Think Wink.

I come back to Mark 1:14-15 for one last meditation before moving on to something else. Again we read from the Gospel work,

Now after John was imprisoned, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the gospel of God. He said, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel!”

Now I want to focus upon Jesus’ actions in this text. We have seen in this series how Mark is about Jesus preaching good news and we looked at the message he preached. In this post we will come back to the idea of this book being about the gospel Jesus preached.

We see that when John was arrested Jesus headed north. In Mark 6 we read that John was arrested for his condemnation of Herod’s relationship with his brother’s wife. Jesus and John would no doubt be preaching the same message. But what is very interesting in this picture is that as it was time for Jesus to take center stage and John move to the background, God removed John completely! John was martyred, beheaded for his demands that even the Jewish political leadership conform to God’s law.

So to avoid that fate before it was his time, Jesus headed north to Galilee. In the ancient world, the Jews of Judea thought that their northern kinsmen in Galilee were slow, thick. It is much the same attitude that many have about people living in the Ozarks. Many people across the nation (not all) see those coming from the Ozarks are just thick, slow, stupid. The Ozarks are notorious for incestual relationships, and thus “imbreeding.” It is the perception that the Ozarks has. In America the Ozarks take the bad wrap for being the area of the stupid people. The same perception is true for Galilee by Judea, they are stupid and slow.

Yet Jesus goes to make his grand announcement to these slow Jews, these Galileans. He breaks social boundaries here and preaches his gospel to them. He comes to the slow people and gives them hope first, and hen goes to Jerusalem to be crucified by them. Interesting side note. Jesus is not for the intellectuals, he is for the “stupid” as well. Jesus is as much for those living on the US coasts as he is for those living in the Ozarks.

But the verb that really strikes me is κηρύσσων. It is a present tense, or continuous aspect, verb from the word κηρύσσω, which means to proclaim. The action of the participle is what I want to highlight. It is a continuous action, linear in thought. What Jesus did in Galilee is preach the gospel of God. All of his miracles, all of his teachings, all of his ministry in Galilee was doing one thing: proclaiming the gospel of God. That’s what Jesus did.

So now we come to his message one last time: the times of old are complete, what the law was picturing, it is here. The times of living in the darkness are over. The kingdom of God is here. But the kingdom of God is not characterized by a piece of land, but rather by a King; all of the lands of the earth were God‘s so he wasn‘t here to throw off the shackles of Rome. The kingdom is here because the King is here. Thus all of Jesus’ ministry was pointing out that fact, the King is here.

Our lifestyle must be said to be the same thing. That same continuous participle must characterize our lives, κηρύσσων. It must be our business to proclaim to the world that the King has come and he is reigning up on high, seated at the right hand of the Father. Every aspect of our lives must point to the fact that our knees have bowed before King Jesus. No matter what situation we are in: we must show that the King of the universe has captured our hearts and we have found the greatest joy in yielding our lives to him. We must proclaim this message to the world: the King has come.

Indeed, this is what Mark would have wanted his Roman audience to see. They were being persecuted by Nero. But Jesus went on preaching even though there would be stiff persecution and resistance. Even though it cost John his life, Jesus kept preaching his message. His whole life revolved around that message. His whole ministry was that message of the King. Now it is up to the Roman church to go into Rome and elsewhere and to proclaim boldly that Jesus is King and his kingdom has come. Yes it might cause them to rub against Nero and get them killed. But as Paul told the Philippians as he was in jail, “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain” because “to depart [is to] be with Christ, which is better by far” (Philippians 1:21, 23). So too should we also proclaim this message as Christ’s heralds, his κῆρυξ.

Related posts:

Truth, Salvation, and “euaggelion”

No Doctrine But Love?

Pure Enjoyment