Our understanding of authority, our community, our religious practices, our theology, and our ethics are all challenged by Jesus. We can outright oppose him for this, we can ignore his claims and try to relate to him on our own terms, or we can submit to him and let him change our paradigms.

The Gospel of Mark is focused on three major questions: (1) Who is Jesus? (2) What has he come to do? (3) How should we respond? As the introduction to the book, these first fifteen verses answer the same questions.