What Got Torn Can’t Be Sewn Shut

Mark My Words — A Series in the Gospel of Mark

Mark 1:1–12

 Your phone buzzes with a news alert and you’ve read three articles before you realize you’re still standing in the kitchen holding a spatula. Someone texts “we need to talk” and your heart rate changes in half a second. Your kid falls at the playground and you’re across the park before your brain catches up to your legs.

We are remarkably fast responders. We detect when something shifts in our environment and we orient our entire attention around it—instantly, without thinking, without debating.

We just don’t do it for God.

And honestly? I don’t think it’s because we’ve rejected him. I think it’s sneakier than that. We’ve gotten used to him. Familiarity is the most effective sedative in the world. You hear something enough times and it stops waking you up. The gospel becomes background noise. You don’t even realize your headphones are in.

Mark’s gospel opens like someone kicking down a door. No genealogy. No manger. Twelve verses, and he’s already detonated three Old Testament prophecies, reintroduced Elijah, and unveiled the Trinity at the Jordan River. But there’s one detail in this passage that wrecked me this week—and I think it might be the most important word in the entire Gospel of Mark.

The word is torn. In Greek it’s schizo. It doesn’t mean opened—like a door you can shut again. It means ripped. Shredded. Like fabric that can never be stitched back together.

And here’s the thing that should stop you cold: Mark uses this exact word only one other time in his entire gospel. Mark 15:38. Jesus dies on the cross—and the temple curtain rips in two. Top to bottom. That curtain was the physical barrier between God and humanity. The thing that said: you cannot come in here.

Two tears. One word. Bookending the whole story.

At the beginning of Mark—heaven is torn open over Jesus. At the end—the curtain is torn open because of Jesus. And here’s why that matters for your Wednesday morning: what is opened can be closed. But what is torn cannot be mended. God didn’t crack the door to see if you were interested. He ripped the barrier down. Permanently. Irreversibly. To get to you.

And look at what pours through that tear. The Spirit descends—hovering over water the way he hovered in Genesis 1, because this isn’t a renovation project. It’s a new creation. And then the Father speaks: “You are my Son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased.”

Jesus hasn’t done a single thing yet. No healings. No sermons. No cross. And the Father’s first words aren’t a performance review—they’re identity. You are mine. I love you.

Cornelius Plantinga described the inner life of the Trinity this way: “Each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others.” Mark isn’t just showing you a baptism. He’s pulling back the curtain on the heartbeat of reality—and at the Jordan, that love spills out of heaven and crashes into earth. Toward you.

That same voice speaks over everyone who is in Christ. Not because your quiet time streak is impressive. Not because you finally got your act together. Because the barrier is gone—torn, not opened—and a God who rips heaven apart to reach you is not going to lose interest on a Thursday.

So if the barrier’s gone… why does it still feel like there’s a wall?

I think most of us have quietly built a life where God is welcome but not needed. Jesus gets a seat at the table but doesn’t get to rearrange the furniture. We give him the crisis moments—the diagnosis, the 2 a.m. panic. But the ordinary Tuesday? The low-grade anxiety? The slow scroll through someone else’s highlight reel? We manage those on our own.

And we’re so used to managing that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to be held. We’re exhausted people carrying things we were never meant to carry, white-knuckling through weeks God never asked us to survive alone. And the whole time—heaven’s been torn open.

God tore heaven open to get to you. Don’t sleep through it.