 flatten out the four Gospels and say, well, they're all basically saying the same thing, people have tried to do that, but if we've been given these four separate books, Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, then we are wise to pay attention to what is specific about those books. And so though the whole time we are looking as it were through Mark at Jesus, we are also looking at Mark to say, why did Mark select and arrange things in the way that he has done? Now, there is some reason to suppose, because somebody said this in the second century, that actually Mark just wrote down everything that he knew about Jesus. But when we look at the Gospel, I suspect that's a considerable oversimplification, because it is a well arranged book, even though it's not as ornately arranged as certainly Matthew and Luke and arguably John as well. So we're looking at Mark as Mark, not just as a clear window looking on to Jesus. And this is a fascinating question in itself, granted what we think we know about Jesus, granted what we think we know about the early church and what they were about and the pressures they were under. Why when people began to write the story of Jesus as a connected whole, why did they do it like this? They didn't have any models for this. There is no book before the four Gospels that's just that kind of thing. So they would be saying to themselves, I'll do one like that. Somebody inaugurated basically a new genre. I remember when I was a student, one of my professors saying, supposing you were in charge of the library in Alexandria in Egypt, sometime in the 80s or 90s of the first century. And somebody brings to you this extraordinary scroll, which begins the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God. And you say, well, where in this library does it belong? What shelf should we put it on? What other books is it like? And that's a very good question. Sooner or later, I suspect they would have to decide, especially when they got four, which were all somewhat similar, maybe we need a new shelf, a new category. This is a new kind of thing. And if Mark is indeed the first of our Gospels, I suspect he may well have been aware of that newness. So that's the question. Why did they write it like this? Now, at one level, yes, people had come to believe in Jesus. People had come to experience him as the living Lord, the one who was rescuing them not only from sin and quite possibly disease, but also in some bigger, deeper sense that they were coming to explore. But it wasn't just that they wanted to know more about Jesus. They wanted to know more about what God had done in and through Jesus. What was the achievement as a result of which now they were the people they were called to be. And so when we're reading the four Gospels, and this is particularly true of Mark, we're looking at several different things that are going on at the same time. The first thing that's going on, of course, is that this is a sort of biography of Jesus. It's quite like several ancient biographies, although of course Mark doesn't have anything about Jesus' birth. And there's lots of other things which the other Gospels give us which Mark doesn't tell us either. But it is basically a book purporting to be about a man who lived in the early, the first third of the first century AD. But it's also, as well as being a sort of biography of Jesus. It's a book about how the great story of Israel in the scriptures of Israel came to fulfilment. Mark begins right away after the opening line with a couple of quotations from Israel's scriptures in order to say, when we look at Jesus, we're looking at somebody who came to prominence at the time of John the Baptist. And when we look at John the Baptist, we're looking at somebody who is the fulfilment of these scriptures. So there is a sense that, yes, it's a story of Jesus, but it's also the story of how Israel's great narrative came to its fulfilment. And therefore, it is also, and this is really the big one, I suppose, it's also about how God's kingdom on earth, as in heaven, got launched. How Jesus, through the strange things that he did and through what happened to him, how Jesus launched that new mode of being, that new epoch of world history, that new community of people, which loosely gets called the kingdom of God. In other words, the place where God himself takes his power in a new way and reigns over his world in a new way. The way that the scriptures had always pointed to, but until that point, that hadn't yet been realised. The result of that, and this comes through very clearly right from the beginning pretty well, is that this precipitates Jesus and then his followers into confrontation, into danger. And into danger, sometimes, which is pretty obvious when powerful figures seem to be bearing down on them, and other times less obvious when subhuman or non-human forces, whether we call them demons or whatever, seem to be threatening or shrieking at him or whatever, messing things up. And there's that sense, this is not a smooth narrative just flowing forwards. It's jerky because things are happening which are opposing danger and threats. And therefore, as a result, this is a book which tells a story inviting its readers to become part of the story themselves. It isn't just, oh look isn't that interesting, that's how it happened way back when. It's this is a story which now opens up to include you.