Urgent: Moving with Purpose

If you’ve been in church since the end of November, and you’ve been awake (!), you may have noticed that we’ve been reading the Gospel of Mark almost exclusively as our Gospel lesson. That’s because we’re in ‘year B’ of our lectionary, and this whole year we will mostly be reading from Mark (as last year we read mostly from Matthew, and next year we’ll read mostly from Luke).

There are a couple things that the Gospel of Mark is known for. One is the ‘messianic secret’: just about every time Jesus does something for someone else (healing, exorcism, etc.) he tells the person not to tell anyone what he did or who he is.

There’s the incredible amount of exorcisms in Mark. In relation to the other Gospels there’s a much higher percentage of stories of evil spirits, demonic possessions, and stories of Jesus casting these demons out. More than any of the other Gospels, Mark is very clearly the depiction of the forces of God battling the forces of Evil.

There’s the ending of Mark. If you look in your Bibles, and turn to the end of the Gospel of Mark, you’ll see that there are several ‘versions’ of the ending of his Gospel. If you look at the bottom of that page to the footnotes, you’ll almost certainly find some explanation that there are different ancient copies of Mark that have different lengths of endings. The oldest copy that we have of Mark has no Resurrection appearance of Jesus at all. The women go to the tomb, find it empty, and run away scared, and tell no one what they have seen – certainly an odd way to end a Gospel!

But, maybe the most curious thing about the Gospel of Mark is a single phrase that turns up over and over again in the Gospel: “and immediately.” Everything in Mark happens ‘immediately!’ The phrase “and immediately” thumps through the Gospel like a drum, constantly propelling the reader forward, and giving a quick pace to this, the shortest of the Gospels.

You might be asking yourself, ‘why does everything happen immediately?’ Well, the best answer that we can give, is Mark’s disposition. In all accounts, Mark is the first of the Gospels that was written, probably written only 10 or 20 years after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and maybe even a full 40 years before the Gospel of John was written.

Mark was writing in a time of the Church – the very, very Early Church – when everyone was certain that Jesus was going to come back any moment. They literally thought that they would not die before Jesus came back to bring them all to Heaven and end the World as we all know it.

If you had told Mark that people would be reading his Gospel almost 2,000 years later in the mountains of western Maryland, he wouldn’t have believed you for a moment, because the thought that 2,000 would pass without Jesus coming back would have been completely foreign to him. So, when he sat down to write this Gospel he wasn’t trying to write a literary masterpiece – this was not the great American novel: he was writing a short testimony of the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus so that the most people possible would quickly read it and come to faith before Jesus came back.

That’s the reason why this is the shortest Gospel in the Bible. It’s the reason why there is no account of the birth of Jesus (no Bethlehem, no star, no shepherds, no Joseph and Mary in waiting). It’s the reason why Mark doesn’t have any long account of the Resurrection of Jesus (No road to Emmaus, no doubting Thomas, no appearances of Jesus to the disciples in the Upper Room).

And, it’s why everything happens ‘immediately.’

Mark was writing with urgency, and when he looked back on the ministry of Jesus, he saw it as an urgent ministry. He saw Jesus battling the cosmic forces of evil with urgency. He saw Jesus teaching His People with urgency. He saw Jesus come up from the waters of Baptism (as in today’s Gospel lesson) and be propelled with urgency to begin what he was sent here to do.

2,000 years later, we can look at the Gospel of Mark, and realize that Jesus wasn’t coming back quite as soon as Mark or Mark’s church thought he was. Looking back over these 2,000 years we can see that God’s Time isn’t as our time, and that God will move, and act, and come when the Time is right.

But, that doesn’t mean that we have to abandon the urgency of Mark, and the urgency of Jesus. It doesn’t mean that we should resign ourselves to laziness and carelessness when it comes to the things of God. Faith and moving with urgency are bound together, inseparably, both in Heaven and on Earth.

Mark’s Gospel is written so as to move us to act and live with a sense of urgency and purpose when it comes to the things of God. The drumbeat of ‘and immediately,’ and immediately,’ ‘and immediately,’ should be a drumbeat that infects us – effects us – to carry the same urgency in our lives. It’s an urgency that should alter how we understand our own baptism, our prayer life, our sense of mission in the world, and our drive to liver closer to God day by day.

When the paralytic, whose friends dug a hole in Jesus’ roof and lowered him down to the feet of Jesus, was healed he ‘immediately’ got up. When the leper was touched by Jesus, the leprosy ‘immediately’ left him. When Jesus came to Simon’s mother-in-law’s home, everyone ‘immediately’ told Jesus of her illness. When Jesus invited the disciples to drop everything in their lives and follow him, they ‘immediately’ left their nets and followed him. And, today, when Jesus was baptized by John in the wilderness, the Holy Spirit ‘immediately’ drove him into the wilderness for prayer, fasting, and tempting by Satan.

Some questions rise to the surface here:

What in our lives drives us with urgency?

What drives us? What consumes us? What makes us jump to our feet? Job? Family? Sports? Politics? . . . God?

Are we moved with a sense of urgency to grow in our faith - this Lent?

Those are questions that I can’t answer. Though we’ll all know the answers we give.

And, so will God.