Mark’s Gospel – An Overview (given at St. Andrew’s Partnership)

This transcript has been automatically generated

Because Mark really has only recently been discovered in many ways. Many people used to think it was just a shorter version of Matthew. So thousands of Christians throughout the world have been rediscovering this wonderful gospel. It must be one of the most used books in the Bible today. It’s one of the most important little books in the world, I think, because of that.

And it’s the first of the 4 4 Gospels that you are going to be studying this winter. And yet it is odd, I think, that this most famous of writings was written by a Christian who at the start of his Christian service was a great failure. And it is the storey of Christ’s 12 disciples, all of whom turned out, according to Mark, to be great failures as well. Strange thing, isn’t it? We like our heroes to be heroes.

In the boys’ books of my childhood, and that’s going back a long way, so they’re now collector’s items, in the books of my childhood, William Taylor, the captain of the school, scores the winning try against the hated Bullidge First XV despite having a broken leg, and the whole school cheers itself hoarse. Do you remember that? Well, perhaps you don’t read those kind of storeys, but that’s the kind of stuff that I used to read. But none of the 12 disciples whom you’re going to be following ends up as a hero. All desert the front line as the battle warms up, and in 1914-1918 terms they would have been shot.

And one proves a traitor and goes over to the enemy. No one cheers any of them, and if Mark has a message for us, it is not to think of ourselves too highly, Because all of us in a measure in our Christian service are failures.

Even when the great leader reappears from his grave right at the end of the storey, the women who have hitherto been so brave— it often seems that women are more brave than men in spiritual things— they tremble, they flee, and they are desperately afraid. It’s a very curious ending to the storey, isn’t it? And not a very happy one. And presumably there is some point in this and it’ll be important for you to discover it. Now what I want to do in this very short time is to share with you some of the discoveries of the little group of us who on Saturday morning first studied Mark together on the staff.

Obviously those who teach the gospel learn most from it, so I congratulate those of you who are going to be leaders of groups because you are the people who are going to dig deepest and find the most. First discovery.

The first thing I discovered was that the Gospel of Mark gives us with great simplicity the gospel of Christ. As you look at verse 1, the word gospel means just what we mean, the good news of Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean the book. To talk about the Gospel of Mark as a book is actually a 2nd century usage, not a 1st century usage. It became called a gospel because it contains the gospel.

When I was young— sorry to be— it’s rather tiresome, isn’t it, to talk like that all the time? When I was young and people preached the gospel at church, it was usually from Paul’s epistles, by grace are you saved, and possibly from John’s Gospel, God so loved the world. But in those days people didn’t preach the gospel from the Synoptic Gospels, and yet that’s a very important thing to do. And in the last 20 or 30 years I’ve often heard Mark used as an evangelistic book, which is what it is. It comes, as most of you know, in 2 halves, and the first half is about the person of Christ— who is he?— and the second part, which starts somewhere in chapter 8, is what the Son of God did and why he came into the world.

So in technical language, This gospel is about the person and the work of Jesus. Or if you like it in Paul’s language, it’s about Christ and Him crucified. When someone gets that clear, that those are the 2 essential things you have to know, then you know the eternal gospel and you know the saving gospel. I love Alan Stibbs’ comment on chapter 8:31, if you’ll turn to that. Alan Stibbs was the Vice Principal for many years of Oak Hill.

He was one of these men who probably wouldn’t have been a very good number one but was a brilliant number two and in many ways held the college together on the Scriptures because he was such a wonderful expositor. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a better. And he had a fine comment to make on Mark 8:31, which is about where the halfway mark comes. Peter has made his great confession just before And now the disciples know that Jesus is the Christ, verse 29. And then you have the curious verse, he strictly charged them not to tell anyone.

Well, you’ll have to find out why that was so. But Alan Stibbs used to comment on verse 31, he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer. And that begins the second half of Mark, Christ crucified. And what Alan Stibbs said, and I think he had been a primary school teacher when he was young, is that you don’t start lesson 2 in primary school, you don’t start teaching it until these blockheaded kids have learnt lesson 1. In other words, don’t start telling them about his work until they are sure about his person.

So that’s the first discovery we made. It may seem a very simple discovery to you now. It wasn’t then. I don’t think people did realise that Mark’s Gospel was the Gospel. They thought preaching the Gospel started after Pentecost.

But actually Mark— well, of course Mark is writing after Pentecost, and this account of Jesus and his death is the Gospel, the true Gospel of Christ. And it serves as a clear marker so that you can tell whether in your church at home they are preaching the true Gospel. Are they preaching Christ? Are they preaching Christ crucified? That’s the heart of the matter.

Discovery 2.

Discovery 2 that we made was, and that many others have made as well, that Mark’s little book gives us a pattern for authentic Christian service and ministry. Right at the heart of this little book is, of course, a portrait of Jesus. The 4 portraits in the Gospels are different, and the picture in Mark is of Jesus the great servant of God. And here and now I’d like to give you the text to learn, which I hope you’ll have learnt by this evening, 10:45, if you don’t know it by heart already. So please turn to 10:45 and we’ll read it together.

It’s just the heart really of the whole Gospel of Mark. Chapter 10, verse 45. I’ll read it and then we’ll say it together. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. Isn’t that a wonderful verse?

Let’s say it together: For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. Now will you take your eyes up and look at the ceiling and say it to me without looking at the book. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. Did I hear you, Vijay? You got that?

Right. If V.J.’s got it, that’s good.

I recall a very convicting talk from an elder Christian to young ministers, and though I can’t remember anything he said exactly, the sort of thing he said was this: if you go off in a huff after giving a talk because no one told you how good it was and how much it helped them, What that means is that you came to give that talk in order to be served and not to serve. Isn’t that a convicting statement?

And you will know how often in church life people actually are coming to be served. You know, when the minister asked Mrs. Jones if after 45 years she would allow somebody else to put the flowers around the font or the baptistry, and then she gets in a terrible huff because she’s done it for 45 years, what you know is that she was serving to be served, not to serve. If we’re doing things to serve and not to be served, then we’re much easier to work with and God will use us more greatly. And of course, that’s why the 12 were such failures as they are throughout the book. Look at chapter 10, verse 33.

They were on the road going up to Jerusalem and Jesus was walking ahead of them. And they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the 12 again, he began to tell them what was to happen. And here’s a prophecy of the passion. And then verse 35— did I say John?

I think I’ve got this wrong. Never mind. Are we at 10:33? Yes. Then you get the request of James and John, don’t you?

And they come up to him and say, Lord, we were with you right at the beginning. And so when you come to the City of David and sit upon your throne, would you please arrange it so that we two sit on your right hand and on your left? We’re slightly embarrassed to say this, but Mother wanted us to say it. And you know, it’s a very embarrassing paragraph, isn’t it? And similarly, when they were walking along the road and they were discussing something and Jesus said, what were you discussing on the road?

And they were discussing who was to be the greatest.

From the moment Jesus calls the first 4— that’s in chapter 1 which you meet right at the beginning— to be full-time disciples, He begins to train them in what it means to serve. And it’s a long, long training and the point of the book of Mark is that they fail to understand. And at the end of the book He says, we’ll go back to Galilee, as much as to say we’ll go back to the beginning and start all over again. So I want you to notice that. I want you to keep your eye on the nature of the gospel all the way through this course.

What is the gospel as taught by Mark? But secondly, will you keep your eye on every paragraph that teaches us how to serve Christ and gives us an example of how he served the Lord in his wonderful ministry? So that Mark’s gospel is not only a proclamation of the gospel, it is a training manual. And I think you’ll be surprised actually how much material is made up of training on their own. You know, we think of the Gospels as being Jesus speaking to the clamouring and pressing crowds, but actually when you come into the centre of Mark you’ll find that again and again, having left the crowds, he takes the disciples on their own for a little private seminar as an inner circle, and they have what you might call a ministry training session, a question and answer session.

Do watch for those. They come again and again at the end of a public an episode of public ministry. And they’re quite fascinating and they’re extraordinarily contemporary because the mistakes the disciples make and the things they need to learn are just right for us.

Well, in a sense, that’s it. Those are the 2 major themes of Mark’s Gospel. It presents the good news of Christ, the Son of God, who came to save us from our sins and deliver us from the wrath to come. And it presents in a somewhat painful way a long training process by which the 12, ultimately the 11, were made fit for their enormous responsibilities for the day of Pentecost. It’s astonishing that 11 men who failed so comprehensively were able from the day of Pentecost to bring the church into existence, and the only explanation of that, of course, is the Holy Spirit.

Now I want to add a few things to these 2 main points, and I think the most important of the things I’d like to add is this. We made a mistake at the beginning, I think, in our innocence, and I want to put that right.

Mark’s 2 halves, which are very clearly delineated, however, they must never be separated.

These 2 halves fulfil the 2 great strands of Old Testament prophecy. The 2 strands of Old Testament prophecy which are quite fascinating are: one, the glorious Messiah who is to come, and you can think of passages that we read at Christmas about the Wonderful Counsellor, the Mighty God. These are prophecies which the Jews then and still today in many Orthodox Jewish circles treasure, believing that the Messiah is still to come. To deliver his people. The other strand of Old Testament prophecy is that of the suffering servant.

Now it’s most astonishing and grieving actually that the Jewish people of Jesus’ time believed in that great strand about a glorious Messiah who was coming to be their king and to rout out the Germans, but missed completely this great line of Old Testament teaching about the suffering servant. They were one-eyed, they saw only one. So immediately Jesus begins to suffer, and especially when He goes to the cross, then that proves to a Jew then and proves to a Jew today and a Muslim that He can’t possibly be the Son of God.

And for the Jew it was because he missed that great strand of teaching in the Old Testament. These 2 strands are brought together right at the beginning of the storey at the baptism. So turn back, if you will, to chapter 1, verse 11.

It’s a marvellous little passage, this.

When He came out of the water, verse 10, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended upon Him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven. Now it’s very interesting, in the New Testament when a voice comes from heaven it actually comes from the Old Testament. That is, God quotes His own Scriptures. I think putting His seal upon the authenticity of the Old Testament, incidentally. And the heavenly voice said this to Jesus as He was baptised and began His public ministry: You are my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.

Now I know many of you are pundits and know much of this better than I do, but you don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to be able to work out that those are 2 quotations from the Old Testament. The first, You are my beloved Son, comes from— one of the pundits tell me please.

Psalm 2, thank you. A magnificent prophecy, Psalm 2, of the coming Messiah, the great King whom God has ordained to conquer his enemies and deliver his people. With you I am well pleased comes from another pundit, not the same pundit, Oh dear. Isaiah 42. And if you look back at Isaiah 42:1 you’ll see it’s the beginning of the great servant passages, the servant songs they’re often called.

And which is the climactic servant song? Isaiah 53, isn’t it? And what is at the heart of Isaiah 53? Which verse is at the heart of it?

Verse 6, let’s say it by heart. You can say it by heart, can’t you? Ellie, can you say it by heart? Of course you can. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

That’s at the heart of the central suffering passages of Isaiah. They’re the most wonderful chapters. And they are about the servant of God who pleased God by fulfilling His mission. Now do you see, by putting those 2 together Mark is signalling what this whole book of his is about. It’s about the glorious King who was a suffering servant.

That idea is still totally obnoxious to a Jew today. It’s totally obnoxious to a Muslim today. And it’s often embarrassing for Christians who want a more triumphalist faith. One thinks of one or two of the big churches in London which preach health and wealth and prosperity. They want a king who gives us things here and now, who makes this a triumphant life.

Whereas the storey of Jesus is of a king who went finally to his death. It’s all very embarrassing because we belong to a Christian civilization and have heard it since we were children, most of us, we’re not shocked and surprised by it. But this paradox, this contradiction, this shock, if you like, goes all the way through Mark’s gospel. And the 12 never grasped it until after Pentecost. That the Son of David, the King of kings, would go to Jerusalem— well, they knew that they were on their way to Jerusalem, the city of David— and that when He got there, instead of ascending His throne and sending all His enemies away would actually surrender to the most degrading punishment ever devised by men, a punishment which to the Jew then was blasphemous and to the Greek was utter foolishness to suppose that any great man would suffer it.

That was beyond the 12, and it’s beyond many Christians still. Well, we’re used to it. Well, I hope you won’t be used to it. I hope you’ll try to come to it freshly and see what an astonishing thing it was that the early church was called upon to believe and to preach. There’s a storey in the wonderful biography of John Stott by Timothy Dudley-Smith of how when he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, he began to witness to a student about Christ and him crucified.

And suddenly this fellow student, hearing about Christ crucified, shouted at the top of his voice, Horrible, horrible, horrible.

Well, if you and I were actually to look at someone being crucified, that’s what we would say, wouldn’t we? Horrible, horrible, horrible.

The more radical liberal theologians under whom I sat at university 50 years ago called the gospel message of the cross the theology of the slaughterhouse. That’s how much they disliked it. Even poor deluded Steve Chalke, who’s done such wonderful work, talks about God laying our sins on Jesus as child abuse. Increasingly even Christian pulpits are becoming frightened of the cross, and yet it’s the very heart of our good news.

So it’s vitally important to realise that the glorious Messiah does not start as a suffering servant from chapter 8, but is the suffering servant from the very start of the gospel. And I don’t think we were sufficiently clear on that when we started out, simply because in the first half of the gospel it’s all about his mighty works, the glorious miracles. Nevertheless, despite all these wonderful things that he was doing for people, look at chapter 3, verse 6: There He is healing the leper and driving out demons and forgiving men’s sins, doing all these things for people. Yet in chapter 3, verse 6, we read, the Pharisees— that’s the religious establishment— went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians— that’s the secular establishment— against Him, how to destroy Him. Isn’t that astonishing?

Here are 2 sides who hated each other’s guts, Pharisees and Herodians, coming together in co-belligerence against this Jesus of Nazareth. And they want to destroy him from that moment onwards. And so Mark is telling you by that verse that the shadow of the cross falls on the pathway of Jesus right from the beginning. So in case any of you should have been misled by the earlier teaching I gave on Mark, do get it clear that although these 2 halves are separate, And I think that’s partly for teaching purposes as well as describing the storey. Actually, he is a suffering servant as the glorious Messiah from the very start of the storey.

So that Mark is saying that far from his suffering being an overshadowing of his glory, it’s an outshining of his glory. And when that became too difficult for the 12 to grasp, when the whole thing got on top of them, In chapter 9, when He begins— chapter 8 and 9, when He begins to talk about His suffering, you have that wonderful storey of the transfiguration when suddenly He is glorified in front of them and they have a glimpse for a moment of the majesty of Jesus Christ. It’s as though God said, I know that this is more than you can understand, but I want you to realise that the one who’s talking about His death is My Son. So they had that momentary glimpse of his glory in order to prepare them for the terrible days that lay ahead.

The final way Mark makes this almost incredible, almost mind-blowing concept clear to us is at the end of the Gospel. And I’d like you to turn, if you will, now to that.

Mark’s Gospel was written for the Romans, for the Roman Empire, that powerful empire that believed that might was right and power succeeds and the weak go to the wall.

And of course that’s what all empires think. And so the climax to the Herlemans Gospel is in fact in the death of Jesus on page 1028, verses 33 to 39. And you notice that in utter desolation, forsaken by God for our sake, bearing our sins, who is the first to confess him as Lord? When the centurion, the soldier who had been responsible for this brutal death, when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, truly this man is the Son of God. Well, it’s almost Incredible, isn’t it?

One of the finest expositions of that I’m going to give you in a quotation.

Toward this climactic disclosure, hinted at from the beginning but in reality hidden from a blind world, Mark’s whole Gospel has been moving inexorably.

It is crucial for Mark that the centurion’s believing response arises not out of any claim made by Jesus, but only on the basis of what is accomplished in Jesus’ death.

Precisely there, in the obscurity, lowliness, and humiliation of the cross, and not in any miraculous display of power such as an unbelieving world demands in proof of God’s presence, the God of Jesus confronts men. It’s still so today.

Only in and through His death on the cross can it become known who Jesus really is, the one in whom God seeks out men to fulfil His saving purpose with them. Then and only then too can true discipleship to this Jesus become possible. So the cross tells us who Jesus is and how He did His saving work, but it also is a pattern of how we have to do our work. And working out in practise what it means to deny self— that’s not giving up chocolates for Lent, of course— and taking up the cross. What does that mean?

That’s something you’ve got to work out. But there’s less and less of it today, isn’t there? You know, when I hear of what goes on at Hillsong and places like this, I feel to myself, if I ever had the opportunity to preach there, I would preach on taking up the cross. Because in the very difficult days that some of the young people today are going to face in the next 30 years— William was showing me an article or telling me of an article yesterday from Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail in which I think she says that Christianity is being made a crime.

In the very difficult days that may be ahead of us, I shall long be gone when these days have come, only the Christians who are willing to take up the cross and deny themselves are going to survive. Anybody being brought up on a prosperity gospel is quickly going to disappear.

So what is Mark saying? He’s saying the Roman world will be converted not by miracles and mighty deeds. Jesus does not win his way in the world by the sword but by the proclamation of Christ and him crucified. What could be more different than the offer of of Islam and the offer of Christ. They are absolutely different.

One conquers by love and sacrifice, one conquers by cutting off your head if you don’t believe.

Finally, remember all the time that Mark is not just a faithful recorder of what happened, Though he is a reliable historian. And I’m thankful that there have been so many enemies of the gospel because for 100 years people have been probing every dot and comma of these 4 gospels, often to demonstrate, as they thought, that they weren’t accurate. But actually, as the years go on, the Bible still stands and these efforts to disprove it have failed. It’s something that’s very exciting, I think, when I look back to my student days. When really doubts about the Gospels were often paramount in one’s training.

So although Mark is a reliable writer and journalist and recorder, he is actually meant— meaning to be a teacher, and a very skilful one. And you’ll find that his method is logic and orderly. You’ll expect to discover his themes and structures. He’s a 3-point man: 3 parables of sowing, 3 records of preachers being rejected, 3 prophecies of the passion, 3 descriptions of Christ suffering at the hands of enemies, friends, and the Father. There’s nothing casual.

All the connections are very close. It’s worth taking him seriously and seeking them out and learning from him. I hope you will learn from him, but I hope something much more than that. I hope that you will teach others because Learning is not enough for people who live in responsible positions of fathers and elders in churches. You ought all to be able to teach as a result of this course.

So seek to understand it, seek then to live it, and seek then to pass it on. Over to you, Mark.