It makes sense, though, to start with the person who's at the centre of the whole thing: Jesus. We find out about him from the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And of those, the earliest (not to mention shortest) is Mark. So that's where we're going to start.
There's many things you can say about this passage, but the one that comes to mind immediately is "Wow. That's fast." In the very first verse, Mark tells us who he's going to be writing about, and he doesn't mince his words:
The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Within the next seven verses, he's set the scene. Its a clever device — in the same way that John the Baptist prepared his audience for the coming of Jesus, Mark gets us ready as well. By the end of this section, we've learnt that the coming Jesus is going to be powerful, and that he's going to be baptising people with the Holy Spirit. Mark doesn't go into detail about who the Holy Spirit is, but as we already know that John's baptism was "repentance for the forgiveness of sins", we know to expect something pretty special.
Immediately, Jesus turns up, and within five more verses he's been baptised (including heaven being torn open — clearly one for the theatrics) and has vanished off into the desert again. I love the way Mark is so carefree about tossing off details left and right; not only is Jesus in the desert for well over a month, surrounded by wild animals, he's also being tempted by Satan. And Mark gives it no fanfare at all, attaching no great meaning to it. The tone is businesslike; it's "this is what happened, so you should hear about it".
Seven more verses, and Jesus is back from the desert, in Galilee, and has gained four disciples, all of whom drop everything that they were doing (quite literally — Simon and Andrew leave their fishing nets, James and John leave their father, apparently without so much as a second thought) and follow him. Once again, it's the amazing in terms of the mundane. Would you follow someone and devote your life to him just because he asked you to? Unlikely. And yet, these four fishermen — almost certainly down-to-earth and unflappable men, because you have to be when you're trying to haul a big net of fish into a rickety little boat in the middle of a small sea — simply down tools and follow him. Clearly, there's something special about this man.
That image is reinforced with the next two verses. Now we see Jesus in a synagogue, teaching people. That in itself isn't unusual, of course. What is strange is that he teaches "as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law". So not only does he cause the sky to be torn open, not only can he make fishermen follow him with barely a word, but he has authority over the most learned people around.
Mark can't keep us thinking about that for too long, though, because we've got more to see. In what's left of the chapter, he rapidly reports three incredible miracles, all of which underline forcefully the authority that we've already seen. Jesus is shown to have authority over demons, over fevers, and over leprosy (and over an unspecified number of other illnesses). Things even start to spiral out of control — Jesus makes it very clear twice (and possibly three times, depending on exactly how you interpret verse 25) that no-one was to say anything about the wonderful things he was doing, presumably in an attempt to at least slightly slow down the tide of people he was generating.
In the midst of all this, we get a brief moment of silence, in the form of verse 35. Jesus takes the opportunity to go off somewhere by himself and pray. It's a simple moment, but very telling Jesus isn't doing this off his own bat. He needs stillness and prayer, because he needs his Father. This section is paired nicely with the bit that follows it:
Jesus replied, Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so that I can preach there also. That is why I have come.
So, having taken a mere 45 verses to do it, Mark has told us a vast amount. We know who Jesus is and who he has come from — he's the Son of God, the one who will fulfil God's prophecies. We know he has massive authority, over people, teachers of the law, demons and illnesses. And we know what he's doing here — he's going to preach the good news of God.
That's a lot for one man to do, and I don't think it's coincidence that Mark has set it down in so little space. He wants us to be knocked back by this, to expect something extraordinary. He's expecting us to ask "If he can do this, what else is he going to do?"
Mark's got 15 more chapters in which to answer that. It's going to be quite a trip.
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