The good news, or Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begins here, with the prophets Malachi and Isaiah, who long before Jesus was born wrote these words: “Behold, I send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you…”
So begins the earliest of the written Gospels…
Over the next few months, my church is embarking this Sunday on an experiment – What if we all just sit down and read, really read, the Gospel of Mark? Not try to harmonize the Gospels or fill in the gaps or paint a complete picture of the life the “Historical Jesus…”
What if we just take two months, two chapters per week, and READ Mark’s account of Jesus as it is written?
For my part in this endeavor, I have written and narrated (I, personally, not anything AI) story-style videos that closely follow each chapter. They are, as best I can describe, a hybrid paraphrased translation with historical and cultural notes thrown in as needed.
The video for chapter 1 is below. The full script I am reading from is pasted below the video, in case you’re one of those people who wants to read along.
Children’s activity books are (and will be) available to accompany each chapter. Sign up to my newsletter to have them delivered in PDF format to you weekly, ready to print (and yes, the chapter 1 activities are available for download immediately upon sign up). Click here if you’re interested.
The good news, or Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begins here, with the prophets Malachi and Isaiah, who long before Jesus was born wrote these words:
“Behold, I send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.”
“A voice crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.’”
And so, John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness. He was a preacher who used the ritual of baptism to turn people away from wrongdoing and restore their relationships with God.
Now, the Greek word, Baptizo – or, in English, baptism – means to immerse or dunk something under water. When John Baptized people, he dipped them into the Jordan River, a special place to the Jewish people, as it historically marked one of the borders of their territory. Where did he get the idea to do this, though? Well, the Jews at that time had several similar cleansing rituals, which symbolized the ending of a sickness, or recovery from an injury, or repentance from wrongdoing. So, this baptism thing was something that made perfect sense to the people John was talking to.
Now as the legend of this man, John, grew, it seemed that everyone in the region of Judea, and certainly everyone living in Jerusalem – the Holy City, where the One and Only Jewish Temple was located – came out to see him for themselves. And in all the commotion, it seemed that everyone was confessing their sins—these things that held them back from God—and being baptized by John in the Jordan River.
Their curiosity is quite understandable. John wore a camel hair tunic and a leather belt, and ate only locusts (which are giant grasshoppers) and wild honey.
He was a sensational figure, and a powerful speaker. But one of the strangest things he said was that: “Someone far more powerful than me is still on his way. In fact, I’m not even worthy to stoop down and untie his sandals for him.
I baptize you in water; and he will baptize you in a Holy Spirit.”
And one day, Jesus came from a town called Nazareth in an area called Galilee and was, like so many others, baptized by John in the Jordan.
And as soon as Jesus’s head came up out of the water, he saw the sky tearing open and the Spirit—that is, God’s Holy Spirit—descending on him like a dove.
And a voice came out of the sky, saying: You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
Then right away, the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness.
He was in the wilderness for forty days, being examined, or tested, or tempted, or proven true by Satan—a Hebrew word meaning adversary. During that time, Jesus was also with the wild bests. And the messengers—that is, God’s messengers, the kind we now call angels—were looking after him.
Now sometime after that, John was arrested. And so Jesus left the region Judea, where John had been preaching, and went into the region of Galilee to preach the gospel of God, saying that the time had come; the kingdom of God was drawing near. Repent (literally, metanoiete—which means, turn your mind into line with, in this case, God.), and believe in the Gospel.
Now, the most important place in Galilee is the Sea of Galilee (which is actually a large lake, also known as Lake Genesseret). While Jesus passed by the Sea of Galilee he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, because they were fishermen.
And Jesus said to them: Follow me, and I will make you fisher’s of humankind.
So right away, they left their nets and followed Jesus.
A little further down the shoreline, Jesus saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother (not to be confused with John the Baptist… There were a lot of Johns in first century Jewish territories…) Anyway… James and this John were in their own boat mending their nets.
So at once, Jesus called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired helpers and followed Jesus.
The whole group of them, Jesus, Simon, Andrew, James and John, now went off to Capernaum, one of the largest cities in the region of Galilee. And at once, on the Sabbath, Jesus entered the synagogue and taught.
[[Synagogues back then, by the way, were mostly the same as synagogues today—Jewish gathering places for worship, particularly on the Sabbath, which for Jews is from Friday evening until Saturday evening, not all day Sunday is it is for Christians.]]
The people who gathered for worship in the synagogue were astonished by Jesus’s teaching, because he was teaching them like someone who had some special authority, even over the religious leaders, and not like just another scribe who had studied and memorized what scribes and teachers before him had already said.
Then, right away, there was a man in the synagogue who had an unclean spirit. And he cried out:
What do we have to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth? You are come to destroy us! I know who you are, the Holy One of God!
Shut up and come out of him! Jesus said.
The unclean spirit threw the man into a seizure and screamed aloud and came out of the man’s body.
Everyone who saw this was astonished, and whispered among themselves: What is this? This man, who comes here teaching new things with such authority? And even the unclean spirits, [or demons, or beings who cause disease and mental illness,] obey his commands?
But what is this “unclean spirit”? It is worth discussing here, as such beings will appear and confront Jesus over and over again in the stories to come.
Traditionally, we have called these creatures “demons”—but what does that word even mean?
The word “demon” comes from a Greek word: “Daimon.” These were minor, nameless deities, sometimes perhaps ancestor spirits, who roamed the earth causing either harm or help, mischief and mayhem, or sometimes good.
You might notice, the Greek Daimon is similar to the Arabian concept of a Djinn.
Now, ancient people believed that all disease, injury, etc., had some kind of divine cause. They had no idea that actual disease carrying organisms, like bacteria, existed, so they turned to what we now call the “supernatural.” When no other explanation could be found, they attributed sickness, injury, and mental illness to “demons” “tricker spirits” “unclean spirits…”
In fact, if you think about it, the scientific reality of bacteria and viruses is not all that dissimilar from ancient ideas about “daimons,” demons, “unclean spirits…”
Still, Jesus’s encounters with “unclean spirits” or “demon-possessed” people often seem to go beyond, what we might call, ordinary “sicknesses.”
So what was this “unclean spirit” that Jesus encountered in the synagogue that Sabbath? Was it some supernatural creature, or was this a man with some mental disorder we would today be able to identify and treat? The truth is, we don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. The point of the “unclean spirit” is that it prevented this man from living a whole and meaningful life. The point of Jesus’s encounters with such creatures is that he drove them away, allowing the possessed people to live whole and meaningful lives.
Whatever Jesus did drive out of the man that day, Jesus drove it out, and it was astonishing to all who saw it.
And so, the rumors about Jesus began to spread like wildfire all over Galilee.
As soon as they left the synagogue, Jesus, with James and John, entered the house of Simon and his brother Andrew.
And right away, they spoke with Jesus about Simon’s mother-in-law, who was sick with a terrible fever.
So Jesus went and took her hand, and the fever left her. She got up and took her place as their hostess—since she was probably the oldest person living in the house with Simon and Andrew.
Now this, again, is exactly the sort of thing that sets rumors on fire. By the time the sun went down, it seemed that everyone who had a sick or demon possessed friend or relative had come looking for Jesus…
Until it seemed that the entire city had converged on Simon’s front door.
So Jesus healed many sick people of various diseases, and drove out many demons. But Jesus didn’t allow the demons to speak, because they knew him.
And early the next morning, when it was still dark, Jesus got up and went off to a place in the wilderness outside the city, to pray by himself.
Simon and the others went after him.
“Hey, everyone is looking for you!” They said when they had found him.
“Let’s move on, to the neighboring towns,” Jesus said. “So I can preach there too. For this is what I came out to do.”
So he went around preaching in all the synagogues in Galilee, and casting out demons, too.
[See, I told you that demon or unclean spirit thing came up a lot…]
One day, a leper—that is, a person with a terrible, disfiguring, and contagious skin disease—came to Jesus. Kneeling down, the leper implored him, “If you will it, you can make me clean!” That is, cured.
Filled with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the leper. “I will it,” he said. “Be made clean.”
At once, the leprosy left him, and he was made clean—that is, he was cured.
Then right away, Jesus sent him away with this warning: “Don’t say anything about this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and make the offering Moses established all that time ago for your cleansing—this will be your testimony to them.”
But when the former leper left Jesus, he spread the story of what had happened far and wide, so Jesus was no longer able to enter a city because so many people wanted to see him. He retreated to the open country, the wilderness between cities. And people came out from all over to meet him.
