“The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” (Mark 1:1)
What’s in a word. In this case the Greek word arche, translated as “beginning.” Turns out quite a bit.
According to biblical scholar James R. Edwards, the formal introduction to the Gospel of Mark takes the common course of patterned ancient writings of using its opening line as a means of “treating the first subject discussed.” As he suggests, this first line could be considered the working title. This follows in the pattern of Genesis and Hosea, where the first word (the beginning, or arche) is meant to act as the focal point that opens everything else into view.
The beginning.
Edwards connects this patterned form or structure by way of the authors intention to both evoke the notion of “remembering” or memory (this is what God has done) and the notion of principle or origin (this is what God is doing). Not only does this memory connect back to Genesis and the prophets, it incorporates “the whole Gospel” into a present, living, breathing reality.
In this way it is not simply the beginning of a “temporal sequence” in relationship to Jesus’ life and ministry, it is the beginning of a new reality born out of Jesus’ fulfillment. It brings together both the end of the story and beginning of a new one into this biography of the life and ministry of the “Son of God.”
“For Mark the introduction of Jesus is no less momentous than the creation of the world, for in Jesus a new creation is at hand.” (Edwards, page 2)
In this way, the Gospel is not a book but a story. A story which, in its ancient context, uses a word (evangelion) which was commonly used to report victory from the battlefield, to state that a new reality has been brought about. The original hearers would have conjured up this picture as the story was being performed, which is how it would been presented. What’s interesting here is that in the ANE the word is always used in the plural. In the case of the N.T. Gospels and letters it is always used in the singlular. (Edwards, page 4) Meaning, it evokes the singular “breaking in” of Gods saving work.
In other words, a new age has dawned in which we find “the beginning” of the fulillment. And to enter into the story the Gospel according to Mark is telling is to to enter into a story which finds us (and Jesus and the disciples) “on the way.” In the context of the story of Israel, which this would have been conjuring up, this is a portrait that imagines us as both occupying the wilderness and equally being on the move.
This is the reason for the incessant and robust and frenzied movement that colours the whole of Mark’s Gospel. For the author, we are essentially being thrust into a story that has already started, akin to arriving at a movie 15 minutes late, albeit as one who knows the beats already having been immersed in Torah. Thus the entirety of Mark’s literary structure is meant to be seen as a parallel movement to our own. It begins with the end, which is itself a beginning. The beginning of our story in this new creation reality that we find “in Christ.”
Author Kaitlin B. Curtice writes in her book Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives, that we are all born into the middle of a story. We emerge in something that is already “in play.” And yet part of the reality surrounding our participation in this story is this intuitive sense that “somewhere somehow a story is born.” As stories did in the ancient world (and arguably today), they begin with the cosmic picture in which this question reflects a working tension. A universe “in time” and yet also necessarily infinite. Stories don’t stay in the cosmic sense of origins, they move from the cosmic into taking the particular shape of the stories contained within. In this sense the story is someting external to us. In the words of Curtice, it is alive. It is an embodied, living, breathing thing. And yet we are also somehow part of it. Thats the wonder of it all.
In David Rhoads commentary, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel, he describes it in the following way
As a result of our emphasis on the cosmic conflict, we shift the interpretive center of gravity from the end of the story to the beginning of the story. (Rhoads, page 2)
For the author of the Gospel according to Mark this should “shatter the customary way of seeing the world and invites hearers to embrace another, thus impelling them to action.” As mentioned already, in its original context this would have been recieved as oral storytelling, and to thus “hear” this story, something reflected in the form and structure of this Gospel, is to “enter another world” by way of our senses in a way that not only changes us, but actively moves us, animates us. That invites us not only to see the characters within the story but to find ourselves as characters in the story. This would have been the formative aspect of such storytelling in the ancient world. It is assumed that we are to become the performers in this story so that it might begin to unveil were we find ourselves in our own. That is the power of beginning where a story ends. This recasting of “the beginning” as an invitation to step in “on the way,” is what informs our place as performers in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
I recently finished the book Conversation on Faith (Martin Scorsese and Antonia Spadaro) where he reflects on his own story as a “storyteller” on the cinematic front. He talks about once thinking about becoming a priest, and arrives at a similar sentiment regarding how it is that we relate to the Gospel of Jesus Christ:
“We try to find endings for our stories that give form to life as we all live it. Stumbling along, I realize I might be creating pictures that lead to more questions, more mysteries… A question formed and came into being. The question… What does Christ want from us?” (page 125, p128)
He calls this the immediacy of Jesus. The way the story of Jesus informs the whole of life, of our stories, is by embodying the everyday nature of its experience. Always asking that necessary question- “What does Christ want from us?” Two words ring out in the opening chapter of the Gospel of Mark in response: repent (turn and begin moving in a different direction towards Jesus) and believe (live into that new way of seeing and being in the world shaped by the “Gospel”, or the singular “fulfillment”). Both words caught up in Jesus’ invitation to “follow me.” This is what frees us to step into the story at the beginning, a beginning that starts at the end and yet is also already in motion as a story of new beginnings. As Scorsese puts it, it really all comes down to one word: grace. No matter where we find ourselves in this story, it is informed by grace. That is the good news- God has acted in fulfilling the story, we are thus free to act in living out this story.
The Stories of my Life 