Changing our Worldview; Changing our World 1

 

A study of Mark:  Week One

 

Mark 1

1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way;
³ the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
    ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’

 

2020 will be a year that stands out in our memories and in our histories.  It remains to be seen whether it will mark the beginning of a new social contract or whether it will be remarkable only for its medical advances and missed opportunities.  To ensure that our suffering has not been in vain, we will need to examine the cultural values that have shaped our society and our world for the past 40 years and engage in some radical rethinking of our relationship to each other and to the earth which sustains us. 

 

The Gospel of Mark is the story of how Jesus challenged the cultural values of his time and offered the world a different point of view.  The Christian church has spent the last 1500 years shaping the gospel to fit our view of the world. We have valued owning the earth over caring for it, we have valued competition over cooperation, hierarchy over inclusion, the individual over the community.  It is time we re-shape our view of the world to fit the gospel, the good news that God has give us through Jesus. 

The times in which Jesus lived and spoke and acted were very different from our times. We need to rely on scholars who have spent their time and abilities studying those differences seeking to understand the Gospel of Jesus and make it relevant for our time.  This series will rely on the work of Ched Myers in Binding the Strong Man.  He looks at the political, social and economic narratives that make up Mark’s gospel and not just the religious or spiritual ones which are also essential to the story.  All aspects are part of the whole and no one perspective can be ignored without diminishing the power of the gospel message. In reading Mark, with such scholarly assistance, we will see that Jesus challenged the social, political and economic forces of his time as well as the religious ones.  Indeed in his time the lines between those forces were not so clearly drawn. The gospel can help us look critically at our time, challenge our assumptions and values and habits so that we can make the world in our time a bit closer to the world of peace and justice and joy that God intends for us. 

 There are voices crying to us from our wildernesses inviting us into those wildernesses to make the good news heard and seen and felt.  Are you ready to listen, to think, to pray and to act so that 2021 is indeed the beginning of good news?