Mark 1:1-8
A Voice in the Wilderness
1This is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2As it is written in Isaiah the prophet: “Behold, I will send My messenger ahead of You, who will prepare Your way.”
3“A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him.’”
4John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
5People went out to him from all of Jerusalem and the countryside of Judea. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.
6John was clothed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.
7And he proclaimed: “After me will come One more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.
8I baptize you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Berean Standard Bible
Mark gives us no birth, no genealogy, not one ancestor named, and his opening sentence is not a story at all but a claim: this is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Everything that follows is offered as evidence for it.
Then, before Jesus has walked into the book at all, we are given a man in the desert.
Mark introduces him with a borrowed line about preparing a road for the Lord and making straight paths for him. It comes from Isaiah, and in Isaiah the one whose road is being cleared is God himself, named as such. Mark sets that sentence down in front of Jesus walking up. He does not argue for it or explain how it can be true. He puts it in his third verse and gets on with the story.
Now the man. John is out in the wilderness, and the traffic is all going the wrong way: people are leaving Jerusalem and the Judean countryside and walking out to him. The temple stood in the city. If you wanted to deal with God, the city was where you went to do it. They went the other way, out to a river.
His clothes are the next thing Mark mentions, and they were not an accident. Camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist. Centuries earlier a king had asked for a description of the prophet who had confronted him, and the answer came back that he was a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist. That was Elijah. Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, closes with a promise that God will send Elijah before the great and awesome Day of the LORD. That promise sat at the end of the scroll for something like four hundred years with nothing written after it. Then a man dressed like that walked out of the desert, and the country went out to see him. What he did with all that attention was hand it away.
After me will come One more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.
Untying sandals was a slave's job, and John says he does not measure up to that. He is not being modest about his own work. He is telling the crowd that the one behind him is of another order altogether, and then he sets out the difference in a single line: water is what John has to give, and the Spirit is what the other one brings.
How We Know
Verse 2 says "as it is written in Isaiah the prophet" and then quotes two prophets. The first line, about a messenger preparing the way, is Malachi 3:1. The second, the voice calling in the wilderness, is Isaiah 40:3. Many later copies of Mark smooth this to read "in the prophets" instead. The earliest ones do not, and modern translations follow the earliest.
That is established from the manuscripts themselves, and it shows a text preserved as it was rather than corrected to look tidier.
John's clothing in verse 6 carries something too. Second Kings 1:8 describes Elijah with a leather belt around his waist, and Malachi 4:5 promises Elijah before the day of the LORD.
- Most later manuscripts read "in the prophets". Earlier witnesses including Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus read "in Isaiah the prophet".
Questions
1 Mark could have started with Jesus being born. He gives us one sentence instead. What does he put in it?
AnswerThat this is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. No family tree, no infancy, no warm-up. He makes the claim first and then spends the rest of the book backing it.
2 What would get this family out of the house and a long way down the road to see somebody? Crowds did that for John, and where they went is the odd part.
AnswerOut of Jerusalem and the countryside of Judea, into the wilderness. The temple was in the city, and the city was where you went to deal with God. Walking away from it to be baptized in a river meant leaving the place they were supposed to be.
3 John's clothes matched a description of a prophet from centuries before. Why would Mark bother telling us what a man was wearing?
AnswerBecause the clothes carried the message. Elijah was described with a leather belt around his waist, and Malachi had promised that God would send Elijah before the Day of the LORD. Mark never spells the connection out. He writes for people who know the older books.
4 John said he was not fit to untie the sandals of the one coming after him. What is he saying about himself, and about Jesus?
AnswerThat the gap between them is not small. Everyone from Jerusalem and the Judean countryside was going out to John, and with all of them watching he put himself below the servant who handled the shoes. He is not performing humility. He is describing who is on the way.
What This Means for Us
John had a whole country walking out to him, and he used the attention to talk about a man who had not arrived yet. Few of us are ever handed a crowd. The small version turns up constantly: a conversation where we could take the credit, a story we could tell about ourselves, a moment at this table when the easiest thing is to leave the attention where it already sits. Pick one of those this week and send it somewhere better. Mark does not open his book with anything we have to do. He opens it with who Jesus is, and John's whole job was to say so.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you did not leave us guessing. You sent a voice ahead, and then you came yourself. Make us people who point away from ourselves. And when we are the ones looking, help us look where John was pointing. Amen.