my 2023 Advent devotions on Mark
This year I wrote a devotion on the Gospel of Mark every week for Advent in my parish e-mail newsletter. They are roughly 500 words apiece.
Dec 3. ADVENT I
It is salutary to think of Advent as a season of beginnings. It is a season anticipating the birth of Jesus and it begins a new liturgical year. What value can Mark, then, have for this season, if it doesn’t have a convenient birth story of Jesus to reflect upon? The answer is that one needs to reframe their understanding of Advent. Advent is about more than anticipating Christmas. The tradition of the Church teaches that Advent observes two comings of Christ simultaneously: first, his coming in the manger, “in great humility”; and then, His coming again to judge the universe and inaugurate His Kingdom: “in his glorious majesty” (Collect for Advent I, Book of Common Prayer p. 159). In the season of Advent, the beginning and the end of salvation is brought together, so that the vision of Christian faith in this life takes on a special intensity. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22.13, cf. 1.8).
You can learn a lot about a book of the Bible by studying how it begins. This is especially true for the four Gospels. Read Mark 1 and compare it to Matthew 1, Luke 1, and John 1 and you will already spot some dramatic differences. Mark seems hurried, eager to jump into the action of Christ’s public ministry right away. What’s interesting to me is the sequence of events: after Jesus' baptism, temptation, and calling of the first disciples, his first public miracle in Capernaum is an exorcism (1.21–28). This is how Mark wants the public to first know Jesus: the conqueror of evil. Notice the first thing Jesus tells the demon: “Be silent” (1.25).
Let’s compare these words to this Sunday’s Gospel lesson, Mark 13.24–37. These are the words of Jesus the tradition of the Church places before us for the beginning of the year: the End of the world. He says, “my words will not pass away” (13.31). As in the beginning of Mark, so too at the End of the world: Jesus has the final word, and the voices of evil opposed to Jesus’ loving purposes for us will be silenced. It is difficult to believe that evil can be silenced for a single life, let alone the whole universe. There are so many ways the demonic, that is to say the forces of the world that oppose God’s loving character, can seize us and hold us captive. But Jesus has come! He came 2000 years ago, and He will come again, and He comes to you now, in the events of your life. Listen to Him, and learn how your beginning and your end are united. The good work Jesus has begun in you will be completed. The righteous and perfect End of the world proclaimed by Jesus is already being completed in your life. A Christian knows this because they have been given a sacrament to taste, a baptism to claim, and a Bible to hear.
Dec 10. ADVENT II
Last month a Vietnamese-American Baptist theologian named Jonathan Tran was giving a guest lecture in Pittsburgh, and opened with some statements on proclamation.1 For Christians, says Tran, all existence is inherently a gift, because Christians believe Almighty God created the universe in perfect freedom, in love which cannot help but overflow—the fact that we are creatures means that all existence is a form of proclamation, because all existence says something about the nature of God. Therefore the question for Christians is never whether to proclaim, but rather what to proclaim.
What is interesting to me about Tran’s insight is how it provides an angle to reflect on John the Baptist.
This Sunday’s Gospel lesson, Mark 1:1–8, focuses on St. John the Baptist. We heard about the End of the world from Jesus last week, and now, in the topsy-turvy timeline of Advent, we are brought to the beginning of the Gospel. Mark the Evangelist deftly strokes his pen and in a mere eight verses pictures John as a proclaimer of Good News: “After me comes he who is mightier than I” (1:7). John is someone who has so clearly dedicated his entire life to proclamation. He wants his life to be good news by heralding and preparing “all the country of Judea, and all the people of Jerusalem” (1:5) for the coming of Jesus Christ, the one who just is Good News.
Then, in Mark 6, John is murdered by King Herod. His popularity and renown did not save him. It is a cruel and petty episode so typical of the Lord’s prophets. John’s disciples bury him (6:29). Mark is giving us a clue. John’s death now anticipates Jesus’ death. “After me comes he who is mightier than I.” On the surface, John the Baptist’s death is bad news. But the vision of the Evangelist pierces beneath the surface. In the vision of Christian faith, the Baptist’s death transformed into the same kind of proclamation he spoke in life: Jesus is coming. Redemption will come. God will not waste the witness.
What shall we proclaim, if, as Jonathan Tran says, proclamation is unavoidable for Christians? Mark’s treatment of John the Baptist is our pattern. We shall proclaim Jesus. But this answer is expansive, inclusive of locusts and wild honey, inclusive of wilderness and beheadings: Christians can proclaim Jesus in the worst things about their life, not merely the best things. The things that have hurt us and have damaged us can and will be taken up by Jesus in the fullness of time to say something true and good and beautiful, because Jesus will not let anything stop us from becoming true and good and beautiful. A Christian’s vision of life can pierce beneath the surface of the water and find Spirit.
Dec 17. ADVENT III
“I believe; help my unbelief!” —Mark 9:24
The order of the four Gospels in the New Testament is the order in which the ancient Church believed they were written. Mark was believed to be an abridgement of Matthew. This conception of Mark’s origins placed the reputation of Mark in a more vulnerable position for ancient readers compared to the other three Gospels: so much of Mark’s content is found in Matthew that Mark feels like it contributes little that is unique to the fourfold Gospel. “The Gospel of Mark: Imagine Matthew, But With Less Stuff” is not the most inspiring perception. The rise of modern western biblical studies after the Enlightenment helped to improve Mark’s reputation. It is now believed Mark was the first Gospel, and Matthew and Luke used Mark as a skeleton for their work later. Mark, far from being derivative of Matthew, is now perceived in scholarship as a pioneering, brilliant work that invented the very genre of “Gospel.”
I considered the importance that perception makes when reading Mark 8–9. It is a turning point in the story. Jesus for the first time speaks of His Passion, predicting it twice (8:31; 9:30-31; a third time in 10:33-34), and each time the disciples reject Him, most famously when Peter rebukes Him, and Jesus replies “Get behind me, Satan!” (8:33) Jesus meets a demon-possessed boy, and the father cries out what is quoted above (9:24) before Jesus exorcizes the demon. The father is suspended between two poles of belief and unbelief, in desperation, and asks the Lord for help. He is honest and vulnerable to God about what he needs. Peter in ch. 8 and the father in ch. 9 are opposites: Peter shuns and rejects what disturbs his perception of truth, and that becomes his own reward. But the father embraces the disruption, and the Lord turns his weakness into healing and liberation. “My grace is sufficient for you,” promised the Lord to Paul, “for my power is made perfect in weakness” (II Corinthians 12:9).
A less favorable Gospel is now hailed as a pioneer in its genre. The vulnerability of unbelief becomes the gateway to restored relationship between father and son. A cross yields resurrection. Jesus often takes the stones we reject in our life, perhaps what feels inconvenient or disturbing, and makes them the chief cornerstone of our growth into a greater likeness of God’s image. I often refuse to believe this. Like everyone else I do not want to suffer vulnerability or disruption to my comfort and my security. In my most honest moments of prayer, I am like the father asking Jesus to help my unbelief. What disruption looks like will differ for each person. But a Promise beckons: “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (8:35). This only means that the kind of life we may cling to so desperately as our only hope cannot compare to the Life God has in store for us, a Life that can begin today, a Life of inexhaustible love that multiplies like loaves and fishes as it is given.
Dec 24. ADVENT IV
“Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” —Mark 15:32
Thus the chief priests and the scribes mock Jesus as He dies. I would like to think that Mark phrases the mockery of the verse in this way—“that we may see and believe”—because Mark wants to highlight how seeing Jesus on the cross is precisely how a disciple comes to believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world and the Son of God. The sign of Jesus’ rejection in the cross is simultaneously the sign of acceptance and faith in Him. Mark revels in many ironies because the Gospel likes to highlight how Jesus is seen, but not known; heard, but not understood. I think that it is key to becoming a good listener of Mark (and perhaps the whole Bible) to also revel in these ironies, and thus come to a less anxious acceptance of our limitations.
I believe our relationship to the future is one of the deepest and most anxious limitations of being human. The future is only experienced in the moment it comes; it cannot be perfectly secured, fastened, or tied down no matter how clever or how prudent our planning. Jesus Christ knows what this limitation feels like because He was crucified. He begged the Father at Gethsemane to remove the cup of suffering (Mark 14:36) because no human being wants their life to feel like a wasteful dead end. But Christians know that the tomb is empty; it is Jesus alone who has experienced and altered the future of the human condition, and now embodies this change to us.
The angel at the empty tomb tells the women, “He is going before you to Galilee” (16:7). I marvel at this phrase: “going before you.” There is nothing that we can experience in this life that separates us from the love of God (Romans 8:38–39), because we cannot go ahead of Jesus: He is ahead of us in Galilee. The Lord established our past with our creation and the election of Israel; and the same Lord has secured our future with the resurrection. We are being embraced by unimaginable Love on both sides of the timeline. The only thing left for us to do is to make our life today a Gospel—a proclamation of Jesus’ presence. I pray that this Christmas, our capacity for faith, hope, and love can be born again, sweet as snow on a stable, so that each person we meet may see in us “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1).
Jonathan Tran, “The Plenteous Harvest: How Identity Politics Is Killing the Church, and How Theology Might Save Us,” The 2023 W. Don McClure Lecture in World Mission and Evangelism at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Nov. 28, 2023, timestamp 9:29 to 12:10,
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