Thoughts on Mark 1

Today’s reading: Leviticus 20; Mark 1

There is a lot that happens in Mark 1 to kick off Jesus’s ministry that at first blush seems a little odd or unnecessary. I want to touch on a few of these things and why, while they may seem a little odd to us reading the account today, they were very necessary in initiating Jesus’ ministry.

Jesus’ Baptism

Mark starts his account of Jesus’ ministry with His being baptized by John. After Jesus is baptized the heavens open, the Spirit descends on Jesus, and a voice speaks from Heaven declaring Jesus to be His beloved Son. So Jesus is announced to be the Son of God in this event, but why not just have this happen when Jesus walks into the temple where it would be seen by everyone and be in a place of great spiritual significance?

There are a handful of layers to this one, including one important one that we aren’t going to focus on since Mark himself points it out, and that is that this is fulfillment of prophesy from Isaiah, that God would send someone before His Servant to prepare the way, and Mark identified that person as John the Baptist.

What I want to draw our attention to instead is the parallel of the anointing of the kind by a prophet of Yahweh as legitimizing the king of Israel. When Israel first asked for a king, God sovereignly brought Saul to Samuel, the prophet, and had Samuel anoint Saul to be king. Later, when Saul is disobedient and God strips the monarchy from him, God sends Samuel to go and anoint David to be the next king. When Samuel goes to anoint David, he doesn’t know who he is going to anoint, but God tells him that He will tell him who it is when he gets there, and when David stands before Samuel, God tells Samuel that David is His man.

In a similar way, God sends His prophet John out baptizing, and evidently tells him that he is going to baptize God’s messiah, but He doesn’t tell John who that is, just that He will tell him when he comes. So John goes out baptizing, as he is told to by God, and baptizing people with water (whether pouring water over their heads or submerging them) is a lot like how Samuel anointed Saul and then David king by pouring oil over their heads. And when Jesus is baptized, God speaks to John, announcing that this is His man, His messiah, the rightful King of Israel.

So while it may seem a little odd to us, Jesus starting His ministry being baptized adds legitimacy to Him as the rightful heir to the throne of Israel as He is anointed by God’s prophet, and then has God declare to that prophet, on His behalf, that He is the one.

The Wilderness Temptation

Immediately after his baptism the Spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by Satan. This also seems odd at first blush. If Jesus has just been anointed king by God’s prophet, why go off to the wilderness rather than start preaching or heading to Jerusalem?

I have written up my thoughts on the wilderness temptation before, so I’m not going to rehash it all here, but you can read it here if you’re interested. The summary of it though is that in the wilderness temptation, Jesus establishes humanity’s culpability for sin on the one hand, and His own worthiness to deal with sin on the other.

Ultimately, this happens immediately after His baptism because, if Jesus fails in the wilderness temptation, He is not fit to be the Messiah, and the rest of His ministry is worthless.

Keeping His Identity Quiet

Jesus does a handful of things to keep His identity and ministry quiet: He starts His work in Capernaum, an out-of-the-way city, rather than in Jerusalem, the capital and hub of Jewish religious activity, He silences the demons that He casts out that are trying to declare who He is, He leaves the area when a following starts to build up around Him, and He tells the leper He heals not to tell anyone about it. But if Jesus is the Messiah, God’s chosen and prophesied deliverer of Israel, why would He try to keep things quiet rather than going to Jerusalem to declare the truth where the greatest number of people can hear and respond?

This is another one, like Jesus’ baptism, that has a lot of layers to it, but the big one I’m going to focus on this morning is what the New Testament authors tend to refer to as the mystery. In the Old Testament there is talk of both a coming Messiah and a Suffering Servant. The Messiah would be a king who would vanquish Israel’s enemies and establish an eternal kingdom of righteousness, while the Suffering Servant, much less talked about, would die for the sins of others. There is really nothing in the Old Testament which would connect these two figures, and the fact that Jesus is both is only clear after His death and resurrection. It was kept a secret (mystery) in the Old Testament for a reason.

We are probably all familiar with the Pharisees from the gospel accounts, but what we may not be as familiar with is the fact that much of their existence was around preparing and watching for the Messiah. They were trying to lead the people in righteousness to avoid another exile, but also to prepare for the coming Messiah, who they believed they would be the ones to welcome Him into Jerusalem (and then be rewarded in His eternal kingdom for their faithfulness and preparation on His behalf).

If Jesus showed up in Jerusalem and was announced by God to be His Son in the temple in a big public display, this would honestly fit very well with public expectations, and Jesus may have immediately been thrust into the kingly position they expected from their Messiah, but that is not what Jesus was here to accomplish in His first coming. He was not here to rescue Israel from Rome, He was here to rescue the entire world from sin. Instead, as Jesus begins preaching and teaching things which grate against those same Pharisees that are waiting for the Messiah, and as He subverts their expectations, it ultimately creates such a polarization between those who are there to truly serve God and those who are there for their own self-righteousness, that Jesus ends up getting killed by the very people who have been waiting to herald His arrival.

This is what Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2, that if the rulers of this world had known what Jesus was up to, if they had realized that His death was intentional and was the price Jesus was willingly paying to rescue the world from the domain of darkness, they never would have crucified the lord of glory.

So ultimately, one of the primary reasons Jesus keeps His identity and ministry quiet from the beginning is because He needs His work and ministry to result in His death rather than His coronation, and if people knew who He was before He had the chance, by His lifestyle and teaching, to subvert their expectations of Him as the Messiah, that might never have been accomplished.