MARK clears the decks quickly. His Gospel has hardly begun, but already John has declared Jesus’s identity, baptised him, and been arrested. Now, he fades into the background, leaving the new prophet centre stage.

Jesus is not hanging about, either. He has travelled from Galilee, in the north, down to the Jordan to be baptised, and now, after time in the wilderness (1.12-13), he returns north to begin his proclamation of the good news.

It would be nice if the simplicity of Mark’s style made him correspondingly clear at this key moment, when we first encounter Jesus as a man with a message of his own. Apparently, he is “proclaiming the good news of God”. But that could be “good news about God” or “good news provided by God”. It is not a distinction without a difference. Good news about God may tell us only that God exists or is good. God’s own good news, given us by Jesus, is the message of relationship, which gives us the courage to hope.

A god who exists, but in a transcendence so complete as to be effectively irrelevant, had been considered as a possibility before the time of Christ. The third-century BC philosopher Epicurus was a materialist, but even he did not dispense with the divine altogether. As he imagined it, though, divinity had no interaction at all with humanity.

A god who has a message for us, and who finds human voices to convey that message to us, is a more common option in human religious history. Our God is such a one, giving words to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, now, in the Gospel, too.

Mark has to write carefully to make clear how Jesus stands within the prophetic tradition. Perhaps people recalled Elijah’s mantle passing to Elisha (2 Kings 2.13), assumed that greater prophets should come first, and concluded that Jesus was lesser because he was later.

Mark confirms a degree of continuity — Jesus carrying on John’s work — by using the same verb (kerussein) for both of them (1.4,14). But, for him, the Baptist is done and dusted (apart from the retrospective in chapter 6). Both men attracted followers, and yet we know nothing of how John called his disciples. Here, however, Mark presents Jesus’s calling of four fishermen as a kairos and a krisis (the Greek word for a moment of decision, not in Mark, but frequent in Matthew and Luke).

By calling Simon, Andrew, James, and John, Jesus marks them out as special. I suspect that they are not special because they were the first to be chosen, but, rather, that they were chosen first because they were special. Jesus perhaps perceived in them a courage that would not let habit or convention get in the way of the call. If they had not left their nets and followed him, attracting other disciples would have been harder; for going first would mean risking being alone — an intimidating prospect.

So, this short, simple Gospel packs a mighty punch. The opening verses of Mark’s Gospel have already given readers the divine perspective from which all that follows must be judged. This passage builds on that foundation by describing what Jesus teaches: not the whole of it, with parables, and preaching, and prophetic challenges, but what we could call the “meta-narrative” — the overarching, all-encompassing theme.

We Christians believe in Jesus as the one who is sent by God. So, the “good news” that he proclaims is not primarily about God, but, rather, from God. Our own God-breathed conviction, based on years of immersion in scripture — years, too, of worship and prayer — is that words of the Bible are more than just words, and that the speaker of God’s truth is also the bringer of God’s justice and judgement. Mark gives us the proclamation that now is the time, and that God’s Kingdom draws near.

I ask myself why the Church appoints this as the moment for us to hear both the proclamation of the Kingdom and the call of the first disciples. Perhaps she does so because once a year is an absolute minimum (as with Easter and our renewal of baptismal vows) for us to reflect on the voice of Jesus, which once called each of us, inviting us to leave behind the past and embrace the life that is life indeed (1 Timothy 6.19).