GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 5:14
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Go Tell It on the Mountain.
The composer, educator, and musicologist John Wesley Work, Jr. (1871-1925) published the song “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” a traditional African-American spiritual dating back to the mid-1800s. The chorus goes:
Go tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere:
Go tell it on the mountain
That Jesus Christ is born.
It seems like every television news program begins with “Breaking News,” “news” that often involves a car crash or some similar event on a highway hundreds of miles away, maybe even in another state. Without diminishing the often terrible circumstances of the “Breaking News,” I’m touched with sympathy for those suffering in the incident, but the event otherwise does not affect my neighborhood, environment, or daily life. However, let the “Breaking News” report on a fire, accident, or event in my neighborhood, and the reporter has my full attention because that event affects my life.
In St. Mark’s report about Jesus’ confrontation with a man possessed by an unclean spirit, the spirit, or spirits, left the man and went into a nearby herd of pigs, and the pigs stampeded into the lake and drowned. “And the men feeding them fled and announced in the city and the country. And they went out to see the thing that happened.” (Mark 5:14) These swine herders had “Breaking News,” and they broadcast it wherever they went—in the city and in the country. They undoubtedly wanted the pig owners to know that this disastrous loss of wealth was not their fault. They also had news about a wild man becoming sane and submissive. The pig owners and others rushed to the scene to take in this “Breaking News” for themselves.
Without, I hope, disturbing any musicologist too much, if one were to compose a few lines about this incident, he or she might say: “Go tell it in the city, over the countryside and everywhere; go tell it to everyone that Jesus Christ is here.”
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