January 21, Epiphany 3B (Mark 1:14–20)

In history as in fiction, the event of a succession in leadership is a reliable moment of high drama. Sometimes a leader fails to plan for it (Lenin wrote some warnings about Stalin but left the dictatorship he invented open to Stalin’s maneuverings), sometimes a leader makes plans but the survivors ignore them (Edward VI named Lady Jane Grey as his heir, but she ended up losing the crown and her head to her cousin Mary), and sometimes death catches the old boss too soon (Logan Roy, dithering among his inadequate offspring in Succession). Often the leader’s followers have to make the best plans they can on their own.

I recall a professor telling us that when Luther was in hiding in Wartburg and his friends assumed he was captured or killed, some asked when Erasmus would step up to take on the mantle of leading the reform movement. All of a sudden, a center of energy and legitimacy is gone, and everyone close to it is immediately subject to danger and quick shifts in direction. It’s a time of new possibilities, both fearful and exciting.

While John the Baptist appears in all four gospels, only in Mark and Matthew is his arrest noted as the catalyst for Jesus’ public ministry. And it’s only in Mark that Jesus is not specifically singled out by John himself as the one who was to come after him. It’s not clear that anyone besides Jesus sees the heavens opened and hears the voice from above at his baptism. So when Mark records that Jesus’ ministry begins after John is arrested, there is no indication that this amounts to the execution of an established succession plan. The base of support for John’s political-religious revival movement is, in that moment, like sheep without a shepherd.