MARK BLOG 2 Where I Started

When I first put pen to parchment, I knew: this was not just a story, but a heralding—not a mere recounting, but the declaration of something that demanded to be told.
This was the beginning of the good news—the euangelion—of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  This news would change the world.
The whole story bears the weight of that confession, whether spoken at the start or revealed through the unfolding of his life, death, and resurrection.

I did not speak of where he was born. I gave no account of his childhood. The prophets were enough for me. Isaiah had spoken long ago of a messenger crying out in the wilderness and that is where I began. We believed this voice was John the Baptizer the one who would“Prepare the way of the Lord.” It was no accident that John appeared in the wilderness, away from the temple courts, wearing garments rough and wild. His baptism was not a hollow ritual but a summons to repentance, to ready oneself for a kingdom about to break in.(1, 2)

When Jesus came to John for baptism, it was not for his own sins that he descended into the waters. It was for solidarity. With Israel. With humanity. With all flesh. I was told how the heavens tore apart as he rose from the river. The Spirit, gentle yet unstoppable, descended like a dove. A voice thundered from above: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” An echo of Psalm 2:7.

I didn’t define the Spirit in philosophical terms—how could I? But as I recalled what I had heard the Spirit was not some impersonal force. He moved, spoke, descended, drove, even could be sinned against (Mark 1:10; Mark 1:12; Mark 13:11; Mark 3:29).(3) The voice from heaven declared him beloved—but beloved sons are not spared the wilderness. The same Spirit who descended as a dove now drove like the wind. There he met “the satan”—the adversary.

I speak carefully here, for I do not imagine him as a horned monster from children’s tales. The Scriptures call him “the accuser,” and that was enough. This was not as a personal name, but a title, a function. The function of the accuser in the days of Job, was to seek to test the righteous.  In Mark he seeks to test Jesus. Not of his own power did the adversary act, but under the authority of God he set out to sift and to challenge the righteous. 

In the heavenly court, the satan was the one who accused, who questioned the purity of men’s hearts, who probed to see whether their devotion was true or only bought with blessings. You recall how he said of Job, “Does Job fear God for nothing?” So too, in the wilderness, the adversary came to probe Jesus.(4)

After John was handed over—the world already pushing back against the kingdom’s herald—Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming that the time was fulfilled, the kingdom of God had drawn near; repent and believe the good news. I will talk about this repentance and belief later but for now I want to express how vital it was to the kingdom.

The kingdom Jesus proclaimed was confined, in his lifetime, to a small corner of the world—yet it threatened the whole order of it. This was no safe spiritual platitude; it was a challenge to Rome, to Herod, and to the temple establishment alike.

I heard how Jesus’ authority manifested. He called fishermen from their boats—and they left immediately. He taught in synagogues—and the people marveled, not at his eloquence, but at his authority. Even demons could not stay silent in his presence, shrieking, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” He silenced them, commanding them not to reveal him too soon.

He had authority over unclean spirits. Authority over sickness. Authority to end hunger and thirst. Authority to call and command the hearts of men. These were no isolated marvels, but the first clear signs that the kingdom of God had drawn near.

As I wrote, I knew the threads I was laying down would weave through the entire Gospel:

• Jesus’ conflict with unclean spirits would only escalate.
• His identity would remain a mystery to many, revealed not through sword or ceremony, but through his empty tomb.
• His miracles would serve not as spectacles, but as restorations—small previews of a healed creation.
• The suffering and rejection he would face were not detours, but the very road to the kingdom’s fulfillment.

Some say my Gospel leaves too much unsaid—that it ends abruptly, that it refuses to explain what it should make clear. Perhaps they are right. But perhaps that was always the point. Revelation is not always shouted; sometimes it is whispered in the silence of an empty tomb. I did not aim to resolve every question. I sought instead to draw the hearer into the tension—to stand at the cross, to peer into the torn veil, to wonder what kind of king dies like this.

If the story unsettles, if it leaves you asking, then perhaps you are nearer the truth. For the gospel does not arrive neatly. It rends the heavens. It disrupts deserts. It dares to call fishermen, tax collectors, and demons by name. The kingdom comes not to confirm what we already knew, but to overturn it.

It was only the beginning. But in that beginning, the end of the old world had already begun.

Mark-

(1) N.T. Wright, Mark for Everyone (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 2–5.  Some, like the scholar N.T. Wright, have said that John’s ministry was the signal of a new Exodus²—a time for Israel to start over, not geographically, but spiritually.

(2) Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 135–137.  Michael Bird, too, understands John’s call as urgent, apocalyptic even: the kingdom was drawing near, demanding readiness, not complacency.

(3) In the Gospel of Mark, the Spirit is portrayed as the active power and presence of God at work in the world. Jesus is shown to have a unique and intimate relationship with the Spirit, but Mark does not present a fully developed doctrine of the Trinity. As Bart Ehrman notes in How Jesus Became God, Jesus affirms the Jewish Shema — “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” — without equating himself with God or introducing a triune concept. This suggests that the earliest Gospel writings, such as Mark, did not portray Jesus as divine in the later creedal sense, and that the doctrine of the Trinity was a theological development that occurred after these writings. Similarly, while the Spirit is active and powerful, Mark does not explicitly identify the Spirit as God. While I do not dispute that many find in Mark evidence of Jesus’ divine identity through his actions, it remains that Mark himself does not articulate a Trinitarian theology.

(4)Bird, Michael The Gospel of the Lord, 139–140. Bird notes that this early depiction of Jesus’ struggle signals that cosmic forces would oppose him at every turn.