning was an exodus, who proved his authority with acts of righteousness and the rejoining of families. And though it was good, the ground was not ready to receive him. On our next Sunday, we see where this all leads.
---
The Gospel of Mark · 2nd of 5 Sundays: Wilderness, Baptism, Demons & Authority.
Next Sunday: “Bread, Boundaries, & the Way of the Cross.”