Day Two

Felt like I was learning the ropes. Drank water at the right time, but had  little difficulty with the electronic check in and had to check with Reception. Treatment on time, and very efficient.

And now, a weekend...

Day One

Thursday 28 January finally dawned.

Joanie drove me today, and we set off a little early. On the way to Cheltenham the first early white cherries were starting to flower--always such a hopeful sign for me.

In the Oncology Unit it was a bit like the first day of school. Before my appointment time I had a session with two of the Radiotherapists who went through everything and had me sign my consent form (again). Then I was sent back out to start drinking my 400 ml of water.

Like all first days at school I got the timetable wrong. The forty minutes wait for the treatment starts after the water is drunk. The water from their fountain is exceedingly cold, and drinking four cups of it in ten minutes was not easy, but I did it, and the countdown for treatment began.

At 12:20 I was called in and introduced to my new friend, Linac 9.

Once I was on the bench the threee Radiotherapists spent quite while adjusting it so I was comfortable and in the right position.

Then they sounded the little siren and headed out of the gleamin white bunker. The machine came down and slowly and mysteriously whirled around and did its work. if the background music had not been soft pop,  had been a litttle more technological, or, perhaps Pink Floyd, I could have imagined myself to be in a scene from a science fiction movie.

It seemed to take forever, but in less than fifteen minutes the machine had returned to its resting place, the radiographers rcame back in and helped me off the couch, and I was dismissed.

An equally easy and pleasant drive home in beautiful sunshine, with 2.7% of the treatment now completed..

Anointing

Alongside the medical preparations were the practical and spiritual ones.

I spent most of the month of January trying to tie up loose ends so that a mini-vacancy of ten weeks in the Benefice would go smoothly.

On January 18th our friends Nick and Monica joined us at the Rectory as David Runcorn celebrated Communion and Archdeacon Jackie anointed me. It was a very powerful and moving service for all of us, and a symbol of the very many prayers being offered for me in so many places.

The road to radiotherapy

The journey towards my present treatment started a long time ago. 

Back in July the GPS confirmed that my prostate was enlarged and rather hard. He ordered a PSA blood test. A couple days later he phoned me to say that my PSA was 80. (The high for a man of my age is 4.0).  I saw Mr Okeke at Gloucester eight days later. He was sufficiently sure I had cancer that he ordered all the tests, a bone scan, a pelvic MRI  and a prostate biopsy. These took place over the next month. The junior doctors which did the biopsy, accompanied by ultrasound scan, was sufficiently sure of the cancer that she gave me a prescription for bicalutamide--the hormone pills which have to be taken for two weeks before the injections can begin.

I saw Mr Patel,  the Consultant Urologist, at Cheltenham on 13 September.  The news was that I  have cancer which is fairly aggressive, and has spread just beyond the border of the gland. That means it is inoperable, and needs radiotherapy. Not the news I wanted to hear. He suggested starting after Christmas, and set up an appointment with Dr Bowen, the oncologist. He was very positive. 'Our aim is to cure this,' he said.

Dr Bowen was very calm and gentle. She talked a little more about what radiotherapy involves, and it's side effects.

In due course a large envelope arrived stuffed with appointments and advice. An Induction session on 21/12, a CT scan to plan my treatment on 29/12, a delightful tome on bowel and bladder preparation, and a schedule for the radiotherapy beginning later than anticipated, on 28 January.

Then, a month of waiting....

Journal

Many people have suggested that it is helpful to keep a journal while going through treatment for cancer.

Also, since my work email and phone are not in operation for this 10 week period while I am officially on sick leave, it may be a useful way of keeping people updated on my progress, so here goes...

Don't feel you have to read every word. This is a useful tool for me.

Cathedral Evensong Sermon

C    Gloucester Cathedral Evensong

Sunday 10th May 2015 3.00 p.m.

It was a great pleasure to be invited to preach at Evensong at the Cathedral, but the brief was a challenging one --eight minutes, including the Prayers of Intercession.

The Cathedral is notoriously difficult to speak in, with a very long echo. I timed the sermon at 7.5 minutes. In the end it came out at 9 minutes exactly.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I was about thirteen we had an elderly and rather eccentric Chemistry Master at School. He knew nothing of Health and Safety, and knew how to get the attention of teenage boys. His favourite trick, as we cowered expectantly in the background, was to throw a very large chunk of potassium into a double lab sink full to the brim with water. It spat, it flared, it raced around the surface until it expired with a great flash and a puff of smoke. I shall never forget that potent combination of fire and water.

Many waters cannot quench love,

neither can the flood drown it.

[Song of Solomon 8.7a]

Those words from the Song of Solomon speak of a love which flames and rages like fire, even when doused with water.

It contracts dramatically with the Christians of Laodicea, who are characterised as ‘lukewarm’—whose passion has long been quenched, and have enthusiasm for nothing.

A Hebrew love poem, full of lush and erotic imagery, seems rather out of place in the Bible. Those who put it there—and it was controversial—saw beyond human love to the love of God for his people. It reminded them powerfully that faith is not simply a matter of the intellect, but of the heart and of the will.

Like most love stories, our relationship with God is a journey. There are times when our love for God is blazing, others when it is dogged and persistent; sometimes, in our sinfulness, it is lukewarm.

This allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs also reminds me that, as well as being a lover, in this relationship I am also loved. The love of God for me cannot be quenched. God does not look down at me with dispassionate interest, as I sometimes observe the ants scurrying about my patio.

God’s love for me, shown in the death of Jesus, is mirrored in these words from the Song of Solomon:

Love is strong as death,
    passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
    a raging flame.                                                         

 [Song of Solomon 8:6b]

Sometimes I glimpse the reality of that, more often I scurry on about my own business blind to God’s sorrow at my lukewarmness.

Bishop Alan Chesters often quoted some words he heard from a Christian politician at a Labour Party Conference in Blackpool.

“Love makes you feel good, love makes you strong, love makes you do things you wouldn’t do.”

It is not enough to bask, from time to time, in the warm glow of being loved. Love demands a response.

When I get even a glimpse of how much God loves me I feel good, but I am also empowered.

My love for God, however, is not merely a one to one thing.

A lawyer sought to distil the essence of the love of God out of the tangle of the 631 commandments in the Torah. He asked Jesus for his opinion. Jesus gave him this answer:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

[Mark 12:30]

Heart, soul, mind and strength—that is passionate love. That is love without reservations, love which gives its all.

But he added a second clause

You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

[Mark 12.31a]

When I love God, I am empowered to love others, and to put that love into practice in a broken and hurting world which yearns for warmth, gentleness and healing.

May God’s love,

blazing in a distracted and lukewarm heart,

give me, and each of us,

the strength and the courage to do it!

Amen.

Let us pray

As Christian Aid week begins we pray for all helped by Christian Aid, and for all its staff and supporters, locally, and throughout the world.

G

od of reconciliation and grace, you promise us a world where all is new, where love is born when hope is gone, where broken relationships are restored to wholeness. May we live as people who know your story of love, and may we have the vision to imagine what could be possible if we dared to live this story. God of abundant life, may we be witnesses of love, hope and peace, and co-creators of your life in the world. Amen

We remember the 70^th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, and pray for those who still remember it, and those who fight today to keep our country free.

O

 Almighty God, grant, we beseech thee, that we who do honour to the memory of those who have died in the service of their country and of the Crown, may be so inspired by the spirit of their love and fortitude that, forgetting all selfish and unworthy motives, we may live only to thy glory and to the service of humankind through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

We pray for God’s love to be rekindled in all our hearts

O

 God, the God of all goodness and grace, who art worthy of a greater love than we can either give or understand, fill our hearts we beseech thee with such love towards thee, that nothing may seem too hard for us to do or to suffer in obedience to thy will; and grant that thus loving thee, we may become more daily like unto thee, and finally obtain the crown of life which thou hast promised to those that love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen

Mark Session One

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK

The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God.

Through the centuries, Mark, the shortest and simplest Gospel, has been very unloved.

One of the reasons Mark received so little attention is the fact that Matthew came first in the Canon, and for centuries was therefore assumed to be the first Gospel.

There is very little in Mark that is not in Matthew, and much in Matthew which is not in Mark. So the question arose, what was Mark’s Gospel for? Why was it written?

For a long time many believed it was an abridged version of Matthew, perhaps a ‘Jesus for Dummies’.

Towards the end of the 19^th century, however, scholars looking at the Gospels in a new way, more analytical way came to the conclusion that Mark was in fact the first Gospel.

So, let’s begin with that conclusion, and forget all we know about Matthew and Luke—John is in a completely different category.

We will return to the authorship, place and date of Mark in a more detail later on. Suffice it to say at the moment that the Gospel was almost certainly written sometime between the years 65 and 75 AD. When it burst upon the Christian scene it was a unique piece of literature. Nothing like it had been seen before, and it had no parallels in secular literature.

It is worth remembering that Mark’s new Gospel was not a history or biography, either in the ancient or in the modern sense. The ancient world had little concept of biography as we know it, with its need to collect every fact and present it in a rational and coherent framework.

So, at last, let’s turn to the text. Remember, Matthew and Luke had not yet set pen to paper. Those who first read Mark—or more probably heard it read aloud—did not have any other accounts to compare it with.

---

Today we will look at Chapter 1.1-15

In only fifteen verses we get from John the Baptist to the beginning of the ministry of Jesus. Mark does not hang around! The tale is told economically. There is, no Birth narrative, no account of the temptations in the wilderness, and no reflection on what it means for Jesus’ to be baptised ‘for the remission of sins’. But this apparent simplicity does not imply a naïve and unreflective approach. This short passage, perhaps more than any other in Mark, teems with allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures. In a very short span it presents an ‘overture’ of the themes which will dominate the rest of the Gospel.

Remember that this is new. No-one has heard a Gospel before. At this stage it is not even called a Gospel! It’s the first one, the genre has not been labelled yet!

Mark’s account begins quite starkly:

 The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

 “The beginning”—it’s a very good place to start. It is the second word of John, and of the Greek version of Genesis. The Greek word  Arche  gives rise to ‘Architect’. It doesn't just mean ‘beginning’, but implies an absolute beginning. It is the foundation upon which everything else rests.

• Genesis 1:1 takes us back to the beginning of time—the dark abyss, the howling winds and the brooding Spirit of God which gives rise to all that is.
• John 1:1 takes us back to the pre-existent Logos—the Word of God which was in the beginning with God and without which nothing was made that was made.
• Matthew, with his genealogy and infancy stories, presents the credentials of Jesus and places him within the context of his Jewish heritage.
• Luke, beginning his story in the Temple, likewise harks back to God’s purposes through the salvation history of the people of Israel.

Mark simply presents the adult Jesus on the verge of his Baptism, with that foundational word  Arche. For Mark speculation about Jesus of Nazareth is not required, response is!

The beginning is of ‘The Good News or Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’

Euangelion- it shares the ‘Eu’ with euphonics, eugenics, and other similar words. It is a Greek particle which means ‘good’. The second part shares its roots with the word ‘angel’. An angel is a herald, and announcer. Euangelion is ‘good news’.

Mark takes up this word to characterise what Jesus of Nazareth is about. Jesus does not just bring Good News from God, he manifests, he realises it, he is it!

What is the Good News? The Good News is of ‘Jesus Christ’.

Jesus is a Greek version of Joshua, meaning ‘The Lord saves’—a point Matthew takes up when the angel gives instructions to Joseph about the naming of the child.

By the time Mark’s Gospel was written the title Christos  ‘the anointed one’ had already been added to the personal name Jesus, not so much as a title but almost as a surname. Mark gives no theological background either to the name or the title, but presents them succinctly to make clear that this Good News is rooted in a real man, Jesus Christ. He then goes on to describe Jesus as ‘Son of God’. Later in this series we will consider Mark’s Christology—his views of who Jesus was and his relationship to God. Mark hardly ever uses the term ‘Son of God’ to describe Jesus. But he does so here, and the words are found again on the lips of the Roman Centurion at the moment when Jesus dies. ‘Truly this man was the Son of God.’ The phrase almost brackets the Gospel. The readers know Jesus to be the Son of God, but those who were with him in his ministry and on his journey to the cross only discovered it as a result of his Passion. We will explore the consequences of that later, but at the moment we need simply note the elegant way in which Mark uses this bracketing device.

What freshness and clarity in those few words! Imagine their impact on a group of Christians sitting together for teaching and worship in a house, probably in the great city of Antioch on the eastern Mediterranean coast in what is now Syria.

The Prologue to John is one of the most profound and poetic meditations on the grounding of Christ in the reality of God. But consider how Mark presents similar material in such compressed and concentrated form—Japanese haiku rather than Tenysson!

Having splashed his banner headline across the front page, only then does Mark look backwards at the Hebrew Scriptures.

“As it is written in Isaiah the Prophet”[1]

By placing them here Mark makes clear these prophecies are not merely accidental, but that they, too, have a foundational nature.

Though he describes the Prophet as Isaiah, the quote is in fact an amalgam of two verses, namely Malachi 3.1a[2] and Isaiah 40.3[3]. 

This is the first time in the Gospels that the Old Testament has been quoted. It’s worth taking a little detour here to think about some issues of language, scripture and translation.

Mark wrote his Gospel in a rather rough and ready form of Greek; Jesus and the Disciples spoke Aramaic; the Old Testament Scriptures were written in Hebrew, by then a dead language.

The Jews had been scattered to every corner of the Mediterranean since destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Wherever they went, as their children assimilated and learned new languages, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated. Around the time of Jesus one Greek version was becoming the standard, known as the Septuagint. That is the version Scholars used when they went to compare the quotations in the New Testament with the original version in the Old.

A crucial question is:

‘How would Mark, a Greek speaker and writer, have access to Greek Old Testament texts when he wanted to quote them?’

He certainly wouldn’t be able to go to a bookcase, take out a neatly bound volume, and flip to the right chapter and verse. A text of the Septuagint would, however, be very rare and precious. Only the rich and famous scholars would have access to it.

Memory, however, played a much greater part than it does these days.

A teacher would teach in public, reciting and explaining certain texts. The student would commit these texts to memory. Repetition of the teaching would embed the texts, and, in due course, the hearer might recite and teach them himself.

By the time Mark began to write the Church had been in existence for more than thirty years. It’s clear from Paul that the quotation and application of Old Testament texts was a crucial part of Christian teaching from the very beginning. It focussed, however, on those texts in the Old Testament which pointed forward to Christ. Texts were often collected together by topic or key word to make them easier to remember.

Mark might not have known his scriptures perfectly, and almost certainly did not have a bible against which he could check his references, but, after that stark introduction to his Gospel he continues with a bundle of texts referring to the Messenger, the Voice.

The Messenger, in Malachi, was an individual, coming to prepare God’s people for judgement. Note how the quotation in Mark is subtly changed. In Isaiah the messenger will ‘prepare the way before me.’ In Mark this becomes ‘who will prepare your way.’ In Isaiah God is to act in the future, in Mark his messenger is already active.

The Voice, in the second part of Isaiah, calls for a pathway in the wilderness. This is to be a triumphal way on a grand scale, peaks levelled and valleys filled in, so that the Lord may lead his people home from their Exile in Babylon to their true home in Jerusalem. Again there is a subtle change. In Isaiah the voice cries for the preparation of a route ‘for our God’. In Mark it asks straight paths to be made for him.

Does the voice cry ‘in the wilderness’, or is ‘in the wilderness prepare..” the first part of the message? In fact we can’t tell. Neither Hebrew nor Greek have any punctuation! In Christian interpretation however the voice definitely cries in the wilderness, and our attention is turned the next verses—the appearance of that extraordinary character John the Baptist.

John is mentioned by the Jewish Historian Josephus, as well as by all four evangelists.  His historical existence is without doubt, and his short ministry clearly made a great impact on the Jewish people of the time.

There is no background to John, as Luke gives us. He simply ‘appears’ in the wilderness. He is clearly identified both as the personal Messenger sent by God to prepare the way of the Lord, and his message is the Voice crying in the wilderness promised by Isaiah.

We are told first that John ‘preaches’. The Greek kerux is a herald—one who makes an authoritative proclamation of behalf of a King or Ruler.

John preaches—he becomes both the Voice foretold by the Prophet, and also—in the present time—the prophetic voice itself.

He appears’ in the wilderness’ to preach.

Simply the mention of  'wilderness'conjures up for the Jew a whole network of allusions. The wilderness was not simply an empty barren place or a place to get away from things. The very word brought back to any Jew the central events of the Torah. We will consider this further when we look at the testing of Jesus.

"John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey."

If the mention of the wilderness brought them back to the encounters with the living God under the leadership of Moses, the clothing of John the Baptist explicitly reminded them of Elijah.

In 2 Kings 1:8 the King of Israel enquires of his servants about the prophet they have met. They describe Elijah as ‘a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist.’ The king instantly recognises the description and cries out ‘It is Elijah the Tishbite’.

Though at this point in the Gospel Mark does not explicitly name Elijah as the one who is to return before the Messiah comes, the way he describes John’s clothing makes the point allusively.

Here, at the very beginning John is surrounded by tantalising shadows, or gleams, of Moses and Elijah, the two great pillars of Hebrew faith.

So, what does the Voice, the Herald have to say? What is the message of the Messenger?

We are told, first of all, that he

“appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

He preaches repentance. The preparation of the coming of the Lord to save his people is not to be an exterior event involving terraforming of mountains and valleys, but an interior one—repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  It is not simply a verbal message, but it be accompanied by a sign—baptism.

Israel at the time of Jesus was a ferment of religious movements, ranging from the Saducees, the highly conservative Temple establishment, to the Essenes, who lived a radical and ascetic existence in the desert. There were many radical preachers and movements which came and went, not unlike the ‘new age’ movements of our own day. John’s message struck home not only because of his call for repentance. That in itself was not unusual. But he coupled it with ‘baptism’—a symbolic washing in the River Jordan.  Jewish ritual emphasised the washing of hands before prayer and eating as a sign of ritual cleanness. But the washing of the whole body was reserved for proselytes, those not born as Jews who wished to enter into the Jewish faith. John’s call for repentance coupled with baptism—complete immersion—for all moved it from a ritual matter to a moral one.

John caught the mood of the times, and Mark tells us that people Jerusalem and the whole of Judaea flocked out to take part in this ritual. There was an apocalyptic mood in the air. For the majority of Jews, who believed that prophecy was a thing of the past, and that God only spoke to his people these days with the ‘Bath Qol’--the daughter of a voice—here was a prophet, alive and active in their midst, preparing them through repentance for the coming of the Lord. And people did not simply listen, they did what John demanded of them—plunged into the water and confessed their sins!

Bapto is the Greek for ‘plunge’. This was no token washing, but a deep plunge into the scary water. The whole activity characterised John so much that it became his nickname, ‘John the baptising one’—though  there is no prophecy which indicates this particular activity in connection with the forerunner.

After the effect of John’s ministry is described he makes plain the nature of his rôle.

“The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.”

The prophet said ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord”. John does this. His only role is to point to Jesus, all his activity of preaching and baptising is caught up in that.

 “I have baptised you with water”, he says,

“but he will baptise you with Holy Spirit.”

The Christians Mark was writing for knew the Holy Spirit as a personal experience in their lives. For 1^st century Jews the concept again referred them back to Scripture. The word in both Greek and Hebrew means ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ as well as ‘spirit’. This alludes to the Spirit which ‘brooded over the face of the abyss’—or the ‘wind which swept over the waters of the abyss’ with the implications of new life which follows on from repentance when the anointed one arrives.

What comes next will bring new life, as the breath of God does when it breathes into what is dead and lifeless.

At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

There is no pause, in the midst of all this public commotion and excitement Jesus appears.  The forerunner’s ministry has been fulfilled. Note that he has come from a distance, not from Jerusalem or the land of Judea, but from the Northern Tetrarchate of Galilee, the place a little too close to the edge where Jews and Gentiles can’t entirely be kept apart as they ought. Here he has no title but his earthly description. No-one recognises him, and there are no special preparations for his baptism. He simply goes down into the water with all the rest.

The events which occur as he comes out are recounted in all three Synoptic Gospels, but in Mark they appear to be private events which are known only to Jesus. There is no widespread seeing of the vision, or hearing of the voice of God. His coming out of the water for every-one else is an uneventful as his going in. We do not even have any indication in Mark that John the Baptist recognised him.

In Mark the vision is personal. Jesus sees heaven ‘ripped open’. Though Mark does not recount the tearing of the veil in the temple in the Passion Narrative, the language is similar. The separation between heaven and earth is interrupted in a dramatic way and direct communication between God and earth is enabled. This is experienced in two ways. Firstly the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove. Secondly the voice of God is heard, addressing Jesus: “You are my Son, my beloved. In you I am well pleased.”

The symbolism of the Dove probably picks up the Rabbinic interpretation of Gen 1.2 where the verb describing the activity of the Spirit was translated as ‘broods’ and was interpreted as analogous to the activity of a bird hovering brooding over its nest to hatch its young. The bird in question was often identified as a dove. Here, then, unnoticed by humans amidst all the excitement and action of the Jordan baptism, heaven is ripped open, and creation begins afresh!

The words of God reflect a number of Old Testament passages, for example Psalm 2.7,

 You are my Son, this day have I begotten you.

and Isaiah 42.1,

 Here is my Servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights

Psalm 2 is one of the ‘Royal Psalms’ in which the King of Israel, at his anointing, is adopted as if he were the Son of God.

 Isaiah 42 reflects that concept of the Suffering Servant who will bring the people of Israel back to God.

The two concepts, the Anointed one of God—the Messiah or Christ—and the suffering servant, are both central to the theology of Mark’s Gospel.

God’s word takes us back to the opening of the Gospel, and to the words of the centurion at the Passion, and make it clear that being God’s son is not merely what Jesus thought of himself. This is the action and decision of God.

Mark avoids any reflection on the nature of the baptism, or the fact that Jesus was baptised ‘for the remission of sins’. Matthew’s longer account takes up both these issues, which perhaps perplexed some of those who read the earlier Gospel and needed addressing.

As soon as the words are uttered Mark uses one of his favourite link-words euthus immediately. Immediately Jesus is expelled by the Spirit into the wilderness. The word used,ekballei is a very strong one. Hurled or expelled is an appropriate translation. God’s new act of creation is followed by dramatic action.

The wilderness again—this time the phrase is repeated twice, and the same connotations occur as with John the Baptist. The wilderness is where God tests his people, and where individuals discover their vocation .

Three things happen.

• He is tempted by Satan for forty days,
• he is with the wild beasts,
• and the angels minister to him.

Forty is a very symbolic number in the Hebrew Scriptures. Try looking it up in a Concordance. Twice Moses stayed on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, bracketing the idolatry of the Israelites with the Golden Calf.

If forty brought back a whole series of memories of Moses and the journey to the Promised Land, forty is equally significant in the story of Elijah.

In  1 Kings 17, a the beginning of Elijah’s ministry he prophesies to the King of a drought which will come upon Israel. The Lord then sends him out into the wilderness, where he drinks from a stream, and where ravens brought him bread and meat to eat each morning and evening.

Later he flees from Jezebel, goes a day’s journey into the wilderness, and lies down under a broom tree to die. He believes he is the only prophet of YHWH left, and his ministry is hopeless. At this point an angel visits him, and says ‘Get up and eat’, and there is a freshly baked loaf and a jar of water. We are told that

he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he travelled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.

Like Moses, and the People of Israel, for Elijah too the wilderness was a formative place, both at the beginning of his prophesying, and at a time where it seemed totally to have failed.  In the course of these two trips to the wilderness, he was fed by wild beasts, i.e. the ravens, and ministered to by an angel.

The word peiradzo seems here to mean ‘test’ rather than ‘tempt’. Unlike Luke and Matthew there is no direct mention of fasting, and, no moral temptations are recounted. But testing is not just about whether you pass the test or not, it is about formation.

The Semitic term Satan is used by Mark, whereas Luke and Matthew use diabolos. Though both Jews and Gentiles at the time of Jesus believed in a universe populated by spiritual beings of various sorts, some good, some bad and some neutral, no theology of a personal Devil as we know it had yet been worked out.  Satan means adversary. In the Book of Job, the adversary’s role is a neutral one—a Devil’s advocate, rather than a personified force of evil.

The ministry of Jesus begins in Mark with baptism—the place where the spiritual life of his readers would also have begun. Baptism leads, under the very strong guidance, even compulsion, of the Spirit, to a time of testing in a wild and completely isolated place inhabited only by wild beasts, but where, nonetheless, he has the assurance of God’s presence through the ministry of the angels.

Christians early began to suffer persecution, and, as we shall see, one of the purposes of Mark’s Gospel was to explore the consequences of discipleship… this is what Jesus did, what do we do, how do we respond to God’s choice of us?

The Baptism and Testing of Jesus is portrayed as New Creation, a New Exodus. A new people is the inevitable result. But what will their response be—obedience, or disobedience??

In these few verses Mark shows his readers a paradigm in the life of Jesus, and invites them to lay it over their own Christian life and experience.

The outcome of this testing is recounted again in a very compressed manner.

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!

John’s time is over. His courageous ministry has led to his arrest, and as we shall see later, his martyrdom.

Jesus time now begins, not in Jerusalem or the regions of Judea, but in Galilee… that mixed up place where Jews and Gentiles lived too close together for the comfort of ‘proper’ Jews.

His message is a fresh one, building on that of John the Baptist, but full not of impending judgement, but of Good News, and the assurance of the closeness of the Kingdom of God.

How that message works out we will see in coming weeks as we look at the Galilean ministry of Jesus.

I assure you that we will not be looking at the rest of the Gospel in such excruciating detail, but this beginning passage show us that Mark is  not a naïve writer, who abbreviates the fuller Gospels to provide an ‘Idiots Guide’ to Jesus, but a skilful theologian. In such a small compass he weaves together a web of scriptural quotations and allusions to present us with a fresh and challenging portrait of Jesus as the mysterious Son of God, emerging victorious from the testing of the Satan in the wilderness, and entering into battle with him in the everyday realities of the world.

---

[1] Mark 1.2a

[2] “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me.”

[3] A voice of one calling:  “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD^; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.