On the surface, Mark begins his gospel very matter-of-factly: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
But looks are deceiving; there’s more going on here than meets the eye. These are words of defiance. When Mark uses the terms “good news” and “son of God”, he’s invoking terms used by Caesar, terms well-known in the Roman Empire of his day.
Back then, “Good news” was a political term. It was marketing hype that included all the official announcements about the Roman conquests, the victories of the Roman Legions, and their often brutal subjugation of many peoples--including Jesus’ own people, the Jews. Caesar’s good news inspired shock and awe.
In the opening line of his gospel, Mark co-opts this term from the Roman Empire to introduce a counter-story about a different kind of good news, a different vision for how life and the world can be. A vision based on love and mutual service, forgiveness, justice, mercy rather than on subjugation, domination, and brutal cruelty. Mark is writing a counter-story to that of Caesar, and it is an act of treason.
This is also the case when he refers to Jesus as the Son of God. In Mark’s day, that term referred to Caesar. Caesar was the Son of God, and here again, Mark is disrupting the story of the Empire by claiming that the real son of God is not Caesar but Jesus.
For Mark, Caesar has it all wrong. Being son of God is not about power and control, but about laying down one’s life in love. The punchline in Mark’s gospel becomes clear when Jesus hangs from the cross, having just been executed by the Empire as a criminal. In that moment, a centurion who has just watched Jesus breathe his last declares, “Truly, this is the son of God”. It’s the supreme irony in Mark’s gospel, reflecting an understanding of what it means to be the Son of God that is very different from Caesar’s.
In our context today, we know well Caesar’s version of good news. We’ve seen the recent headlines about the killings of young African-Americans and Latinos by police officers:
- Eric Garner was a father who was selling single cigarettes to support his family.
- Michael Brown was a son heading off to college.
- Tanesha Anderson, a mental health patient, was in need of an evaluation and intervention.
- Tamir Rice was a twelve-year-old boy playing in the park.
- Alex Nieto, a student at San Francisco City College, was eating a burrito in Bernal Heights Park while on his way to work.
Each of them killed by police.
Suddenly, as we see the faces of many African-American and Latino mothers, the ancient words of the prophet Jeremiah ring eerily true: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.”
And our judicial system has failed them and all of us as Americans. Grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island have refused to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, meaning those officers will never stand trial. Here in San Francisco, in the police killing of Alex Nieto, police have not released a witness list, not released the recording of a pertinent 911 call, not released the police reports, and not released the names of officers involved. This makes an independent investigation impossible. We’re forced to blindly trust what the police tell us. Given that no officer has ever stood trial for killing an unarmed black or Latino in this City, we have reason to be suspicious. It’s reasonable for us to want access to the available facts.
In our day, even in our City, we know well Caesar’s version of “good news” and how it manifests itself.
In the very beginning of his gospel, Mark introduces the wild man John the Baptist who preaches repentance. Our spiritual ancestors realized that they had, knowingly or not, bought into Caesar’s story, and that if things were ever to change, they would first need to free themselves from that bitter story. They would need to repent, and so they wade into the muddy waters of the Jordan to be baptized by John.
And perhaps this is true for us as well--that, like our spiritual ancestors, we, too, knowingly or not, have bought into Caesar’s story. In our day, each of us in our own way have become complicit in the racism so deeply, often subtly, embedded in our culture and social institutions. And so, for us as for our ancestors, mountains must be leveled and winding ways made straight in order to find a new way.
Years ago, in the pre-dawn hours of March 12, 1964, Kitty Genovese was assaulted and murdered in New York City. Her screams awakened at least thirty-eight neighbors who heard or watched how, for another half hour, her assailant stalked, stabbed, raped, and finally killed her. No one wanted to get involved or even call the police. The story attracted international attention. It was not just that many identified with the victim and understood that something like that could easily happen to them. Killings happen all the time.
What could account for the public’s fascination with this crime? Many who have studied the case attribute it to people’s deep-seated fear that, had they been there, they would have been the thirty-ninth silent witness. In this crime people caught a glimpse of the “bad Samaritan” in themselves.
The story of Kitty Genovese shines a light on our sense of being guilty bystanders in a cruel world. Today, with the recent police killings of young people of color, we are more aware of the scope of racism, the fact that we are all, especially if we are white, its beneficiaries if not its agents.
It’s not enough to say that we ourselves would never use the “N-word”, would never mug or kill or exploit others. In the war between good and evil, there is no neutral ground. All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to stand by silently. Martin Luther King used to say that he was more troubled by decent folks standing on the sidelines than by the racists who threw rocks.
The point is not to get down on ourselves but to awaken from a lonely hypocrisy. We are all caught up in this racist web. We too have bought Caesar’s version of “good news”. Better to feel our solidarity in sin and the need for repentance than to cling to a phony righteousness.
It is often said that the longing for liberation begins when you notice that you are in prison. Getting free to love requires facing up to our part in the sin, the racism, of the world.
In today’s gospel, our spiritual ancestors wade into the muddy waters of the Jordan River. They come to John dissatisfied and desperate. They come for baptism with a look in their eye that says “God, I hope this works”. The past has become intolerable and they know they can’t go on as they are.
We in this country know that our racist past is no longer tolerable, that we can’t go on like this. And so on this second Sunday of Advent, we are invited to join our ancestors in the Jordan to confess our sin along with them, especially our sin of racism and our acquiescence to it, and to repent, to turn away from the story of Caesar and to gently turn a new way toward life, toward what Mark calls “the way of the Lord”.
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