The Horn is Blowing

Mark 1:1 Here begins the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.

I spent a few years living in a dorm in a Bible College, a strange life that I wouldn’t ever want to repeat. There was the usual parade of characters - Fred, who threw apple cores at the wall; Carl, who insisted on bouncing a large ball bearing on the floor above my head whenever he was nervous (and who went on to become a spy); Larry, who made his roommate sleep in the hallway for no obvious reason. But none of them was as colorful as Billy.

Billy was a good guy, pure of heart, strong in body, filled with energy and fierce joy of life. He'd come to us with his head in a totally different space. Let's just say that Billy marched to the beat of a drummer, it was beating a rhythm that none of the rest of us were hearing. He was a musician, and the brilliant sounds of his trumpet sparked many a church worship service. An early riser, he also went for regular long runs before dawn.

One morning the early rising and the trumpet somehow came together in Billy's mind. For some unknowable reason, he decided to greet the day with a melody, a series of brilliant piercing trumpet blasts of praise to his God that rang down the halls of the dormitory and shot every sleeper awake in an instant. The tune was cut short, however, by angry shouts and then there was the inevitable chase and capture, after which Billy experienced such horrifying tortures that he never again played his trumpet before breakfast.

Billy and his trumpet blasting a tune down a dorm hallway reminds me of the way the good news about the Kingdom comes to us. You see, the message announced at the beginning of the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark – “Here begins the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” - is not something to cheer every heart or take away the troubles of every troubled soul. It's a blast of hope and challenge that brings any number of reactions from the people who hear it.

Some hear the trumpet sound when Jesus announces God’s kingdom and find it shocking. They chase down the one who’s playing the tune, murder on their minds. Some pull a pillow over their ears in some sort of vain hope that it will stop. Others don’t hear it at all and miss the opportunity to respond to the melody. But some listen to the beauty of the song, as strange and troubling as it may be, and recognize that their lives will never be the same again.