Dr. Thomas Schreiner · The Master's Seminary · 23 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Mark preaches the King, and just as urgently preaches what following him costs. Dr. Schreiner shows why the two-touch healing sits exactly where it does, why no one expected a suffering Messiah, and how Mark structures his second half on three passion predictions. Then Luke and Acts open as one story framed by the kingdom. Listen for whose story the passion predictions turn out to be.
Mark alone records the parable of the seed growing secretly: a man scatters seed, sleeps and rises, and the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how, until the harvest. The kingdom of God grows in ways not immediately discernible, and it grows, on this parable, by the preaching of the word. Schreiner presses it on those bound for ministry: your job is not to discern how the kingdom grows but to be faithful in preaching the word. Where pastors stop believing that the preached word grows the church, the result is congregations full of the unregenerate, or of very weak Christians.
If Mark has a distinctive beside the King himself, it is discipleship, and Mark stresses as Matthew and Luke do not that the disciples' hearts were hard during the ministry. After the sea is calmed, Matthew tells us they worshiped Jesus as the Son of God; Mark tells us their hearts were hardened. That is no contradiction: the reality inside them was complex, at one level recognizing the Son of God, at another still resisting him, and both realities were present, as Jesus' later rebuke shows: are your hearts hard, like those who oppose me? This makes Mark a great book to preach, on the King and on what it means to follow him.
At Bethsaida Jesus heals a blind man in two stages: after the first touch the man sees people like trees walking; after the second he sees everything clearly. Schreiner dismantles the popular misuse, the sermon that turns the story into a second blessing for carnal Christians, recalling a guest preacher who tried exactly that and was not invited back; nor is the story about healings sometimes taking several attempts, for Jesus never needed two tries. The key is placement: the story sits immediately before Peter's confession, and it is an acted parable of the disciples. They are about to see truly, you are the Messiah, and still see men like trees walking, for they do not yet see that he is the suffering Messiah of 8:31. Messianic identity they nail; messianic destiny they miss.
In Mark, Jesus is Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, and also the servant of the Lord from Isaiah; and in all the Gospels he is hesitant about the title Messiah because it fed a political expectation he refused, preferring Son of Man. But why was the suffering so hard to grasp, when Isaiah 53 teaches it plainly? Schreiner surveys the literature: Josephus, Philo, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Qumran scrolls, the Targums, and nowhere is there a pre-Christian tradition that the Messiah would suffer. The Targum tradition even calls the servant Messiah while paraphrasing the suffering out of the passage. Qumran expects two messiahs, on the majority reading, neither of them suffering; the later Fourth Ezra has a Messiah who dies after reigning, but nowhere in Jewish literature does the Messiah suffer atoningly for the sins of the people. The New Testament fits this perfectly: when Jesus told his own disciples, again and again, they had no categories for it. It was a mystery revealed: present in the Old Testament, and so contrary to their interpretive matrix that it did not compute.
The episode is a lesson in interpretive grids. Everyone reads through one, and a deeply held frame yields slowly, even to plain words from a beloved teacher. Jesus, moreover, said many mysterious things and often spoke parabolically, so the disciples were left asking what he meant, as they still were in the upper room. The unlearning took them all the way to the resurrection.
Mark structures his second half on three passion predictions, each followed by discipleship failure and discipleship teaching. At the first, Peter rebukes Jesus, and only Mark, written, as the deep early tradition holds, on Peter's own testimony, records that Jesus turned and looked at all the disciples before saying, get behind me, Satan. The look tells the truth: Peter, first among equals, had spoken for everyone, and the rebuke was for everyone. Then the terms: whoever would follow me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow. Jesus' passion is also the story of their life, and it was not what they thought they had signed up for.
After the second passion prediction, Jesus asks what they were arguing about on the road, and they fall silent, for they had been arguing about who was the greatest. Again the pattern: his dying is answered by their ranking. So Jesus sets a child in their midst: welcome the child, and be the servant of all.
After the third prediction, James and John ask Jesus to promise them whatever they ask, and what they ask is the right and left hand of his glory. Jesus answers that they are thinking like the Gentiles, whose great ones exercise power over people; it shall not be so among you, for the disciple is called to serve. Passion prediction, discipleship; passion prediction, discipleship; passion prediction, discipleship: a great way to teach through Mark, and its lesson in one line is that membership in the kingdom means being a humble disciple of Jesus who serves others.
Turning to Luke, Schreiner first joins the volumes: Luke and Acts are two books by one author, one story, and biblical theology should read them together. The kingdom, so central in Matthew and Mark, rules Luke as well, and, he argues, rules Acts too.
Acts is framed by the kingdom. What did the risen Jesus speak about with his disciples over forty days? The kingdom of God. And how does the book end? Paul in Rome, welcoming all who come, proclaiming the kingdom of God. Schreiner commends Alan Thompson's The Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus, in the same series he has praised all week, as essential for anyone preaching or teaching Acts; Thompson shows that although the word kingdom is not frequent in Acts, the theme is central from envelope to envelope.
The kingdom and Jesus are not two subjects. Philip in Samaria preaches the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ in one breath; Paul in the Ephesian synagogue spends three months persuading about the kingdom of God, which is to say proclaiming Jesus as the fulfillment of the Scriptures. The promise of the kingdom is fulfilled in Jesus, the crucified and risen one; the kingdom is the gospel that the church preaches.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How does the kingdom grow, in Mark's unique parable?
2. What is Mark's distinctive emphasis alongside the King himself?
3. How do Matthew's worship and Mark's hardened hearts in the boat fit together?
4. What is the real point of the two-stage healing at Bethsaida?
5. Why was Jesus hesitant about the title Messiah?
6. What does the survey of pre-Christian Jewish literature show?
7. What does the disciples' long incomprehension confirm?
8. What does only Mark record when Peter rebukes Jesus?
9. What follows each of Mark's three passion predictions?
10. How should Luke and Acts be read?
11. How does the book of Acts begin and end?
12. What is the content of the kingdom preached in Acts?
All twelve correct. Lecture 24 is complete.
The seed grows while the sower sleeps. Where are you demanding to see growth you were only asked to sow, and what would faithfulness without visible results look like this season?
The disciples worshiped and hardened in the same boat. Where do recognition and resistance toward Christ coexist in your own heart right now, and which one are you feeding?
Three times Jesus answered the cross with a towel: the child welcomed, the servant of all, the ransom. Who near you could you serve this week in a way no one will ever rank?
Mark 8:34, the terms of following: whoever would come after Jesus must say no to himself, shoulder his cross, and walk the road the Master walked.
The lecture's own recommendation: Alan Thompson's The Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus, in the same series the lecture has praised all week, called fantastic and essential for anyone preaching or teaching Acts.