The Priority of the Proclamation Text: Mark 1:35-39
Introduction: The Danger of a Successful Ministry
There is a peculiar danger that stalks every successful ministry, every fruitful Christian, and every victorious church. It is the danger of being defined by the blessings instead of the Blesser. It is the temptation to manage the effects of the gospel rather than continuing to proclaim the cause of it. When God moves in power, when healings happen, when demons are cast out, and when the crowds begin to gather, the pressure mounts. The pressure is to give the people what they want, to maintain the momentum, to build the brand, and to ride the wave of popular acclaim. The urgent needs of the many can easily drown out the central mission given by the One.
We see this dynamic with crystal clarity in the life of our Lord. After a Sabbath day of breathtaking power in Capernaum, teaching with authority, casting out a demon, healing Peter's mother-in-law, and then healing a whole city's worth of sick and demonized people, Jesus had a booming ministry on His hands. The whole town was buzzing. Everyone was looking for Him. He was, in modern terms, a viral sensation. The crowds were a sign of success. His disciples, practical men that they were, saw this as the great opportunity. "Everyone is looking for You." What they meant was, "This is it. We've made it. Let's build on this success."
But Jesus, operating from a different set of priorities, a different wisdom, refuses to be trapped by His own success. He does not see the crowd as the mission; He sees the crowd as a potential distraction from the mission. His response to His disciples is a course correction that is essential for the church in every age to understand. He shows us that the engine of the kingdom is not healing, it is not exorcism, it is not meeting the felt needs of the masses, as important as those things are. The engine of the kingdom is the proclamation of the gospel. Everything else is a consequence, a validation, or a signpost pointing to that central reality.
In this short passage, we see the secret source of Christ's power and clarity, the pressure of popular demand, and the unwavering priority of His divine mission. This is a lesson in spiritual discipline, a lesson in resisting the tyranny of the urgent, and a lesson in keeping the main thing the main thing.
The Text
And in the early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus rose up, went out of the house, and went away to a desolate place, and was praying there. And Simon and his companions searched for Him; and they found Him, and said to Him, "Everyone is looking for You." And He said to them, "Let us go elsewhere, to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came out for." And He went, preaching in their synagogues throughout all Galilee and casting out the demons.
(Mark 1:35-39 LSB)
The Secret of His Strength (v. 35)
We begin with the foundation of Jesus' ministry, which was not public, but private.
"And in the early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus rose up, went out of the house, and went away to a desolate place, and was praying there." (Mark 1:35)
After a day of immense spiritual output, healing the sick and casting out demons well into the night, how does Jesus recharge? He does not sleep in. He does not take a personal day. He rises "a great while before day," while it was still pitch dark, and He goes to a solitary place to pray. This is a stunning rebuke to all our modern notions of self-care and burnout prevention. The Son of God, the one who holds all things together by the word of His power, maintained His human ministry through disciplined, dependent communion with His Father.
We must get this straight. Jesus did not pray because He was a divine superman who could do it easily. He prayed because, in His humanity, He was utterly dependent on His Father for everything. He was a true man. He got tired. He faced temptation. He needed wisdom and strength for the day ahead. If the perfect, sinless Son of God needed to structure His life around this kind of disciplined prayer, how much more do we, who are weak, sinful, and easily distracted? We often think that because Jesus was perfect, of course He could pray like that. We need to flip that around. It was because He prayed like that, that He was able to walk in such perfect obedience.
This prayer in a desolate place was not an escape from the ministry, but the engine of it. It was here, in communion with the Father, that He received His marching orders. It was here that His priorities were clarified and His resolve was strengthened against the temptations that would come with the sunrise. Without this solitary prayer, He would have been vulnerable to the well-meaning but misguided plans of His own disciples. Prayer protects us from the obvious. The obvious thing to do was to stay in Capernaum and build on the momentum. But Jesus had a better plan, one received from His Father in the dark.
The Pressure of the Crowd (v. 36-37)
As the sun comes up, the world's agenda immediately intrudes on God's agenda.
"And Simon and his companions searched for Him; and they found Him, and said to Him, 'Everyone is looking for You.'" (Mark 1:36-37 LSB)
Simon Peter, ever the pragmatist, leads the search party. The word for "searched" here can have the sense of "hunted down." They are not just looking; they are pursuing Him with a sense of urgency. When they find Him, their statement is not a simple report; it is an implicit rebuke. "What are you doing out here praying? There's a crowd waiting! The ministry is back in town! Everyone is looking for you."
They saw the crowd as the ultimate validation. For them, popular opinion was the measure of success. "Everyone" wants you. This is the voice of the world. This is the logic of pragmatism. If it works, keep doing it. If it's popular, give them more of it. Find a need and meet it. Find a hurt and heal it. This is the foundation of so much of what is called "ministry" today. It is driven by the demands of the consumer, not the commands of the King.
The disciples were not being malicious. They were simply thinking like men. They saw a great opportunity, a revival breaking out, and they wanted to steward it. But their vision was limited to the immediate, the visible, the popular. They could not see that to give in to the demands of this one crowd would be to abort the mission for all the other towns in Galilee. They were thinking addition; Jesus was thinking multiplication.
The Priority of Preaching (v. 38)
Jesus' response cuts right through their pragmatic fog with divine clarity.
"And He said to them, 'Let us go elsewhere, to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came out for.'" (Genesis 1:38 LSB)
Notice what He does not say. He does not say, "Let us go elsewhere to heal more people." He does not say, "Let us go find more demons to cast out." He says, "Let us go...so that I may preach." He defines His mission not by His miracles, but by His message. The healings and exorcisms were essential, but they were not central. They were the dinner bell, calling people to the feast. They were the signs that pointed to the reality, but the reality was in the proclamation. The miracles demonstrated the power of the kingdom, but the preaching explained the meaning of the kingdom.
"For that is what I came out for." This is His mission statement. The Greek here is forceful: "for this purpose I have come forth." From where? From the Father. This was His divine commission. He was not a freelance healer responding to popular demand. He was a herald, sent from the throne of heaven with a specific proclamation. That proclamation was the gospel: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15).
This sets the priority for the Church for all time. The central task of the church is not social work, it is not political action, it is not community organizing, and it is not running a spiritual infirmary. The central task of the church is the faithful proclamation of the Word of God. The power is in the gospel. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ. When the preaching of the Word is central, true healing occurs, demons are routed, and lives are genuinely transformed from the inside out. But when we make the effects the cause, the ministry becomes a mile wide and an inch deep.
The Pattern of Ministry (v. 39)
The final verse summarizes the execution of this mission.
"And He went, preaching in their synagogues throughout all Galilee and casting out the demons." (Mark 1:39 LSB)
Jesus was as good as His word. He left the adoring crowd in Capernaum and began an itinerant ministry throughout the whole region. He went to them; He did not wait for them to come to Him. This is an offensive, invasive mission. The gospel is not passive. It seeks and it saves.
And what did He do? Two things are mentioned, in this order: "preaching in their synagogues" and "casting out the demons." The preaching came first. He went to the established places of worship, the synagogues, and He proclaimed the fulfillment of all that the Scriptures had promised. He reasoned from the Old Testament to show that He was the promised Messiah. The proclamation of the Word was the tip of the spear.
But where the Word is preached in power, there will be conflict. The casting out of demons was the necessary consequence of the preaching. When the kingdom of light advances through the proclamation of the truth, it necessarily collides with the kingdom of darkness. Preaching the lordship of Jesus Christ is a declaration of war on all rival lords, especially the prince of the power of the air. The exorcisms were not a separate ministry; they were the mopping-up operation that followed the artillery barrage of the Word. They were the visible proof that a stronger man had come to bind the strong man and plunder his house.
Conclusion: Christ or Chaos
This passage sets before us a fundamental choice, the same choice that faced the disciples that morning outside Capernaum. Will we follow the logic of the crowd or the logic of the Christ? Will our lives and our ministries be dictated by the tyranny of the urgent, the endless demands of a needy world? Or will they be anchored in the divine priorities established in prayer and centered on the proclamation of the gospel?
The world is always "looking for" a version of Jesus that it can manage. It wants the healer, the miracle worker, the social revolutionary, the provider of bread. It wants the blessings of the kingdom without the King. It wants the benefits of Christianity without the claims of Christ. It wants a Jesus who will meet its felt needs without demanding repentance and faith.
But the true Jesus, the Jesus of the Scriptures, cannot be managed. He gets up while it is still dark. He answers to an audience of One. And His mission is not to be popular, but to preach. He came to announce that God's kingdom has invaded enemy-occupied territory. He came to declare that He is Lord and that Caesar is not, that sin is not, that death is not, and that Satan is not.
Our mission is the same. We must begin where He began, in dependent prayer, seeking the Father's will. And we must major in what He majored in, the bold, faithful, unapologetic proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom. As we do this, we will see the power of God at work. We will see the sick healed, both physically and spiritually. We will see the demonic powers of our age routed and put to flight. Not because we sought those things first, but because we sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other things were added unto us. Let us therefore go elsewhere, to our neighbors, to our towns, to the nations, so that we may preach there also; for that is what we were saved for.