The Ultimate Sandwich

I don’t know why, but every single time I thought about this weeks gospel, all I could think about is some big sandwich. I don’t think it was because I was hungry whenever I thought about the beginning of Mark’s gospel, and the only food mentioned in these opening verses are about locusts and wild honey. Neither of which I would consider putting into a sandwich I would create or order.

Honestly the sandwich that comes to my mind was a sandwich I used to get all the time in my seminary days from a restaurant called “Old Bag of Nails”. While the name of the restaurant may cause you to pause and wonder whether it is a restaurant or a hardware store, it had, in my opinion, the ultimate sandwich. It was a pastrami sandwich, by the way I love pastrami, and it’s contents were quite simple. A pound of pastrami piled high and placed between two pieces of homemade bread. You heard me right. Bread and a pound of meat. There was no need for pickles, lettuce, thousand island dressing, tomatoes or any of the other extra stuff. It was simple a pound of the best meat ever seasoned conveniently stored between two slices of bread so that you can easily bring that yummy goodness to your mouth and enjoy.

And now that I have made my mouth water and have this intense craving for a pastrami sandwich I now realize why a sandwich is what kept coming to my mind when I was thinking about these opening stories of Mark’s gospel. And not just any sandwich but this pastrami sandwich that I used to get. The gospel writer, Mark, will do this throughout his entire gospel, but we see more clearly now than anywhere else I believe that Mark doesn’t mess around with anything but the most important and necessary details of the story of Jesus. He doesn’t mess around with anything and in the very opening of his account he tells us that this is the beginning of the good news, the gospel, of Jesus Christ who is God’s son, or the son of God. He doesn’t mean the beginning as in the opening of his gospel, but he means this is the beginning of the good news. This whole gospel he has written is just the beginning of what he is telling. It’s mean to just be the opening of what we hear and know and experience of Jesus and that it is meant to continue even after Jesus and even after reading this gospel message.

Then he throws out the fact that the good news is about Jesus who is the Christ or the messiah. Jesus is the promised one of God and that he is the Son of God or God’s son. He is the one that we have heard all the prophets talk about and say is coming into the world. Despite the fact that Mark shows that people don’t understand or as we see with the demon as a part of what we heard about today, is told to be silent, we are the hearers of this gospel are told from verse 1 that this is in fact that very messiah we’ve been spending all this time in the Old Testament hearing will come, is come. If that isn’t good enough we then have quotes from prophets about his coming to help support what Mark has just told us.

Not only have the prophets of old talked about the coming of a messiah, the Christ, we then hear about John the Baptist who comes as a prophet to prepare everyone for the imminent coming of this very person. We probably know that lots of people at that time associated John with the second coming of Elijah, but what we may miss is that his clothing and the food he ate would have given that away so clearly to anyone who knew the stories of Elijah. So John both represents the prophetic history but also brings it around to the current context to prepare the way for Jesus. And the way that John fulfills his ministry as prophet and predecessor to Jesus he baptizes Jesus in the Jordan for all to see.

We see that Jesus, like the other gospels is then driven out to the wilderness and tempted by Satan, but he doesn’t go into detail here because, as I read in a commentary, he doesn’t want us to think this is the only time that Jesus combats Satan and the demons of the world, again, this is just the beginning, which we’ll see happens right after Jesus calls his disciples. But before we get there we have to acknowledge this very important line from Mark 1:15. Again, the Mark doesn’t mess with anything but those things that are of utmost importance. Jesus announces the coming and inbreaking of the kingdom of God, that it is now and that we are to change our hearts and lives and that we should trust this is all good news. It’s not something to fear or tremble but to believe and know that God is doing something good in our lives.

And this incredible dynamic nature that Mark presents Jesus and this good news as having draws these first disciples of Jesus without any question or conversation. They are simply called and compelled to come and see what it means to fish for people. Something that each of us has done in our own lives and are still doing to this very day.

This amazement of Jesus by the disciples is immediately followed up by his first miracle of Mark’s gospel which is the casting out of a demon. The people were already amazed by Jesus by what he was teaching in the synagogue that day, but then with two simple commands of ‘silence’ and ‘come out of him’ Jesus is able to cast out a demon despite the power it had over this man and whatever power this evil spirit may have had in this world.

So I really think that as bizarre as it may seem this image of this ultimate sandwich is exactly what we should think about when reading this opening of Mark’s gospel and maybe even keep it in mind as we go through the rest of his gospel this Winter and Spring. I say that because it reminds us of how incredibly packed this gospel is. It may be the shortest of the gospels. It may have the crudest Greek of all of them, and it may be the one lacking the most details, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an entire pound of pastrami goodness packed between two home-made slices of bread. Mark just doesn’t care about the pickles, lettuce and the rest, he wants us to get the meat of the story. He wants us to know what is most critical to know. He lays it out for us in Mark 1:1 and the rest of what he says throughout the gospel is to support that opening statement.

This is just the beginning of the gospel, the good news of Jesus who is called the Christ, who is the promised messiah of God who is God’s one and only son. He is the promised one. He is the one who will wipe away our sin despite knowing no sin himself. He is the one who will save us from death by taking on death on our behalf. He will do all of this by bringing about the kingdom of God, giving us this good news, calling us like he called the disciples, and by removing the evil spirits of the world from our midst so that we can live a life that is full of grace and forgiveness, a life that calls us into a close relationship with God and one another. May this good news about the messiah change your heart and your life today and always. Amen.