Lecture 8: The Messianic Secret, Preaching Mark, and Meeting Luke and Acts

The lecture, section by section

1. Resources for Mark

   For exegesis the major work is now France in the New International Greek Testament Commentary, which interacts richly with the interpreters before arguing its own case, superseding though not retiring Cranfield. For interpretation Essex's first purchase is Hiebert's Mark: A Portrait of the Servant, unmatched in paragraph-by-paragraph analysis even where its overall synthesis is weak, complemented by Edwards, used with Hiebert rather than alone. For preaching, Garland's volume is among the strongest in its series, moving from meaning to contemporary application, while works that print actual sermons retain their own value.

2. The messianic secret: Wrede's theory

   Throughout Mark, Jesus commands silence: demons are muzzled, the healed leper is sternly warned to tell no one, and after the great confession the twelve are ordered not to speak of him. Wilhelm Wrede, holding Mark the first gospel and nearest the historical Jesus, made these commands a literary device: embarrassed that Jesus never claimed to be Messiah, Mark supposedly invented a Jesus who was Messiah but told everyone to keep it quiet. Essex first shows the theory cannot even survive Mark's text: the healed demoniac of chapter 5 is commanded to go home and report what great things the Lord has done, and does, through all Decapolis; and at the trial, asked, are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One, Jesus answers, I am, and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven, Daniel 7 claimed outright, the very claim the high priest calls blasphemy. There is no universal secret.

3. Why the demons were silenced

   The commands that do occur have contextual reasons, and the first is the nature of the witnesses. Demons are liars by nature; if Jesus accepted their testimony, hearers could never weigh it, and worse, in that world the one who names and defines another implicitly claims authority over him. Every silencing of an unclean spirit is a round in the power struggle: it is Jesus's own words and works, not demonic acclamation, that will show who he is. His authority stands; theirs is refused.

4. Why the healed were silenced

   Healed people came for healing, not necessarily in faith that Jesus is Messiah, and so could not give accurate testimony to who he was. The leper is sent instead to the priest, where Leviticus governs: only God heals leprosy, and the priestly examination would confront the man, and the priests, with what his cure meant. When the healed disobeyed, the result proved the point: the fame of a miracle worker spread until Jesus could not enter a town, crowds crushing him, everyone wanting the touch that guarantees health, and no one coming for the reason he came. The Decapolis demoniac is the exception that tests the rule: in Gentile territory, without Israel's tangled messianic expectations, a healed man could freely tell what great things had been done for him.

5. Why the disciples were silenced, for a time

   The disciples believed truly but understood partially: in the very next scene after the confession Peter rebukes Jesus for predicting his death. Until the cross they could repeat but not interpret; so when Jesus sent them out, they went as representatives, not interpreters, reduplicating his message, repent, and his works, so that the crowds met Jesus's own testimony through them, without the disciples' premature conclusions about a kingdom arriving at the next Passover. After the cross and resurrection they became the full witnesses, and Mark's gospel itself is the record of that apostolic testimony. In every case Jesus reserved to himself the prerogative of revealing and defining who he is.

6. Preaching Mark, and its ending

   Mark is the easiest gospel to preach: written for Gentiles, requiring least Old Testament background, more than eighty percent straight narrative that retells naturally, without long discourses to slow a series. Essex recommends it as the first gospel a pastor preaches, and recalls the graduate who began with Luke instead and did not survive the book; his own series ran about thirty messages in eight months, against some fifty for John. On the ending, he preached Mark 16:9 to 20 in a single message, first giving the congregation a printed summary of the textual question their own translations already flag: he judges the passage an early appendix rather than original, but it embodies very early church tradition and contains nothing not taught elsewhere in Scripture, and he treated the disputed paragraph at the end of John 7 the same way.

7. Luke and Acts: one work, one purpose

   Luke's preface and Acts' opening bind the volumes: the first account I composed, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach. On the Greco-Roman convention for multi-volume history, the purpose stated in volume one governs both: that you may know the exact truth, the certainty, of the things you have been taught. Literarily Acts is the sequel to Luke alone; canonically the church placed Luke among the Gospels and let Acts serve as sequel to all four, which is how readers meet it still, but strict historical-grammatical reading pairs Acts with Luke. Luke knew other accounts existed, resting on the apostles' testimony; they were not wrong, but they did not meet Theophilus's need, and of the four canonical Gospels only Matthew existed when Luke wrote.

8. The importance of Luke and Acts

   Luke reaches further back than any evangelist, to Gabriel in the temple before either child is conceived, and alone carries the story through the ascension, where Acts picks up and runs to Paul's Roman custody about AD 62, nearly seventy years of history. Without Acts there would be no history of the early church at all; try reconstructing Paul's movements from the letters alone and the value of Acts becomes obvious, for the whole chronology into which the epistles fit rests on it, and the letters' burdens, Jew and Gentile in one body, the content of the proclaimed gospel, are intelligible from the history Acts supplies. Providence has underlined the point: Luke and Acts together are twenty-eight percent of the New Testament, more than all of Paul's letters, making Luke the largest human contributor to the New Testament. Yet Luke was long the forgotten gospel, as Acts was the neglected book until the Pentecostal movement forced its study, one good result of which is that the church has been driven back to Luke.

9. The author found in the we-sections

   The author never names himself, but he enters his own narrative. At Troas, when Paul sees the Macedonian vision, the pronouns change: we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them, the author a preacher among them. After the first events at Philippi the we ceases, resuming at 20:5 when Paul passes back through: they were waiting for us at Troas, and we sailed from Philippi. The man left at Philippi around AD 50 rejoins around 57, some seven years of ministry rooted there, travels with Paul to Jerusalem, went in with us to James, and reappears for the voyage, it was decided that we should sail for Italy, through the shipwreck to Rome. Church tradition adds that he came from Antioch, and elimination confirms the name: of all Paul's ministry companions named in his letters, only two never appear by name in Acts, Luke and Titus, both Gentiles, and Colossians 4 marks Luke out, the only non-Jewish writer of any Scripture.

10. Most excellent Theophilus

    Theophilus, lover of God, was a common Greek name, but this is no everyman: the address most excellent, used later of the governors Felix and Festus, marks a real individual of standing, likely holding some position in the Roman order of the Greek east, above Luke's own station. Was he a believer? The verb, the things you have been taught, is the word used of Apollos in Acts 18, instructed but needing fuller understanding, and Essex reads Theophilus the same way: a Gentile believer of the Pauline mission, taught and having embraced the message, now needing assurance. A patron's role, copying and circulating the volumes, may follow, but the preface is written first and foremost for him.

11. The purpose sharpened

    What would shake such a man? The pressure that sounds through Acts and the letters: the claim that without circumcision and the law a Gentile could not truly be saved or belong to God's people, the battle of Galatians, Philippians, Colossians. Luke's answer is not another doctrinal argument but a history: God's hand directed the events from Jesus through Peter to Paul, and the message never changed, Jesus spoke of Gentile salvation, Peter preached it, Paul preached it, and every preacher called for the same response, repentance and faith in Jesus as Lord. So the purpose: that Gentile Christians of the Pauline mission might know with certainty that the word taught to them was absolutely true.

12. The themes of Luke and Acts

    Above all, the sovereign plan and purpose of God, sounded in the dei motif, it must: the boy Jesus, I had to be in my Father's house; the risen Lord, the Christ had to suffer, according to Moses and all the prophets; the night word to Paul, as you have witnessed in Jerusalem, so you must witness in Rome. If Romans 9 through 11 argues God's unthwartable purpose, Luke and Acts narrate it. Around that center cluster the rest: Jesus the Savior, the salvation word group thicker here than in any gospel, for Israel and the nations; the power of God; Jesus the Lord, kurios some 210 times; death, resurrection, and ascension held together, the ascension Luke's alone; the Holy Spirit filling and directing John, Jesus, then Peter and Paul; the Gentiles and the outcasts, the poor, the tax collectors, the women; the temple and Jerusalem, to which the story returns until Jerusalem's final rejection gives way to Rome; repentance and faith as the one response preached by Jesus, Peter, and Paul alike; prayer; joy; the advancing word; baptism and the breaking of bread. From Gabriel's word to a priest in Jerusalem's temple to the gospel preached unhindered in pagan Rome, the two volumes trace one plan of God.

1. Jesus refused testimony from witnesses who spoke truth with lying natures, keeping the revelation of himself in his own hands. What does that teach about how the truth of Christ should be commended, and about the kind of witnesses he wants?

2. Crowds pressed Jesus for the touch that guarantees health, and Essex notes things have not changed. Where do you see people, or yourself, coming to Jesus chiefly for what he can do rather than for who he is?

3. Luke answered a believer's deepest doubt not with an argument but with a history of God's unbroken plan. When assurance wavers, how might rehearsing what God has actually done, in Scripture and in your own story, steady you the way Luke steadied Theophilus?