Mark's Gospel BONUS 2 - Making the Most of Mark: How the gospel 'works'

So we're studying uh Mark's Gospel this term.

It's our it's our main book in Sunday preaching and in uh midweek fellowship group Bible studies, uh, Mark's Gospel.

And we're taking two Sunday school sessions uh to help us to make the most of Mark's Gospel.

That was uh last week uh and this week.

So have Mark chapter one uh open in front of you if you would, uh and I'll pray.

Father in heaven, uh, thank you for the gift of uh this your day.

We ask that you would encourage our hearts, feed our minds with and from your word uh by which we know you.

Uh, we pray that for ourselves.

Uh we ask that too for our children and young people meeting elsewhere.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So uh making the most of Mark's gospel, just a few uh basic questions as we come to Mark.

So who wrote the Gospel?

Well, Mark.

Uh, but very early evidence in church history, so outside of the Bible, but early on in church history, suggests that Mark was writing with kind of with the Apostle Peter peering over his shoulder.

So we find very good testimony to that from people like Pop Pius, an early church uh leader, and quoted in Eusebius, the early historian.

And the way that the gospel is written very likely reflects Peter's own eyewitness testimony and experiences.

You know, here are the words of someone who actually shared in uh Jesus' public ministry, and that I think helps to explain some of the features of Mark's Gospel and actually some of the unique features of Mark's Gospel.

Uh it's an it's an amazing sort of roller coaster ride, in part giving to us uh the testimony of someone who was there.

Uh how, or how was Mark's Gospel to be used?

I'll explain what I mean by that.

At least one purpose for Mark's Gospel was to be read aloud.

Now, obviously, all of the New Testament actually was meant to be read.

So, for example, Paul will say to one church, read the other letter, and vice versa.

There was an expectation that the public reading of Scripture was actually the first arena for the church to receive uh the word of God.

But obviously, bear in mind, additionally, this is at a time when some people could read, perhaps more than we thought, but not that many people could read.

And there is in Marx's gospel what you could call a storytelling quality.

That is, when you when you read it through, and we we've read chunks of it through recently, and it's something you you can't not notice, there is a kind of a flowing narrative.

It's a true story, but there is a there is a story element to it.

There are things in it like uh deliberate repetitions, which might be there in part to help the memory.

There are events described, which so for example, when G when Mark describes a miracle, he will actually usually give a longer and more colourful description than you'd find in Matthew or Luke.

And all of these little things may well work together to uh make this memorable to someone or to a church who is listening.

This kind of storytelling quality uh to the gospel has led some folks even to think about Mark's gospel as a drama.

It's not a bad word to uh have in our minds.

Obviously, don't think fiction, it's it's true, but the way that the truth about the Lord Jesus is being conveyed is in a particular way.

It is a gripping story.

Now why?

Why was it written?

Well, it was written to convey the gospel.

So remember, Mark is writing gospel.

So, Mark 1, verse 1, which we've looked at plenty of times recently, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Mark 1:1

So the gospel, it is good news, and that is about the reign of God's King.

That is gospel in Bible terms.

The reign of God's King.

So it's not good advice, that is, it's not chiefly about what we are to do, rather, it's about King Jesus, who he is and what he has done.

It's not a history book exactly, though it is historical.

It's not a biography either, exactly, as we would tend to think of a biography.

It's not a it's not a comprehensive life story.

There's nothing in Mark about Jesus' birth or early life.

Half of the gospel is given over to the last week of Jesus' life.

So it's deliberately highly selective.

So God, through God the Holy Spirit, through the human author, has chosen to tell us this and not the rest.

So together it is gospel, it is conveying to us the message of the reign of God's King.

So can we say a little bit more, though, about the message?

You know, what is the message?

Well, it's obviously about Jesus the King.

Well, the introduction actually tells us Mark's message.

So the introduction is verses 1 to 15 of chapter 1.

We thought about that at some length last week, actually.

And it gives us these three questions, which the rest of the gospel fills out.

Who is Jesus?

Why did Jesus come?

And what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus?

So those are the three topics of Mark's Gospel: Jesus' identity, Jesus' mission, and discipleship.

It's what we see in the first three verses of the Gospel.

Those quotes from the Old Testament, from Malachi and Isaiah, the messenger whose John the Baptist will come before God's king comes, and he's going to come both to judge and to save.

So that's what's given to us in the first three verses.

And then at the end of the introduction, Mark 1, 14 and 15, the first words of Jesus, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel.

So the kingdom's here because the king is here, and he's come with this dual mission actually, to judge and to save.

And the right response, therefore, is to repent and believe.

And the rest of the gospel, well, it gives us answers to those three questions.

And if you have those three questions kind of going over in your mind as we work our way through Mark over the next months, we won't go far wrong.

Who's Jesus?

Why did Jesus come, and what does it mean to be a follower of him?

Let's go on and think a little bit about how Mark works in Adverted Commas.

One challenge in Mark's gospel is to work out the big point of any given passage.

You know, it's our it's our conviction that God the Holy Spirit has given to each portion of Scripture a particular burden or a particular point, which Christian people in the church, with the Spirit's help, need to understand and rightly respond to.

So how do we work that out?

One challenge in Mark's gospel is that there are rarely explanatory comments.

For example, in Luke 18, we read this sentence.

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.

So here's a parable, but very helpfully, before the parable, we're given that comment that tells us the point of the parable that follows.

It's about praying and not giving up praying.

It is very unusual in Mark's gospel to read something like that.

We simply have an event or a parable or some such thing, and we have to work out, well, actually, what is this Spirit's given intent and purpose of that passage?

Now, one of the ways we get led to that is by noticing carefully how Mark tells the gospel story.

I just want to look at an example together.

So in our Bibles, would you just open up Mark 15?

So I'm going to read verses thirty-three to thirty-nine, and I want us to pay particular attention to verse thirty-eight.

Here we are, uh, the Lord Jesus on the cross.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloy, Eloi, Lema Sabakhthani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, Behold, he's calling Elijah.

And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink, saying, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.

And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

And when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, Truly, this man was the Son of God.

So when you look at verse 38, and maybe we need to try and read this with fresh eyes and fresh ears, when we look at verse 38, does anything surprise us?

Why is verse 38 there?

Anyone want to just share a thought?

Just have a thing for a moment.

The surprise about verse 38?

Yeah, go on, Jones, a bit louder.

Yeah, it's a it is that's a good way of putting it.

It's a scene change.

Just think about the geography.

So Jesus is dying on the cross on Calvary outside of Jerusalem.

Then for one verse, we're told about something that happened in the temple, and then we go back to the cross and the the centurion's words.

Yeah.

Does anyone else want to sort of chip in on that?

Doncush.

Is it significant that the curtain was drawn from the top to the bottom rather than a man's effort to carry from the bottom to the top?

Yeah.

There's obviously something deeply significant about that, isn't there?

This the temple curtain.

I mean, we could have, you could have told the story of the cross like this.

You could have said, here is what happened as the Lord Jesus died on the cross, and then at the end of it, you could have said, Meanwhile, something very significant happened in the temple.

But God the Holy Spirit, through the Gospel Writer, decided not to tell us that.

You know, as we as we listen to the account of Jesus breathing his last and his final words, you know, he wants us in our minds and imagination to be carried simultaneously to the Holy of Holies in the temple, where we actually see the temple being destroyed and judged, and a new temple is actually being inaugurated, the Lord Jesus Christ.

A curtain, which was essentially a keep out sign.

Well, the curtain is destroyed, and then we see back on the cross a Gentile centurion coming in.

So we're not told explicitly the theological point there.

In a sense, we have to work it out, and it's actually rather beautiful the way we are told that.

It's rather wonderful.

It's the way that the story is told to us that the meaning is given to us.

You just have to notice things carefully about how Mark, under the inspiration of the Spirit, tells the story.

Sometimes that's a very conscious choice by Mark, by the human author.

He chooses to tell the story in a particular way.

Sometimes it is simply how the Lord sovereignly arranged those events which Mark then describes to us.

So we're asking, how does it fit together?

Now, some things that we notice, you know, with that in mind, in Mark's gospel, we often see sets of three.

You call them sort of groups of related incidents.

We're actually going to see this in the passage Gavin is preaching in church later this morning.

That's chapter 1, verse 40, through to chapter 2, verse 17.

So just have your Bibles open there.

We're not going to look in detail.

But we're given 140, the cleansing of a leper.

We're given then a healing of a paralytic, and then the calling of Levi.

And then we look into the details of these three adjacent incidents.

Well, they actually work together to tell us something extremely important about the person and work of Jesus.

We see something similar in the next bit, actually, down in chapter 2, verse 18, we get three sections in which we meet the Pharisees, and they're opposing Jesus.

Jesus is doing something they don't like in each.

And again, we read these three bits together: issues about fasting and the Sabbath and healing on the Sabbath.

And it's not really about any of those issues.

It's telling us something about the Lord Jesus.

And again, I'm not going to not gonna spoil the story, as it were.

That'll be preached, God willing, next week.

We see similar sorts of things.

Come to chapter 4 and verse 35.

Chapter 4, verse 35.

So we have the calming of the storm, we have the healing of a man with a demon, chapter 5, and then 5.21 and following.

We have another healing and also a resurrection.

And again, uh it's not an accident that these events happened in this way and in this order.

And we we read them carefully together and we learn something about the Lord Jesus.

So we're looking out for sets of three.

Let's go on and think about another feature that we observe quite often in Mark's gospel.

Some people call it sandwiches.

I'll explain what I mean.

So a sandwich.

It's where Mark starts off with one thing, one subject.

Then he goes to something else, which on the face of it sometimes seems completely unrelated.

And then we find ourselves reading next about the first topic coming back again.

So it's a bit like a sandwich, you know, bread, bread, and then something different in the middle.

And why does this happen?

Well, often it's because those two subjects are actually connected and they help to explain each other.

Often the bit in the middle is the key for working out the bit on either sides.

So I'm gonna give uh just an example, and then we'll we'll look at something and discuss something uh together.

So, for example, come back to chapter, you're still hopefully still in chapter 5 and verse 21.

We see how 22, one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus, he comes to Jesus, he implores him, his daughter is at the point of death.

At the end of the passage, we actually see that his daughter is dead and a resurrection is needed.

And in the middle is something else.

In the middle is there is this woman, verse 25, who's had a discharge of blood for 12 years, and Jesus delays.

He's on his way to heal this little girl.

He delays, he engages with this woman, he heals her, and he talks to her.

And you know, we learn something about Jesus' uh work and character, but also uh the response uh he wants from us.

Now, the the effect this is it's a sandwich.

Now, the the effect of that bit in the middle, well, at one level it's a very it describes to us the very painful reality for gyrus, doesn't it?

So just imagine the he the you know this man who can heal your daughter is on his way to heal her.

Come on, don't deal with this woman, you can come back and help her.

And then she dies.

So it's it's telling us something that happened, it was something very, very painful, but it also has a sort of a teaching uh impact for us.

It tells us something about the necessity of faith in Christ and the extent of Jesus' power and work.

We'll get to that uh in due time.

Or turn on a few pages, come to chapter 11, uh chapter 11 and verse 12.

Again, we're not going to read all the details.

So we're into the very last bit of Mark's gospel.

Jesus has come to Jerusalem.

And then, yeah, chapter 11, verses 12 to 21, we read something about a fig tree who Jesus curses.

Then Jesus goes into the temple and he cleanses the temple, his act of judgment.

Then verse 20, we've got the fig tree again.

You think, hold on, what on earth is going on here?

Sort of horticultural reflections aside uh Jesus' ministry.

Well, no, there's there's a connection, isn't there?

Jesus curses the fig tree and it dies.

And we're actually meant to understand that Jesus is doing exactly the same thing to the temple.

Yeah, because of what he found there, fruitlessness, he curses it and it dies.

Mark does not tell us that that's the point, but he recounts the events in such a way that we are led to that conclusion.

Now, I'd like us to look and think about uh chapter 14.

So come to chapter 14, have that open in front of you.

I'm gonna read chapter 14, verses 1 to 11.

Then I'd love you just with a friend for two or three minutes just to think.

Remember, we're talking about sandwiches here.

Work out what are the elements of the sandwich, as it were, and then try and think, well, can we discern what point they are making together?

So let me read chapter 14, verses 1 to 11.

It was now two days before the Passover and the feast of unleavened bread.

And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, for they said, Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.

Now, while he was at Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment, of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head.

There were some who said to themselves indignantly, Why was the ointment wasted like that?

For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor, and they scolded her.

But Jesus said, Leave her alone.

Why do you trouble her?

She has done a beautiful thing for me.

For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them, but you will not always have me.

She has done what she could.

She has anointed my body beforehand for burial.

And I tell you, and truly I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

Then, Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.

And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money.

And he sought an opportunity to betray him.

So have a talk with a neighbour, and just two things to think about.

Can you spot how this is a bit like a sandwich?

One thing, then another, then back to the same sort of thing, and then can you try and work out, well, given that's how this happened, given that the Lord arranged it like this and we're told it like this, what what are we trying to be told?

So talk about that for a few moments.

What are they about?

What are they about?

Someone someone shout out.

Yeah, they're about the death of Jesus, aren't they?

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah.

What are the sort of elements of the sandwich, if we can put it like that?

It's not a question you ask every day of the week in a Bible study, but you know what I mean.

Does someone want to suggest what are the elements?

Go on, Peter.

Yeah.

Hate, love, and hate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hate, love, hate.

Yeah.

So there's sort of there's hateful plotting.

And there's hateful plotting either side of the sandwich.

And in the middle there's something totally different.

It's still telling us something about the Lord Jesus' death, isn't it?

It's totally different, isn't it?

Yeah.

Anyone else wanted to sort of talk about the sandwich elements, as it were?

Or how they how they work together.

We had a couple of sandwich elements.

So on the one hand, you see in the bread, the sort of stealthiness and sort of trying to keep undercover what's going on, and in the middle, Jesus obviously knowing what's going on and being taken control.

But also in the bread and the two different responses to Jesus, so the the hate and the plot to get rid of Jesus for money in the case of Judas contrasted with the sacrificial giving of the woman in the middle from the prophesied her response.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Go on, Chris, what are you going to say, brother?

The death of Jesus meant different things to different people.

For the scribes, the Pharisees, somebody to get rid of.

For Judas, somebody to betray to get some money.

But for the woman who anointed him, it was love and devotion.

And that's what he meant.

Amen.

Amen.

So you do see these sort of different angles on the cross, don't you?

So on the one hand, who was really in charge of what was happening as the Lord Jesus went to the cross?

You have wicked human beings who are plotting and scheming.

The scribes and the Pharisees and Judas.

But who's really in charge?

Well, actually, the Lord Jesus.

In his engagement with that woman, he explains what's happening.

Gospel is happening.

He's being prepared to die and to be buried, and it's and it's gospel.

And it's actually going to go to the whole world.

And yeah, we learn something about responses to Jesus, don't we?

Sort of the binary response to the work of Christ on the cross.

Hate or love.

You know, disciples love the Passover lamb, don't we?

And this woman is perhaps the most beautiful and glorious example and model of it.

So again, do you see these the way the story unfolds?

Mark at no point says, and here's the point, but he tells this event in such a way we we read these elements together and they teach us something, both about the Lord Jesus and the cross, but also the response to the cross.

Just other things just to note in Mark's Gospel.

And I mean this is true generally for most bits of the Bible.

Look out for repeated words and phrases.

When something gets said again and again and again, that might be a clue that you're near the main point of something.

So for example, when we're in when we're in uh that bit of chapter 7, that midpoint of chapter 7, we get told three times, what about what makes a man unclean, unclean, unclean.

Or in quite close proximity to each other, right in the middle of the book, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10, we get these repeated statements from the Lord Jesus about what he's going to do.

So for example, 831, he then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected and be killed, and after three days rise.

And in the next chapter, he says virtually the same thing again with a bit more detail.

And then chapter 10 he says it again, sort of repetition and in close proximity.

The Lord Jesus is telling something about his mission.

Three times in Mark's Gospel, Jesus expressly says why he has come.

So three of Jesus' mission statements.

So just take a moment with whoever you were just talking with.

Look up those three verses, 138, 217, and 1045.

Try and put those things together.

What do they tell you about the work of Jesus?

Take a minute.

Sorry to rush.

Hopefully you got to at least read all three verses.

So I've come to preach.

That's 138, isn't it?

So God had one son and he made him a preacher.

That's in the context of crowds of people coming to the Lord Jesus for healing.

I've come to preach, come to preach the herald of the gospel.

It tells us something about Jesus' mission and priority.

Second, chapter 2, verse 17, Jesus says, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

So again, I have come to do this.

I've come to call sinners.

Again, it's telling us something about Jesus' priority and work.

I mean, at this point in time, imagine you don't know the gospel story, you don't know how he's going to call sinners.

But he's told us something else about his priority and work.

And then thirdly, 1045, the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

So the nature of Jesus' work is servanthood and it is redemptive.

It's ransom, it's paying something.

You put those three things together, we actually get a wonderful sense of what the Lord Jesus is about.

Just simply because Mark tells us three times, Jesus said, I have come to do this.

You just read carefully.

Let's go on.

Another thing to, we've got to clock very carefully, is well, how does Mark use the Old Testament?

Now, by the way, this is what we spent the whole of last week's session on.

I'm not going to say more than one sentence now.

I've got a bunch of last week's handouts, by the way, in case anyone be interested in taking them away.

Sometimes Mark will quote explicitly from the Old Testament, and sometimes even put a like in chapter 1, verse 2, he will say, it is written.

Dot dot dot.

Sometimes he hints or he alludes to a passage in the Old Testament.

And the thing to do is look back at that passage and don't just note, oh great, Mark knew his Old Testament, wonderful, and then zoom back on in Mark.

You think, well, why?

Why is it important that this was quoted or alluded to?

And often you have to read around a bit in the Old Testament.

I'm not going to say any more than that now.

Lastly, think where we are in the story.

So Mark is a story.

It's not as easy to put a tight structure on Mark's gospel as it is, say, one of Paul's letters.

It's not like Romans, which is very structurally built.

It is a flowing narrative.

And I think as I've over the years I've realized that more and more and more it is it is a story, it is a drama.

That said, there are some obvious Blocks or structural points in the story and in Mark's retelling of the story.

And sometimes it's helpful just to think, well, where are we in the story?

So, for example, what you could call Act 1, chapter 1 through to 8, verse 30, we are basically in Galilee.

I think probably geography most explains the blocks within the Gospel.

We're in Galilee.

The king is revealed, the king is at work, and this section climaxes chapter 8, verse 29, with Peter's confession.

You are the Christ.

So if you remember verse 1 of the first chapter, it's the Gospel of Jesus for Christ.

And that's the end of the first section.

And that first half of the Gospel, the first act, yeah, it is about all of the big questions.

Who is Jesus?

Why did he come?

What does it mean to follow him?

There is, though, a particular focus here, I think, on who is Jesus.

The second act, we're told repeatedly, Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to Jerusalem.

And this section here, it's roughly the end of chapter 8, 9, and 10.

It's about the cross and it's about the cross in the Christian life.

As Jesus mainly talks with his disciples about what it means for him to be a crucified saviour and for you to follow a crucified saviour.

So if we're in that section, bear in mind that's the kind of territory we're in.

We're on the way to Jerusalem.

The cross in Christ's life and the cross in the Christian's life.

Then what you might call Act 3, from chapter 11 to the end, we're actually in Jerusalem and it's gospel climax.

Judgment and salvation.

Remember, he's we're told in the very beginning, Jesus came to judge and to save.

Right, well, let's let's see judgment, let's see salvation.

Probably the judgment bit might be the surprise for some.

Heavenly Father, we pray for uh our time in this part of your word this term, and we ask that you would kindly show us the Lord Jesus.

Please, would you refresh our souls for folk uh who are not yet uh your sons?

We pray that Mark's gospel, particularly in Sunday preaching, would be uh a means of saving grace to them.

We pray for our wholehearted discipleship, our following of the Lord Jesus.

We want to serve like He served, we want to be like that woman.

So please would you uh work your word in us?

We want to be good students of your word, and we want to do so that we might be uh wholehearted disciples.

And we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.