The Time is Fulfilled
Reflections on the Lectionary for January 21st
I think it can be difficult for modern readers to appreciate how politically charged the gospel stories about Jesus are. That’s partly because we swim in different political waters, and we don’t always recognize those parts of the story as political when we see them. And it’s partly because our hearing of the gospel stories is wrapped in “religion,” which is a category that might distort what we expect and what we hear, and which is more disconnected from the category of “politics” for us than it was for ancient people. We modern people don’t go in expecting politics, and we don’t encounter things that always sound political to us, and so we don’t always appreciate the political nature or the political stakes of the stories about Jesus’ life.
But the gospel reading for this week, Mark 1:14-20, begins on a decidedly political note. The bulk of the passage, verses 16-20, are a story about Jesus calling some of his disciples—two pairs of brothers, Simon and Andrew and James and John. But the first two verses, 14-15, are what caught my eye. These verses serve as a kind of introduction to Jesus’ career, especially the earlier Galilean portion of it. Because of that, these two verses are doing a lot of setup for what the reader should expect and anticipate in the story to come.
Notice how 1:14 begins with a temporal marker: “Now after John was arrested.” Who is John? In the Gospel of Mark, the answer is both simpler and more complicated than it seems. The simple answer is that it’s John the Baptist that the narrator is talking about. The more complicated answer is that, if you are only reading the Gospel of Mark with no knowledge of the other stories about John and Jesus’ relationship to him, you might not have a lot to go on in figuring out who John is or why his arrest might matter. In Mark, John the Baptist is alluded to very early, in verse 2, in the citation of a prophecy (claimed to be Isaiah by the text, but actually beginning with a portion of Malachi). John’s role is like that of Elijah, a forerunner to the Messiah, which Mark’s text has already called Jesus in 1:1. The text then takes the reader to a scene of Jesus’ baptism by this same John the Baptist, accompanied by John’s insistence that someone more powerful than himself was still coming—again, a reflection of the Elijah role. In 1:6, John the Baptist is described as a kind of wild man, eating locusts and wild honey, lending an air of apocalyptic buzz to his appearance in the text.
But that’s all we learn about John the Baptist in this first chapter of Mark, before the clause in 1:14 that tells us that John had been arrested. It seems that the text is relying on the reader to fill in some of the blanks; Mark doesn’t feel the need to say everything he knows about John or his arrest, because he can assume that the reader brings some knowledge to the table too. We are simply told that John was arrested. For modern readers who are approaching the text through the category of “religion,” this might be a throwaway line between Jesus’ baptism and temptation and the calling of his first disciples. But I think for ancient readers, especially if they already knew John’s fate but even if they didn’t, the casual mention of John’s arrest would have signaled something ominous, ratcheting up the tension, both in general and specific ways. To place it here at the beginning of Jesus’ story, as a temporal milepost, is to tie the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry to a very dramatic political development.
Why would John’s arrest have been a dramatic political development? Remember, the gospel is presenting him as a figure from the mold of Elijah. Mark tells us that he was drawing crowds to the Jordan River (a symbolic boundary of ancient Israel), suggesting that a popular groundswell of religious fervor might have been building. His arrest would have signaled that John’s activity had drawn the attention and the disapproval of the ruling authorities—that John’s Jordan-side gatherings had been understood by Herod or others as the kind of threatening development that required a swift crackdown. By mentioning John’s arrest at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and by tying Jesus’ calling of disciples to the downfall of another public figure charged with messianic associations, Mark is setting Jesus’ debut in the middle of a longer-running conflict between popular religiosity and official power.
If the reference to John’s arrest is suggestive of political stakes, then the rest of verse 14 and all of verse 15 do a lot more than suggest. In 14, when Jesus came to Galilee, he was “proclaiming the good news of God.” The word in Greek that’s being translated “good news” is euangelion, the root of our words evangelism, evangelical, evangelist, etc., and then as now it’s not really a neutral word. Today you can’t say “evangelical,” for example, without bringing connotations of religion to the conversation. The same was true in antiquity; euangelion was a word that had uses before Christianity, and those uses followed the word into places like the Gospel of Mark. (Euangelion, by the way, is the word that we translate “Gospel” in English usually today). Specifically, the emperor Augustus, who was reigning for about the first half of Jesus’ life, used the word euangelion to describe his own accession to the throne and the sense of hope that he thought should accompany his reign. Euangelion, good news, or gospel became a marker of imperial ideology and power. For a bit more on the term, check out this entry from Bible Odyssey (all of which is really useful for people who want to know more about the Bible and its background). It’s not an accident that early followers of Jesus used that same word to describe Jesus’ birth and rise to prominence. It’s as if a religious movement today made its slogan “Make Faith Great Again,” or made “hope and change” the center of its rhetoric. Those are ideas and words that we know from political contexts, and if someone used them in a religious context we would understand that the words were carrying some of their meaning with them. The authors of the gospels were using this political term—or, at least, this term that had a lot of political associations—to describe Jesus.
The word euangelion is clearly important to the author of Mark, because Jesus is said to go to Galilee for exactly that purpose. But to drive home the point, the text uses a literary technique called an inclusio. You can think of an inclusio like a pair of bookends, surrounding something really important to set it apart. 1:14 and 1:15 look like this in English, with euangelion left untranslated:
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the euangelion of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the euangelion.”
The word euangelion serves to encapsulate Jesus’ message; it both begins and ends the thing that Jesus was proclaiming in Galilee. It’s a subtle literary technique, but useful for signaling to the reader that an idea is really important. Mark, which is a gospel that a lot of people think of as primitive or underdeveloped, is in actuality a fairly sophisticated literary talent and storyteller; by framing the launch of Jesus’ career in terms of euangelion, the author is planting a flag in the ground, co-opting an imperial term and making it the centerpiece of the launch of Jesus’ career.
So what comes inside the inclusio? More politics. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe….” There are four claims in this sentence, at least on the surface, all of which have at least some political valence. “The time is fulfilled” has an apocalyptic edge to it; it tells the reader that there has been a period of waiting, and that something about the launch of Jesus’ ministry means that the waiting is over. Much of the literature of the New Testament, not to mention other second-temple-period Jewish writings, dwell on this idea of time and the periodization of history; there was an expectation and a hope that history would be turning toward a new era of God’s involvement in the world. This often took the shape of hope in a messiah, but not always. In the case of the Gospel of Mark, the fulfillment of time lets the reader know that Jesus is connected to that sense of history.
What’s at stake in that history? That’s the second claim. “The kingdom of God has come near” is unambiguously political, the most forthright statement in the middle of these two verses. Though “the kingdom of God” (or “the kingdom of heaven,” as Matthew calls it) is today understood by many Christians as an essentially spiritual idea, it seems clear to me that Jesus and the gospel writers (especially the synoptic gospel writers) meant it as political and not spiritual. This too is connected to the idea of a messiah. The messiah was a political figure, an heir to David and his monarchy who would seize back power and restore a Davidic king to the throne of Israel. That kind of a restoration was not only an assertion of Israel’s sovereignty, it was also a denial of Rome’s sovereignty. Rome controlled Judea, Galilee, Samaria, Syria (mostly), and everything to the west of there, and they administered those regions as a buffer zone between the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire to the east. So Rome had an intense territorial interest in suppressing Israel’s (or Judea’s) self-governance, and in maintaining its grip on power. For Jesus to show up and announce that “the kingdom of God has come near” is to poke a hole in that logic; it is to assert God’s kingdom over and against Caesar’s kingdom, in the same way that using euangelion for Jesus was a way of saying “the good news of God and Jesus and not Caesar.”
The third and fourth claims, “repent” and “believe in the good news,” finish up the sentence and take us to the back end of the inclusio. “Repent” here in Greek is metanoeo, a verb that shares a root with the noun metanoia, meaning to change one’s mind or turn around. The verb is in the second person plural imperative; it’s a command. In this sense, I think Jesus is being portrayed by the author of Mark in the mold of the Hebrew prophets, who preached the same kind of turning back and changing of minds. The prophetic message was always couched in a critique of social practices, religious practices, economics, and government; the prophets railed against self-concern and self-centeredness, and against institutions of religion and kingship that failed to serve the people and serve God. By placing the word metanoeo on Jesus’ lips, Mark is connecting Jesus to that tradition. And although the word isn’t used by John the Baptist in the preceding verses, I think it’s also meant to show that Jesus continued John’s message and the radical kinds of transformation that John’s baptism was supposed to signal.
“Believe” works in a similar way. Today we have flattened the word “believe,” and the Greek word pisteue (also a second person plural imperative) into an intellectual exercise. We think of belief as something the mind does. But pisteue had possible meanings that aren’t captured by “believe,” including something like “have faith” or “trust.” But in the context of the two verses that came before it, and in its place closing out the material inside the inclusio, I think that the call here is to shift allegiance and to place one’s hope differently: not in imperial power, not in systems of violence and domination, not in Caesar, but in the turning of time and the arrival of God’s kingdom, in the return to the principles of justice that the prophets preached, and to trust in those.
It’s difficult to imagine a more forthrightly political opening to a gospel. Mark isn’t pulling any punches; he’s portraying Jesus and the launch of his career as an alternative to Roman power, couched in experiences of political violence (John’s arrest), framed by a long history of Israelite and Judean tradition that expects a kingly messiah not only to restore the throne of David but also to put God’s kingdom at the center of things. In typical Markan fashion, this is accomplished in just a few words and without much over-the-top fanfare. Mark never writes two sentences where one would do. But because of that, we get here at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry a finely distilled message of resistance and hope, of an alternative to the status quo, and most of all an embrace of God’s world as an alternative to Caesar’s.