Now after John was arrested . . .

"Now after John was arrested . . ." --this is how this Sunday's gospel reading from Mark begins the first large section of the gospel (1:14-10:52) describing the ministry of Jesus in Galilee. We move from Mark's short prologue (1:1-1:13) into the body of his Gospel. We've learned in the prologue that John the baptizer was attracting large crowds of people to go out into the wilderness to be baptized. Jesus was baptized by John, received the Spirit, and then spent time alone in the wilderness being tested by satan until "after John was arrested."

My political sense tells me that the mass movement that was drawn to John was a threat to the Roman puppet ruler Herod. Jesus is to inherit that movement, and with that the enmity of those in power in Galilee and Jerusalem who were charged with maintaining "Pax Romana"--the "peace" imposed by Roman military power. The arrest of John foreshadows the arrest of Jesus, and foreshadows as well the countless Christian martyrs later to be arrested, tortured and killed by Roman authority in the coming centuries during which our Bible came into its present form.

Last night a friend of mine, a humble Methodist lay person and retired missionary in his eighties, was given a send-off here in Madison as he faces an appearance in a Federal Court for his part in trying to bring the gospel of the peace of Christ to the notorious School of the Americas--a tool of our government's ambition to impose a "Pax Americana" on the western hemisphere. The School of the Americas concerns many Christians that I know because they teach the tools of torture to the militaries of the present day Herod's we favor in Latin America. Christians are still being arrested. . . .