In interacting with the first chapter of Mark (You, Me & Mark (Zondervan, 2002)), Adrian Plass talks about how it is difficult, when looking at how messed up the world is, even to know what the good news is. Looking at mess the church is and also ourselves as individuals makes it even harder to see the good news. And the lovely theological answers that we might have don't really cut it beside the day-to-day reality of hypocrites, hardship, the offense of the gospel, sin, and our own failures.
And so, Plass gives the following picture of the good news, one worth recording and coming back to:
"I have met this man called Jesus who, as this passage tells us, stepped out to deliver the good news two thousand years ago. My spirit tells me that he has all the answers I shall ever need, even if he will not give them to me now. Like Peter splashing to the shore from his fishing boat I shall run to him one day when I spy him in the distance because I want so much to be with him. I shall have breakfast with him - he will cook it. He has made it possible for me to go to a place where the past cannot strangel the present, and bodies cannot wear out, and tears will be wiped away, and sins will be forgiven, and reltionships will be healed, and we shall be very much ourselves, and things will be as they were always intended to be, and we shall be in the place that we were homesick for but could not identify and there will be no more religion and it will be divinely ordinary. We shall be happy and at home. Good news for God, and good news for us."
Adrian Plass's You, Me & Mark (Zondervan, 2002), 22-23.
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