Mark 1: 1 – 8
Advent is the beginning of the Church Year. We begin all over again to read and rejoice in God’s story. The first Gospel that was ever written was probably the Gospel according to Mark. He was a realist. He doesn’t take time to philosophize or conjecture. His Gospel is the shortest of all the Gospels – and the bluntest – a sort of these-are-the-facts approach to the story of God and God’s presentation of Christ as God’s fullest revelation of God’s self and His purposes for His created world.
Mark does not even begin with the birth of Christ. “Here begins the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he starts off.
What he is saying, in effect, is that “this is it!” This is what God has been preparing God’s creatures for throughout the centuries; this is what the prophets were dimly predicting as their minds slowly opened to God’s eternal truth. This is it. This One, Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is the answer to the aching longings of men, women and children throughout the ages, the healing and the cure for the twisted and distorted lives of God’s human creatures, the cancelling out of the debt of sin that has impregnated the lives of people since the beginning of time, the way back to God’s order and orbit, wherein alone there is peace and joy even in the midst of this life’s fractures and failures.
“This is it”, the purpose of our lives, the reason for our existence – and it is this that will restore us to that purpose and objective. This is the One who has come, who is here, and who confronts us today with the promise, as we embrace him and hold him in our hearts as the Prince of Peace, the One who brings peace and is Peace.
- Sue House
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