You all know, since I’ve done movie night for kids with theological discussion for adults for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Encanto, that I’m love Disney movies and I love they way they can be used to illustrate Christian principles. These movies can offer beautiful stories of transformations from greed and guilt and fear and anger into compassion and self-sacrifice and care for others. I think Beauty and the Beast will be the next one we do. You remember how it starts? An old hag comes to beg at the door of the castle of a young, handsome prince. Rather than helping her, he is rude and uncaring to her, scorning her ugliness and refusing to help her. It turns out she is actually a beautiful and powerful sorceress, and as punishment she turns the prince into an ugly beast and his castle into dark house of horrors, and his staff into pieces of furniture. The curse will only be broken, she says, when he learns to love and be loved. Of course, the Disney version continues on with lots of songs and stunning animation. Eventually the spell is broken through sacrificial love. The prince becomes a new person: kind and compassionate, and through his liberation the entire castle and all of its inhabitants are also restored.

This year our Sunday Gospel readings will be from the Gospel of Mark, and this kind of restoration to wholeness is one of the key themes of the first half of Mark’s Gospel. (Just a reminder that the way the lectionary works, Year A is Matthew, Year B is Mark, and Year C is Luke. John is interspersed throughout every year, especially in Advent, Lent, and Easter.) Because we’ll be hearing it all year, I wanted to give you an overview of Mark so that you can put the little snippet we hear each Sunday into its bigger context.

Mark is called “Mark” because there is agreement among Biblical scholars that it was written by John Mark, who is mentioned as a disciple of Paul and Peter nine times throughout Acts, Paul’s letters, and Peter’s letters. Paul mentions Mark’s presence with him during his Roman persecution, and Peter, writing from Rome, also says that Mark is with him, calling him affectionately his son. Because of those references, and the content of Mark, there is also agreement that it was written sometime between 50 AD and the mid 60’s. It seems likely Mark was writing to Gentile Christians in Rome, because he works to explain many Jewish words and customs, and the Greek text has many structures and words that are from Latin. (You can compare this to the Gospel of Matthew, for example, which seems clearly to have been written to an audience of Jewish Christians. If you want to know more about this, jump in on Zoom or in person the next time I offer my “Bible 101” class.)

For a long time, the Mark was the least examined Gospel—because people thought from a technical aspect it’s the least interesting. The literary style is kind of dull—short sentences, no long stories or sermons by Jesus, no story of Jesus’ birth, no Sermon on the Mount, many of our favorite parables are missing…Mark has no transitions between scenes, and his favorite word is “immediately.” You’ll hear it 41 times as we read through on Sundays. “Jesus was here, and then immediately Jesus was somewhere else, and then immediately he healed that person, and then immediately he went to the next place. But the word does not always mean “just then,” it serves to propel the narrative forward with speed and urgency. That’s one of Mark’s goals: his story of Jesus is action-oriented. With no extended teachings or narratives and rapid scene changes, Jesus is constantly on the move—healing, exorcising demons, confronting his opponents, and instructing his disciples. Mark’s goal was to get the word out as quickly as possible.

The study of Mark became much more popular once it was determined that it was the first Gospel written. In fact, it seems pretty clear that both Matthew and Luke had Mark’s Gospel in their hands as they wrote their Gospel stories. You can separate Mark into 97 little individual chunks of text. Of these 97, 77 show up the same in both the Matthew and Luke, and of the remaining twenty, only two don’t show up in one or the other of those Gospels. Matthew and Luke were both written a few years after Mark; Matthew adding stories and teachings of Jesus focusing on a Jewish audience, and Luke a Gentile audience. Mark’s Gospel documents the first-hand witness, teaching, and preaching of Paul and Peter in the earliest years of Christianity immediately following Jesus Resurrection.

One of the key themes throughout Mark is that the disciples are very human. Like us, they persistently fail—even as the story goes on, they seem to increasingly fail—fail to understand Jesus. Mark portrays the disciples as hard of heart (6:52), spiritually weak (14:32-42), and sometimes dimwitted (8:14-21). Even in his last hours, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asks them to pray with him and they fall asleep three different times. In addition to the humanness of the disciples, Mark also gives us more than the other Gospel writers the humanness of Jesus: he tells us of Jesus’ sorrow (14:34), of disappointment (8:12), displeasure (10:14), anger (11:15-17), amazement (6:6), and fatigue (4:38).

Another key theme in Mark is Jesus’ authority. We heard this in last week’s reading from chapter one at the beginning of Jesus ministry, “They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!” Jesus’ teaching, his healing, and casting out of demons, are used throughout Mark as signs of Jesus’ divine authority. When Jesus teaches, he says, “Truly, I tell you…” speaking with God’s authority and calling God abba, “father.” This was unheard of in the Judaism of his day. Not only that, Mark’s Jesus forgives peoples’ sins, an authority that in Jewish understanding belongs only to God. Jesus has authority not only over disease and demons, but even over nature, as he rebukes the wind and calms the waves, recalling the power of God over chaos at Creation. As Jesus walks across the water to them he tells the frightened disciples, “Do not be afraid; it is I,” and those words echo God’s words to Moses at the burning bush.

The third key theme in Mark is that Jesus’ power and authority are divine power and authority because he is the Son of God. The Gospel opens with the words “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark ends with the Roman centurion proclaiming at the foot of the Cross, “Truly, this man was God’s Son.” Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah, but he’s not the military Messiah people have been waiting for—instead, Mark focuses on Jesus as the Suffering Servant of God foretold by the prophet Isaiah who said, “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity…He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities.” Mark clearly and frequently portrays Jesus as Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. Jesus predicts his passion three times to his disciples (8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34) and at the Last Supper lifts the cup saying it is the blood of his new covenant that will be poured out for many. But, again, this is not what the people or his disciples expected or wanted, and they couldn’t understand this about Jesus no matter how many times he talked about it.

This lack of understanding is the reason for the last theme in Mark that I’ll talk about today. The $10 seminary word for it is “The Messianic Secret.” Many times after healing someone Jesus says, “Now go and don’t tell anyone.” We’ve already heard Jesus say that twice. Both last week and this week, when the demons he’s casting out say, “We know who you are, the Messiah, the Son of God,” Jesus orders them to be quiet. We’ll hear it many more times in the coming months. Why would Jesus, who came to spread his message of Good News, tell people to keep his identity a secret?

Why? Because Jesus knows he must journey to Jerusalem and the Cross, and Jesus knows how much people—how much we—want to use his power and authority for their—for our own—worldly purposes. Jesus himself was tested about this when he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. Jesus knew that only at the Cross could his mission truly be fulfilled and understood, and Jesus knew that a popular uprising declaring him Messiah before he got to the Cross would launch a revolt and prevent him from ever getting there, as Rome swooped in and squashed the rebellion.

For everyone in Jesus’ day, “Messiah” meant a military hero like King David who would drive the Romans out and reestablish Israel’s rule. That’s what Palm Sunday is about—they gave Jesus a hero’s welcome, a king’s welcome, lining the streets on his way into Jerusalem. But Jesus purposely rode in on a donkey, not a horse, to show he was not that kind of king—not a general who would lead them into battle but a humble, suffering servant who would die for them on the Cross. Think about how we would try to use Jesus if he were here today. Think about the way Christian Nationalists try to use Jesus right now. In her book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Du Mez (professor at Calvin University) documents how White Christian nationalists have refashioned Jesus into their own image as a kick-butt savior who is willing to smite enemies to restore America to a Christian nation by force—and she reminds us that this is not the Jesus of the Gospels.

Even Jesus’ disciples don’t get it when he tells them over and over again that he must go to Jerusalem and die. In chapter eight of Mark, when Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter answers him, “You are the Messiah,” Jesus “sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.” He still had a long journey to get to Jerusalem. We long so badly for that John Wayne kind of Jesus—perhaps the best indication of our original sin. Then, as now, we want General Jesus—but the real Jesus, Suffering Servant Jesus, will not have it—because Jesus knows that it will take his death on the Cross for him, and his mission, and God’s way of self-giving love, to finally be understood. Only at the Cross can Jesus be rightly known, not simply as a great moral teacher or a miracle worker, but as the Son of God who came to free us from our bondage to the selfish will to power. Only at the Cross can Jesus ensure that we finally see that the way to God’s abundant life is found not in coercive force but in self-sacrificing love.

As Jesus healed and set people free from disease and disability and sin, he restored them to the wholeness of God’s original, good creation. He became incarnate and walked with us to do that—not for a handful of people in the first century—but for the whole world, for all time. His giving of himself on the Cross bears witness to God’s way of life that is lived not for self, but for others. His Resurrection from the Tomb bears witness that God’s abundant life cannot be defeated by our will to power and our violence and our hate. His Spirit living in us today bears witness to the transformative and redemptive power of forgiveness and love.

My prayer this week is that, as we all read through Mark this year, you will come to better know and love the real Jesus, experience his healing and restoring presence in your lives, and find that your healing and liberation, like the prince in Beauty and Beast, restores not only you but the world and those around you.