fighting words

 Another day which turned out better and warmer than expected, or predicted. My thermometer read sixty eight!! We are going to be spoiled.

I was reading in the first chapter of St. Mark's gospel this morning. Verse 1:  "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."
I have Bishop Barrons' Word on Fire gospels, with loads of commentary from the past two thousand years - a lot of it is his.  He said something about this verse which I never heard before: "The opening line of Mark's Gospel.....can sound anodyne and harmlessly pious to us, but in the first century, those were fighting words.

Mark's Greek term, euangelion, which we render as 'good news', was a word that was typically used to describe an imperial victory. When the emperor won a battle or quelled a rebellion, he sent evangelists ahead with the good news.

Do you see how subversive Mark's words were? He was writing from Rome, from the belly of the beast, from the heart of the empire whose leaders had killed his friends Peter and Paul just a few years before, and he was declaring that the true victory didn't have a thing to do with Caesar, but rather with someone whom Caesar had put to death and whom God raised up.

And just to rub it in, he refers to this resurrected Lord as 'Son of God.' Ever since the time of Augustus, 'Son of God' was a title claimed by the Roman emperor."