Mark 1

You are a Christian in the first century. Your Bible is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. You have heard many sermons from Isaiah and Malachi, especially those passages that speak of the coming Messiah - the man, the God, you know as your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. You know many stories about the works and teachings of Jesus, passed along from eyewitness accounts. Some of the stories are true, some false and many of them an interesting mix of fact and fiction.

Then one day a document arrives from one known as a faithful follower of Jesus. The elder of your church begins to read, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God . . . ."

This is the type of person who first heard the book we call The Gospel According to Mark. It is this person’s perspective we need to consider when we interpret the stories contained in the Gospels of the Greek Scriptures. Too often we interpret the gospels from the point of view of the participants in the stories. This is a mistake. The point of view of the participants in the narrative is only important when the author makes it so.

“He saw the heavens being torn open.” The improper approach would ask what did those around Jesus see and how did they react. Since Mark makes no comment on these questions, they are irrelevant to his point. Our first century Christian would have a very different reaction to these words. Because he knows that when Jesus died, the curtain in the temple was torn open as well. And that, is the good news!