It's Beginning

Mark is not the gospel most people turn to at Christmas… where’s the Christmas story in Mark? But as it says from verse one… The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God…

When we start looking for Jesus we start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). We hear the beginning of “good news” which is translated from “gospel” which once was “God’s spell,” which came from the literal translation of “well message.” In other words (or in those words) “The beginning of the well-message of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God…” This is how it starts. It starts with the fulfillment of Scripture, of prophets’ words from hundreds of years before. It starts the “spell,” the healing words, the verbal promise of wholeness, the pervasive peace that will conquer Death.

Jesus came to kill Death, and when Mark gets underway in his version of the story, he says Jesus entered reality, our reality to keep a promise and to make a promise. God said it would happen and it is happening so that we can know it will happen. Death is on borrowed time. Death ruled at one point. Death is still powerfully in place. But Death is going to end. In Scripture we read that Jesus’ well-message is the beginning of the death of Death. At the end of the Bible, the last enemy to be put down is Death and it will never rise again… forever.

As we sit in hospice rooms, or in hospital waiting rooms, or at bedsides listening to frail, rattled breathing, watching fluttering chest rising and falling gently, or even watching the doctor’s mouth move while words we do not want to hear are coming out, we have a promise. The promise is that you, O Death, may still be powerful. You may win in this small battle. But you have already lost, and you will keep losing.

The beginning of the well-message of Jesus is that wellness is coming, and Jesus came to demonstrate how to live as part of it now and in anticipation of it then. Christmas is the beginning.