The public ministry of Jesus is introduced with the simplest of phrases: The beginning. This phrase
literally begins the narrative of Jesus. It starts a story. Mark will go on from here to describe in 16
chapters, with a remarkable mix of detail and brevity, the words and doings of Christ. But the
phrase also stops us short. The beginning. There is something to dwell on here – echoes of Genesis 1… In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Presumably Mark was aware of the resonance between the first words of Genesis and the first
words of his gospel. He would have known the Hebrew scriptures, including the familiar
rhythms of the creation account. But why draw the comparison? Why begin an eye-witness
biography of an obscure Galilean man with a not-so-implicit reference to the beginning of the
universe?

Perhaps for two reasons (very briefly).

One: Invoking the first beginning reminds us that Jesus came within a particular history. God did
not create all those millennia ago just to exhibit his awesome power and then leave the scene. He
created, rather, to pen the first chapter in the story of God’s relationship to his people – a story
that moves through Genesis, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses all the way to Joseph the carpenter
and his Son Jesus. Mark omits a genealogy (Matthew has one), but this reference to the first
beginning does the same work. Jesus is part of the ancient story.

Two: God sending Jesus is something new and good. In Genesis, God didn’t create using pre-
existing stuff, as if he were a child embarking on a craft project. Everything he made was new –
or rather was not until he made it so! This means creation was a movement of love: a gratuitous
act that brought things into being for their own sake (think about the dignity of divinely created
things, in this scenario, versus the sinister fate of the pre-existing materials manipulated by a
toddler during their ‘crafting’ sessions). God did not create Jesus, of course. But the coming of
this man from Nazareth is, like the first creation, both new and good. At the beginning of Mark’s
Gospel we see God moving again in love to again bring life to the world, adding to the salvation
story a new chapter that fulfils all the chapters that have gone before: Jesus Christ, a new
beginning.

Author- Nick Raven, Ridgeway Church Member

05/04/2020