Lecture 7: Mark: The Themes, the Purpose, and the Beginning of the Gospel

The lecture, section by section

1. God at the center, and the Son revealed

   Like every gospel Mark is theocentric: theos appears 49 times, but father names God only three times, each on Jesus's own lips, in the teaching on forgiving prayer, in the saying that not even the Son knows the day or hour, and in Gethsemane's Abba, Father; writing for Gentiles, Mark reserves the term for Jesus's own speech. Jesus himself bears three titles: the Christ, seven times, tied to the Old Testament as when the high priest asks, are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One; the Son of God, announced in the opening line, declared by the Father at the baptism, this is my beloved Son, and recognized by the demons; and the son of man, true humanity, yet more than a man, for on earth he has authority to forgive sins. The Spirit appears six times, three in chapter 1, where the one John promised would baptize with the Spirit is himself anointed and empowered for his work.

2. The gospel proclaimed, and to be proclaimed

   Mark opens with the beginning of the gospel, and throughout the New Testament gospel names something spoken: Jesus comes into Galilee preaching the good news of God, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has drawn near, repent and believe. The proclamation is to continue: the gospel must first be preached to all the nations, and wherever it is preached in the whole world; whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it; whoever leaves houses and family for my sake and the gospel's receives a hundredfold now and, in the age to come, eternal life. Matthew teaches those already believers; Mark's programmatic use of gospel flows from a different aim, a proclamation written down so its hearers can carry it on. The kingdom theme runs as in Matthew: the authority of God displayed in Jesus now, its full manifestation, after the parables' long sowing, in the future.

3. The struggle with Satan

   Mark compresses the temptation to a sentence but stretches its duration: forty days tempted by Satan, with the wild beasts, ministered to by angels, the whole wilderness a sustained testing that failed, carnivorous beasts subdued and angels serving. Immediately the public ministry opens with an unclean spirit crying out in the Capernaum synagogue, I know who you are, the Holy One of God, silenced and expelled, and the crowds marvel that even the unclean spirits obey him. The emphasis lands where Roman readers lived: a world of superhuman powers tossing men about, in which the one to follow is the one with authority over every such power.

4. Miracles, and the faith they summon

   Nineteen miracles are recorded, concentrated in the gospel's first half before Peter's confession, and told with Mark's characteristic fullness. Woven through them runs the demand for faith: repent and believe the good news; Jesus seeing their faith forgives the paralytic lowered through the roof; the storm-becalmed disciples are asked, why are you so timid, how is it you have no faith; and the fig-tree lesson calls for faith in God that moves mountains, joined to the forgiving of others. John may be remembered as the gospel of believing, but the response of faith is pressed page after page in Mark: those who experience what God gives through Jesus are those who embrace him for who he is.

5. Opposition early, and a death foreshadowed

   Mark lets no grass grow: one paragraph of John the Baptist, and Jesus is baptized, tested, and preaching in Galilee, with four fishermen leaving all to follow. The opposition arrives just as fast: Satan and the unclean spirits on one side, and by chapter 2 the scribes reasoning, he blasphemes, who can forgive sins but God alone. By 3:6 the Pharisees are already counseling with the Herodians how to destroy him. Even the note that John was delivered up in 1:14 sounds the word that will toll for Jesus, delivered up by Israel's leaders into Roman hands. Caught between stand the amazed multitudes, who will finally yield to their leaders, and the disciples, who follow.

6. The disciples who see, but not clearly

   Mark is unsparing about the followers. They believe and follow, but the road is bumpy: after the stilled storm they ask, who then is this; after the loaves they gain no insight, for their heart was hardened, and they take the walking Lord for a ghost; are you too so uncomprehending, he asks over the teaching on defilement; in the boat they fret about forgotten bread while the baker of thousands sits beside them, do you not yet understand; Peter earns, get behind me, Satan; they puzzle over rising from the dead; and when they hinder the children, Jesus is indignant, the very word used of his anger at hardened leaders. They come to full sight only at the end, before an empty tomb. Along the way Mark keeps speaking of the way, the road, the following, the vocabulary of discipleship the church would inherit when believers were called the people of the way.

7. Why was Mark written

   The fathers said Mark preserves the apostolic preaching as the apostles were dying, and that is true, but it does not distinguish Mark from the other three. Garland speaks for the evangelical majority: the purpose is to encourage Christians to follow Jesus in the midst of suffering, in a Rome as hostile as the Palestine Jesus walked. Hiebert answers that the presentation is so relentlessly aimed at convincing that the purpose is to challenge non-Christians to believe in and follow Jesus, even to death. Either purpose yields the other as result, and Essex, once with the majority, has moved to Hiebert's position: the purpose is the challenge to believe, with the strengthening of believers its fruit.

8. The scandal of a crucified God

   The Roman objection Mark must answer is double. Crucifixion was engineered for maximal pain and maximal shame, so degrading that Roman citizens were exempt from it: the victim stripped, the corpse left to rot and be eaten. How can a God suffer so, and who in his right mind would believe a message about a crucified Savior? Mark's answer runs through the whole gospel: the sufferer was no mere man but God in flesh, and the cross, far from shame, is the place of God's glory, because it is the place where forgiveness is won. Armed with this record, Roman believers could proclaim that message to the very people who despised it.

9. Structure: geography, and the turn at chapter 8

   The geography is clean: Galilee from 1:14 to 9:50, the bridge through Judea beyond the Jordan, Perea, in chapter 10, and Jerusalem from the approach of 11:1 to the end. But with the majority of commentators Essex reads the deeper structure as ideological, turning in chapter 8. Everything moves toward Peter's declaration, you are the Christ, and immediately upon it, at 8:31, the first passion prediction, repeated at 9:31 and 10:33: the Son of Man must suffer, be killed, and rise. Then, summoning the multitude with the disciples: deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me, the sentence Mark's first hearers would have to live.

10. The heading and its two climaxes

    Verse 1 is no sentence, it has no verb, so it is a heading; the question is, of what. Some end the prologue at verse 8, 13, or 15, but Essex reads 1:1 as the heading of the whole book, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the gospel itself supplies the proof in two climaxes: at the center, Peter's, you are the Christ; at the cross, the centurion's, truly this man was the Son of God. A Roman soldier watching a crucifixion knew how crucified men die, suffocating, ebbing out; but Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last, dying like no crucified man ever died, and the Roman, standing under the very placard King of the Jews, testifies. And beginning implies continuation: those who embrace this proclamation are to carry it on, which is exactly the purpose Essex finds in the book.

11. The prologue and the body

    The prologue of 1:2 to 13 anchors even a Roman audience in the Old Testament: as it is written in Isaiah the prophet, and then a citation running from Malachi's messenger to Isaiah's voice, the prophets from end to end, all fulfilled in John who prepares the way of the Lord. The greater one comes, is affirmed from heaven, you are my beloved Son, and is vindicated over Satan. The body then displays the authority of God's anointed: authority over disciples, spirits, sin, disease, nature, and death, from Galilee and back and forth across the sea, opposed from 3:6 by leaders bent on his destruction, thwarted only by unbelief at Nazareth, extended through the sending of the twelve, pressed upon the slow-sighted disciples through the loaves and the leaven.

12. The two-touch healing, the way of the cross, and the ending

    One of only three paragraphs unique to Mark sits precisely at the hinge: the blind man of Bethsaida healed in two stages, seeing men like trees walking, then everything clearly. Jesus never needs two touches; Mark needs the picture, for the disciples too see, but not yet clearly, and in the next paragraph they are given their chance to speak and Peter speaks truly. From there the road runs to Jerusalem: discipleship taught on the way, the temple debates showing his authority even as death approaches, the Olivet discourse promising the authority to be revealed, the death that moves a Roman to confess the Son of God, and the tomb that could not hold him, the women fleeing in trembling awe. As for 16:9 to 20, Essex judges from its textual history that it was not part of Mark's original gospel, an early appendix assembled from other Scripture by readers uneasy with an ending of awe, and he leaves the wrestling to the exegesis course.

1. Mark pictures disciples with real faith and partial sight, fretting over bread beside the one who fed thousands. Where has the Lord's past provision failed to shape your present trust, and what would seeing clearly change this week?

2. Rome despised a crucified God; Mark answers that the cross is the place of glory because it is the place of forgiveness. Where does the message of the cross still draw contempt today, and how does Mark equip you to answer it?

3. Mark wrote the beginning of a proclamation its hearers were meant to continue, even at the cost of their lives. What would it mean for you to treat the gospel as a message entrusted to you to carry forward rather than only to enjoy?