'Good news' story, or good 'news story'?

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

11.00am, 31st December 2023

Mark 1.1-8

A Labour Party spin doctor infamously remarked,
            on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001,
            that that day was a ‘very good day’ to bury ‘bad news’.[1]
 

Whilst she was, with some justification,

            vilified by the press at the time,

I think that in many ways her reaction to news management in the wake of tragedy

            was the product of a far wider and longstanding culture of cynicism and opportunism

            in the world of news, media, spin, and propaganda.

 

The question of ‘good news days’, and ‘bad news days’,

            and indeed of ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’

is not a straightforward question

            of the moral difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

 

The thing is, a ‘good-news’ story, is rarely a good ‘news-story’.

            Stories of ‘good news’ are often confined to the final item on the local news,

                        and typically take the ‘lost puppy found’ style.

It is very rare for the headline news, to be ‘good news’,

            rather, the stories we want to hear are stories of tragedy and trauma,

                        of wars and rumours of wars,

                        stories of money, power, and politics.

These are the good ‘news-stories’,

            and they are rarely ‘good news’.

 

On the rare occasion that a headlining story is presented as ‘good news’,

            the cynic in me is always looking beneath the surface of the story

            for the spin, the propaganda, the vested interest.

 

So what is going on here at the beginning of Mark’s gospel

            where the coming of Jesus is descried as ‘good news’?

 

We’ve just had Christmas, where the birth of Jesus

            as described in Matthew and Luke’s gospels

            is presented as ‘glad tidings’ for the world,

and now Mark is calling his advent ‘Good news’ for the world?

 

Human births don’t often get this kind of publicity…

            with the occasional notable exception,

            such as the announcement of yet another royal baby.

 

Whilst the news of human baby is always good news in and of itself,

            a royal baby is only headline good news

            because of the power, wealth, and privilege of the family

            that the child will be born into.

 

And it was ever thus.

 

In the Roman world, the official announcement of the birth of a royal child

            was trumpeted throughout the empire as, you guessed it, ‘good news!!’

 

The Roman propaganda machine would go into overdrive,

            to eulogise the emperor as the ‘divine man’

            and the birth of their child as the birth of a god.

 

There is an ancient inscription, which reads,

            ‘The birthday of the god was, for the world,

            the beginning of the joyful messages

                        which have gone forth because of him.’

 

‘Glad tidings of comfort and joy’, indeed.

 

The birth of an emperor’s god-child was ‘good news’ for the empire,

            because it ensured the perpetuation of the royal dynasty.

 

And so we come to the first verse of Mark’s gospel,

            written to a culture familiar with the carefully managed ‘good news’

                        of the emperor cult:

 

‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’[2]

 

Here, right at the beginning of the gospel, in the very first line of text,

            we find Mark setting up a conflict that will dominate everything that follows.

 

He serves notice to his readers, from the offset,

            that this story of Jesus will be one which challenges

            all the apparatus of imperial propagation.

 

Like John’s gospel, Mark doesn’t offer us a ‘birth narrative’;

            we have to turn to Matthew and Luke

            for our singing shepherds, angelic choirs, and visiting magi.

 

Rather, he gives us a dramatic introduction

            to the arrival of the son of God in the course of human history.

 

Mark presents the coming of Jesus as the advent of the ‘anointed’ leader,

            who is confirmed by God himself,

and who bursts onto the scene of history

            proclaiming a ‘kingdom’ to challenge the might

            of the Roman Kingdom.

 

In other words, Mark’s version of the advent of Jesus

            is cast in such a way as to take dead aim at Caesar, the Roman emperor,

            and at the legitimating myths that supported his power.

 

From its very first line, Mark’s gospel is subversive.

 

‘Good news’ in Roman times, as in our own time,

            was usually news of victory on the battlefield

            as the imperial armies marched their way across the known world,

giving the gift of Roman Peace, the pax Romana,

            to a world that had no choice but to accept the gift,

            or to pay the price for refusing to comply.

 

In direct contrast to this, the ‘good news’ with which Mark’s Gospel begins,

            is a declaration of war upon the very heart of the violent empire,

                        as Jesus does battle with the political culture

                        of imperial domination.

 

We live in a world that is addicted to news,

            but as we have seen, ‘good news’ does not usually make good news.

 

A good, or effective, news story,

            is one that hooks the viewer or the reader into wanting to know more.

 

News of battles won, terror threats foiled,

            economic victories, and political standoffs,

are the staple diet of our news media.

 

And they do for us what the Roman propaganda machine

            did for the Roman plebeians:

 

They sell us the narratives by which we then frame our lives,

            and they invite us to rejoice in the ‘good news’ of their protectionism,

                        as it comes to us through the secular deities of militarism and monarchy,

                        and the miracle of free market economics.

 

And it is to us, as it was to the world of the Romans,

            that the Christ-child comes.

 

And Mark would have us believe that he comes

            in a way that subverts the parochial good news stories of our time

            with a transcendent message of ‘good news’ for all time, and all people.

 

And so Mark takes us on a journey from the world of global domination,

            to the world of those who see history from the other side.

 

He invites us to step with him into the world of the under-dog,

            the world of the dominated,

                        the world of the refugee, the alienated, and the exiled.

 

And so he invokes the prophet Isaiah,

            and we hear a voice reading quotes from the prophet of the Jewish exile.

 

Interestingly, if you actually turn to Isaiah in the Old Testament, to find this quote,

            it’s not there quite as Mark has it,

not only because he was quoting from a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures,

            (whereas our modern Old Testament is a translation of a tenth century Hebrew text);

but also because the first half of the quote isn’t from Isaiah at all,

            it’s a mish-mash of quotes from Exodus and Malachi (Exod. 23.20; Mal. 3.1).

 

But the second part of Mark’s quote is, however, from Isaiah, chapter 40v3.

 

As an aside here, for a moment,

            the fact that Mark can take three quotes, from three different places,

            and edit them together to form what he presents

                        as a unified quotation from Isaiah,

            tells us a lot about the way in which the early followers of Jesus

                        thought about their scriptures.

 

Not for them some restrictive doctrine of scriptural inerrancy,

            or any idea that the text is immutable

            and universally applicable in all times and all places.

 

Not for them a statement of faith

            that regards scripture as the sole and absolute authority

            in all matters of faith and practice.

 

Rather, Mark, in common with the other Gospel writers,

            regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as holy stories,

            that explored how and why God was at work in the world,

drawing people to the divine

            and reshaping human history

            away from oppression and towards liberation.

 

For them, scripture was more of an inspiration,

            than it was itself inspired.

 

It was there to engage with, to hear from, and to argue with,

            not to settle arguments and close down conversation!

 

Anyway, the way in which Mark edits these three quotes together is significant,

            because it tells us a lot about his subversive intent.

 

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but the word ‘redaction’

            has come back into fashion over recent years,

with government reports often published

            with key passages ‘redacted’ in the interest of national security.

 

But just in case you’ve missed this word, it means, ‘to edit for publication’,

            and it’s a word that Biblical Scholars are very familiar with

                        as we look at the ways the gospel writers

                        edited their source material together,

            in order to bring their different versions of the Jesus story into being.

 

So the scholarly discipline of ‘redaction criticism’, as it is known,

            looks at the motives for why

            things have been edited together in certain ways.

 

However, the word ‘redaction’ arrived into more popular use

            through the way in which government departments respond

                        to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act,

            where documents are released, but in so-called ‘redacted’ form,

                        with section obliterated where that particular content

                        is deemed unsuitable for public consumption.

 

The association with concealed statistics and government cover up

            has lent the word an air of mystery and intrigue;

                        it speaks of the mystique of subversion.

 

Which is exactly where Mark is taking us

            in his redaction of Exodus, Malachi, and Isaiah.

 

The Exodus reference, and its equivalent passage in Malachi,

            are combined and translated by Mark to read:

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

            who will prepare your way.’

 

And here, Mark takes us into the world of the Jewish slaves in Egypt,

            making their journey through the wilderness of Sinai

            on their way to the promised land.

 

The messenger who goes ahead through the wilderness

            is heralding the way for the people of God

            to make their own journey of liberation;

the Lord himself blazes the trail.

 

This is a story of emancipation, of freedom from slavery.

            And as such it is an inherently revolutionary story.

 

For any empire dependent on the enslavement of humans,

            the release of those slaves from bondage

            is an act of treason against the system that requires their servitude.

 

Whether it’s the Egyptians of the time of the exodus,

            or the Romans of the time of Mark’s gospel,

or the American plantation owners of a bygone century,

            or those who currently serve in the sweatshops and brothels of our own time,

            held in economic slavery to the empire of global capital

                        that dominates our own world:

 

the release of slaves is an act of subversion.

 

What Mark leaves open for interpretation, though,

            is who the messenger of freedom is in the context of his gospel.

Is it John the Baptist, heralding the arrival of Jesus?

            Or is the messenger Jesus himself,

                        preparing the way for those who will follow him?

            Or is the messenger none other than God,

                        sending the gospel writer to proclaim to readers down the centuries

                        the good news of the advent of Jesus.

 

The answer to this conundrum may well be that all three are intended,

            because the advent of God is not a once-for-all event,

                        fixed in time and space.

 

            The God who comes to us in the infant Jesus,

                        a sign of hope in a world of oppression and darkness,

            is the same God who comes to us in the adult Jesus,

                        opening before all of humanity a way of being,

                        that is not dominated by death and enthralled by empire.

 

            And this is yet again the same God

                        who comes to us by the Spirit of Christ,

                                    as the stories of Good News that we encounter

                                    through the pages of the gospel

                        inspire new ways of engaging our humanity before God.

 

Sometimes, the coming of God into the world

            is full of ambiguity and uncertainty,

because this is the God who comes in the wilderness,

            to those who are lost,

offering a way through the desert to the new world of love and acceptance

            that he is bringing into being.

 

And so Mark introduces us to John the Baptist,

            the herald in the wilderness,

            living a marginal existence, surviving on locusts and honey.

 

John is found in the place where the exodus people fled

            as they left their slavery in Egypt.

 

He is found in the place where Jesus faces his own temptations,

            the place where Elijah sought sanctuary

                        when hunted by the political authorities,

            the place of solitude, loneliness, and liminality.

 

And it is from this peripheral place

            that the challenge to the centre emerges.

 

The voice of the one proclaiming the advent of the good news of the coming of Jesus

            is heard echoing from the hills.

 

If earthly power takes the centre ground,

            whether that be Rome, Jerusalem, or Westminster;

the prophetic voice of challenge comes from the margins.

 

Mark’s gospel deliberately sets up a spatial tension

            between two places that are symbolically opposites.

 

The disparity between the margin and the centre,

            between the wilderness and the temple,

is something that Mark’s gospel returns to time and again.

 

According to the dominant Jewish nationalistic ideology of salvation history,

            Jerusalem was considered the hub

            to which all nations would one day come.

 

Mark turns this on its head;

            and far from beginning his story of good news

            with a triumphal march on Zion,

rather, he tells of crowds fleeing to the margins,

            to be baptised with the baptism of repentance.

 

Mark is setting the scene for a conflict

            that will only resolve itself at the crucifixion,

as the new kingdom of Jesus comes from the margins,

            to challenge the powers that dominate the centre.

 

The priestly and scribal establishment of the temple,

            whose social power was derived

                        from systems of religiously legitimates social control,

            finds itself in the same category as the emperor of Rome:

and such power is deemed illegitimate by the coming Christ.

 

The good news of the coming of Jesus

            is that all expressions of illegitimate power,

                        whether secular, sacred, or some fusion of the two,

            are called to account by the voice of repentance from the wilderness.

 

And so John the Baptist calls people to repentance,

            he invites them to confess the sin of their complicity

                        in the idolatrous powers of Rome and Jerusalem,

            and he baptises them in the Jordan as they, like the exodus people of old,

                        pass through the waters of the river

            as they make their journey from the old world to the new,

                        as they complete their pilgrimage

                                    from enslavement to the powers that be

                                    to freedom in the new kingdom

                                                that they are being called to bring into being.

 

The water-baptism of John, the baptism of repentance,

            heralds the baptism offered by Jesus,

who will, says John, baptise with the Holy Spirit.

 

If John’s baptism of water in the wilderness sets up a challenge

            to the dominant powers in the world,

the baptism of the Holy Spirit proclaimed by Jesus

            inaugurates a confrontation on a spiritual level

with the underlying forces of idolatry

            that give rise to earthly expressions of centralised authority.

 

There is no darkness so dark

            as that which lurks in the human soul,

and we have such endless capacity to wreak havoc in creation.

 

The baptism of the Holy Spirit

            shines the light of the Spirit of Christ

                        into the darkest places of our souls and imaginings,

            bringing to the light all that would otherwise eat away at our humanity,

                        destroying us one day at a time until all that is left

                        are the false gods of our own devising.

 

Baptism is not simply about being sorry to God

            for the wrong things we have done.

It is about opening ourselves to the transformative power of the Spirit of Christ

            that takes us away from the centre,

                        away from our dreams of power and our fantasies of success,

            into the wilderness where dreams are transformed

                        and fantasies redeemed.

 

It is only as we are baptised to be a marginal people

            that we find we can effect true change in the world.

 

The challenge here, at the beginning of Mark’s gospel, is clear:

            It asks us to consider in what way we will regard

                        the coming of Jesus to the world as good news?

 

If we see the coming of Jesus as the advent of power,

            to transform society from the centre

                        by forceful application of Christian values,

            then we side with Rome and Jerusalem,

                        not with John the Baptist.

 

If, however, we hear the one who comes to us,

            calling us to the wilderness to repent of our sins,

            calling us to baptism of water and the Holy Spirit,

then we hear the voice of the one crying in the desert.

 

The waters of Baptism speak to all of us,

            maybe reminding us of the promises

                        we ourselves have made in years long past,

            maybe challenging us to consider baptism for ourselves,

 

but above all, calling us to the margins:

            calling us to the wilderness, to the land beyond the Jordan,

            calling us to repentance of our worshipping of other gods,

            and calling us to receive afresh the baptism of the Holy Spirit,

                        who opens within us the stream of living water

                        which leads to eternal life.

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[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1385043/A-good-day-for-No10-to-bury-Jo-Moores-career.html

[2] The following sermon draws on Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man.