We were continuing our studies in Mark’s gospel this Sunday. This time, looking at Mark 1:14-20. I was struck by one little detail that is easily overlooked but Mark seems to treat as quite important.

The opening of his gospel begins with the ministry of John the Baptist. John is presented as the last of the prophets of the Old Covenant era. To that end, John ministered in the wilderness (where God typically met with prophets), wore the clothes of a prophet and ate the food of a prophet. He then did what all the prophets before him did and pointed people to the coming messiah. John had built up a significant following and many understood him to be the Elijah-figure who would precede the messiah; Jesus later affirms him as such.

What is interesting in Mark 1:14, as Mark outlines the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, is that Jesus does not minister in the wilderness like John. Rather, ‘after John was arrested, Jesus went to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God’. Why is that at all significant?

John conducted his ministry away from where people lived. To hear John’s message, you had to go and find him in the wilderness. You had to leave your town and seek John out in the middle of nowhere. To hear John, you went to him. But Jesus does the opposite. Jesus goes to where the people are and proclaims the good news to them. They don’t need to go and find Jesus; Jesus goes to find them.

This isn’t unique to John either. Typically, if you wanted to follow a rabbi, you had to go and find him. The system was, find your rabbi and sign up to learn from them; just the same as going to a bible college today. But Jesus didn’t wait for anybody to come and find him. Jesus went to where the people were and began proclaiming the good news of God to them. Jesus went to find the people; he didn’t make the people come to him.

We sometimes talk about people ‘seeking after Jesus’ or ‘finding Jesus.’ But the truth is, we don’t find Jesus; Jesus is the one who finds us. That is how Mark presents Jesus. Jesus is the incoming of the gospel, the incoming of the kingdom, the incoming of good news for the world. Jesus has come into the world to find his people; he doesn’t expect his people to find him.

This is particularly good news for us because Paul says in Romans 3, ‘there is no one righteous, not even one… there is no one who seeks God’. By nature, we do not seek after God. There is nothing in us that would ever lead us to go and find Jesus. But the good news is that Jesus knows who are his, he seeks after them and those he seeks he will certainly find. This is what Jesus says himself in Luke 19: ‘The Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost’.

Jesus doesn’t says, ‘I have come and everyone knows where to find me’. Jesus has come to seek and to save the lost. We have a saviour who has come to find us. He comes to find us because, left to ourselves, we wouldn’t even go looking! Jesus begins his ministry seeking out his people. He goes to where the people are. He brings the good news to them, finding the lost so that he can save them.