Be Still And Know

When Mark put together his Gospel, he had a very clear purpose. You might have thought he was going to take us through the life story of Jesus, but he doesn’t. He totally disregards the first 30 years of Jesus’ life. He doesn’t tell us about Jesus’ birth, education, employment or relationships. We would be fascinated to know about all of those things, but Mark wants to get to the heart of the matter - which is that Jesus was nothing other than the Son of God. He was the Messiah, the one that the Jews had been anticipating for centuries. It is generally agreed that Mark was the first person to write a Gospel. Matthew, Luke and John’s were written in very different circumstances over the next 30 or 40 years but it was Mark who was breaking new ground. He was probably relying on Peter’s eye-witness account of Jesus’ ministry, and it is believed that he wrote it in Rome. Many scholars believe that he wrote his Gospel around AD 60, so that’s a full generation after the earthly life of Jesus. Mark devotes himself t