On a middle eastern road, towns people could hear the panting breathe of a young man running. From some distance they saw the faint cloud of dust kicked up behind him. As he puts his hands on his knees to recompose himself, the crowd gathers knowing he’s an evangelist. Once he’s ready, everyone who is present listens to the gospel: “The king has won and defeated the enemy! All is well and the war is over and we can enter peace.” He goes on to tell the story of the battle, the next steps toward peace, and the implications on their lives. Then, this young soldier would pull up his cloak again, and race to the next town.
This is the image and vocabulary Jesus chose to describe his message. The word gospel means important heralded news. Perhaps most commonly used as the message shared by messengers (or evangelists) coming from the battle field to update the villages and towns within the kingdom.
“Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God”
A gospel is a news worthy historical event that must be and is shared. Not only is it “breaking news”, it’s news that changes the lives of the people the news is intended for, whether they hear it or not. If you missed the announcement in the city square, the realities of the announcement still affected you.
Jesus doesn’t just come, he comes speaking. He comes announcing. In the opening lines of Mark, he’s both messenger and message.
In fact, the meaning of this word, proclaiming, gives the sense that this is what he was saying over and over again. The gospel about God was his “stump speech” on the trail of his global reconciliation campaign. This was the topic at every meal with Jesus. It’s in his casual conversations, debates, storytelling, Mark writes that once Jesus started proclaiming “the gospel of God” he couldn’t stop.
At the mouths of caves with the margins of society: Jesus was proclaiming
At the tombs with outcasts: Jesus was proclaiming.
At the footsteps of mansions: Jesus was proclaiming.
Along the fields of wheat: Jesus was proclaiming.
In synagogues, in homes, at parties, by the river, and in the seats of power Jesus was proclaiming.
He proclaimed with stories, he proclaimed by reading long passages of Old Testament, he proclaimed with metaphors, and he, like performance artist, proclaimed with miracles, healings, and walking on water. In Mark 15, we’re given the substance of all this proclaiming.
The gospel is an announcement about God. Jesus proclaims God’s character, timing, and his coming to us. It’s good news for us, but it’s about God.
It’s not about you. It’s not about me. We’ve been given a narcissistic evangelistic message that appeals the god within us: me. What is the gospel about? It’s how I can get to heaven when I die. It’s about how I can be made right. The American Jesus, put bluntly, is about me. God exists as my therapist. God exists as my homeboy. The center of the American religious mind is not a creator of the cosmos but the individual. For nearly a half century, we’ve perfected the religious spin to make God so peripheral to our importance, we no longer needs any news about him while books about finding ourselves climb best seller lists.
But suppose there is a God who not only fashioned the galaxy but also curated earth with every imaginative and self-replenishing speck of beauty we see and touch. This isn’t a God we made to fill our needs, but a God who made us for his joy. Imagine, a God of glory that transcends the human mind while holding everything together for the sake of humanity. Jesus comes telling us good news about who that God is. The Apostle Paul continues Jesus’ work when he speaks with philosophers in Athens to proclaim the reality and news about God.
“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To An Unknown God. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heave and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”
If you’ve rejected the gospel about you because it seems too small, you did the right thing. Your instincts are correct. The only gospel worth believing in is about the God who creates life and gives it. News about that being is worth listening to.
Throughout history there were many gospel proclamations of empire expansion. Each time, the news required a response and brings a change of life, worldview, and reality. But Jesus doesn’t come proclaiming the gospel of Caesar or Alexander the Great. He comes proclaiming a gospel of God.
Jesus isn’t the messenger that speaks on behalf of a higher power and a distant war. He’s not just speaking on behalf of God, as priests and prophets do, he’s announcing the arrival of God’s victory that transforms the reality of the community he’s entering into. Jesus is proclaiming the news that God has come to us to defeat the kingdoms of sin, death, and evil and bring about his kingdom of grace, resurrection, and justice.
This is important: Jesus is not making a promise or sales pitch, he’s making an announcement with ramifications for everyone.
The gospel of God declares his glory, fame, love, and actions taken through his character and power. The gospel is not about humanity, our sin, evil, or death. It’s about God and his unrelenting and just purpose that engulfs sin, death, evil and brings abundant hope in lasting life.
Jesus said, with his entire life: “The is time fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand."