Beginning, Middle and End

When my own children were very young, a more seasoned parent told me that family photo albums (and I suppose now, Instagrams) are filled with pictures of firsts–first smile and first steps, first day of school and so on. Nobody, she said to me, pays as much attention to the lasts. And so I decided to try to capture those moments: waiting for the bus on the last day of school, sunset photos on the last day of a beach vacation, even a sweet snapshot of furry goodbye kisses before the grouchy old cat’s last trip to the vet.

But when I page through the old photo albums, there are a lot more pictures than just those firsts and lasts. There are sandbox construction sites, kite flying and bubble blowing, prom dates and school concerts, and lots and lots of cousins and friends, lined up on the front steps or squeezed around the kitchen table. There’s a lot happening in the middle, between the beginnings and endings, of our family story.

The author of the gospel of Mark seems to have taken to heart a similar understanding of beginnings and endings. Mark’s is thought to be the earliest gospel and it is the shortest, but it is far from the first draft of the good news of Jesus Christ. Mark gave us an intricately-constructed theological statement, and the gospel for the Baptism of Our Lord on January 10 shows his masterful use of beginnings and endings to draw our attention to what’s in the middle.

Mark’s gospel begins not with a story of Jesus’ birth, but with John baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River. John’s baptism is “of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” It is a beginning of  new life–and for Jesus, not of forgiveness for his sins, but the beginning of his public life as the one who comes after John, the one who will baptize not with water but with the holy Spirit.

There is yet another beginning in the background of this first public, watery moment in Jesus’s life. There’s that voice from the heavens. For those who know their scripture, like Mark’s original audience and like us, the sound of that voice calls to mind the opening verses of Genesis, the very first words of the Bible: “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said. . .” In this way, Mark lets us know that when Jesus begins his public ministry, God is speaking again, beginning again, creating the world anew.

The moment when Jesus comes up out of the water and when the voice sounds from the heavens,  speaks not only of the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, but also its ending. The voice calls Jesus ‘beloved Son’, a phrase that recalls God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his beloved son Issac. And the voice speaks at the moment when Jesus came up out of the water: a movement that foreshadows when Jesus will be raised up on a cross and when he will come up out of death. It is sometimes said that the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which begin with their stories of Jesus’s birth, contain in those infancy narratives their entire gospel in miniature. Mark’s gospel does exactly the same thing by beginning with Jesus’s baptism. In Mark, Jesus’s first public appearance both establishes him as sent by God and looks forward to the death and resurrection by which he will save us.

But there’s more. There’s what’s in the middle, between the beginning and the end.

In the middle, between Jesus coming up out of the water and the voice from heaven is an unusual phrase: ‘he saw the heavens being torn open.’ Torn open? I can’t read the original Greek, but it’s striking to me how many translations use vigorous, almost violent verbs to describe the opening of the heavens: torn open, broken, split and ‘rent asunder.’ This phrase might also foreshadow the moment when Jesus dies, when “the curtain of the temple was torn in two” (Matthew 15:38). The powerful verb serves another purpose, too. It draws our attention to what it accomplishes: the heavens are open. There is nothing, no barrier or obstacle between God and Jesus–or between God and us–from the beginning of life to its end. Everything in the middle happens fully in the presence of God.

In Mark’s gospel, what happens between the beginning and end of Jesus’s life is curing the sick, feeding the multitudes, casting out demons. Throughout the middle of Mark’s gospel, Jesus is a wise teacher and powerful healer.

And what of our lives? What are we doing in the middle of our lives? Are our eyes and hearts as open the to human suffering that is both hard to see and hard to look away from? Can we find ordinary ways to use the power and wisdom that we are graced with?

Every day offers many opportunities for small acts of solidarity, from fair-trade coffee in the morning to meatless meals for dinner. Each choice we make can keep us mindful of our power to take better care of the earth and to contribute to a more just and sustainable economic life for all. Our daily work may give greater scope for the wise use of our power: teaching children who are hungry for life-changing education, shaping workplace and public policies in ways that exorcise old evils like racism and redlining, sexism and xenophobia. What matters is that the middle of our lives–in our homes and neighborhoods, at work, in our leisure, from beginning to end–makes healing sickness and overcoming evil an ordinary part of life in our world. As Pope Francis said about the Good Samaritan in his last encyclical letter, “the decision to include or exclude those lying wounded along the roadside can serve as a criterion for judging every economic, political, social religious project.” (Fratelli Tutti, P. 69).

 The heavens are open to us. It is lovely and reassuring to think of all those moments–beginning, middle and end–of our beloved children’s lives played out in the sight of God. It is more challenging to remember that all of our adult lives–from beginning to middle to end–lie open before heaven. How to rise to that challenge? For this we must remember the prediction of John the Baptizer: after him comes the One–Jesus–who baptizes not only with water for forgiveness of sins, but with the holy Spirit. The heavens are open to us, and we are fully immersed in the power of God’s spirit moving beneath them.