Bible Studies Jeanie C. Crain http://crain.english.missouriwestern.edu

The Gospel of Mark: A Study Based on the Old Testament

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Summary Jesus leaves Capernaum and goes to region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, considerably south in the direction of Jerusalem and east of the Jordan; he continues to instruct his disciples. He teaches about divorce, talks about the example of children, tells the story of the rich man, and once again, foretells his death and resurrection, hears a request from the brothers John and James about who in the kingdom would be allows to sit on his right side, and then ends with the healing of Bartimaeus. The Pharisees initiate the discussion about divorce, and the disciples follow-up on the discussion. Following this discussion, Jesus takes into his arms the little children brought to him by their parents, blesses them, and says that of such is the Kingdom of God made. The children are followed by a rich young man who wants to know what he should do to enter God's kingdom; Jesus tells him to keep the law but, also, to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, a requirement that the young man finds too difficult.  This leads to a discussion of the difficulty they rich may have in attaining God's kingdom.

On the road on the way to Jerusalem, he tells his disciples he will be condemned by the chief priests and scribes, handed over to the Gentiles, be killed, and rise again after three days. James and John ask to sit on the right side of Jesus in the kingdom, an indication that they still misunderstand the mission about which Jesus has been teaching. Blind Bartimaeus exclaims for joy when he encounters Jesus, whom he recognizes as the Son of David, and asks to be healed of his blindness; Bartimaeus regains his sight and follows Jesus.

When the Pharisees initiate a discussion about marriage and divorce, Jesus uses it to teach his disciples a message about unity, the content which apparently escapes them since they follow up with much the same question as the Pharisees.   Generally, Deuteronomy has said the following about divorce:

24 Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house 2 and goes off to become another man’s wife. 3 Then suppose the second man dislikes her, writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house (or the second man who married her dies); 4 her first husband, who sent her away, is not permitted to take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled; for that would be abhorrent to the Lord, and you shall not bring guilt on the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession.

Jesus first asks the Pharisees what the Law says about a man's being able to divorce his wife; they reply, showing they know the scriptures, that the Law allows a man to write a certificate and dismiss the wife. The Pharisees, of course, are trying to trick Jesus into incriminating himself by the Mosaic law.  The certificate issued is to protect the wife's interest, allowing her to establish that her divorce has been formal and official and that she was free to marry someone else. Jesus, as always, goes beyond the letter of the Law to its intent:

5 But Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

This reply suggests that the Law was written for man or was shaped for the heart of man. That is, God's law is absolute; human law is relative; in this case, human law does not represent the absolute but exists due to inclinations of the human heart. As always, human law is issued to constrain human errancy.  The purpose of marriage, as Jesus points out, is to bring two people together into one unity joined by God; much later, Malachi is to say that God hates divorce:

14 You ask, "Why does he not?" [accept offerings and sacrifices] Because the Lord was a witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. 15 Did not one God make her? Both flesh and spirit are his. And what does the one God desire? Godly offspring. So look to yourselves, and do not let anyone be faithless to the wife of his youth. 16 For I hate † divorce, says the Lord, the God of Israel, and covering one’s garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts.

According to Jesus, the original intention for humans was laid out in Genesis 1.27 and in Genesis 2.24:

27 So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

Oxford annotation says the following about image:  Image, likeness, refer not to physical appearance but to relationship and activity. Humankind is commissioned to manifest God’s rule on earth, on the analogy of a child who represents a parent (see Genesis 5.3).

The Genesis 2.24 reference describes the unity of man and woman:

24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

The point, perhaps, of all this is that original intentions meant the marriage bond to be indissoluble, as unbreakable as a blood relationship; the argument seems to be that Jesus replies that the male has no right to break the partnership, irregardless of legal considerations.  It also needs to be remembered that adultery--not the issue in question here--was traditionally punished by death (Leviticus 20.10), ending the marriage bond without recourse to divorce proceedings. It will be recalled that this was the situation warranting John the Baptist's criticism of Herodious  who used Roman law, to sever her union with Philip and to marry Herod Antipas.

One needs to be careful about reading too much in this Christianized discussion of the Law:

The evangelists, writing some 40–70 years after Jesus’ death, turned a negative attitude toward the Law (or the Jewish understanding of it) into the touchstone of Christian identity. This tendency makes for considerable confusion when one tries to reconstruct the views of the historical Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth, living and working in a predominantly Jewish environment, very likely had his own views on the correct interpretation of Torah, and these views may well have differed from those of his contemporaries. Argument about the Law between Jews was and is a timeless Jewish occupation: controversy implies inclusion. Transposed to a gentile context, however, argument can seem like repudiation.

Thus Mark’s Jesus turns an unexceptional observation (people are morally defiled by what they do or say, not by what they eat, Mark 7.15–23) into a repudiation of the Law regarding kosher food ("Thus he declared all foods clean"; Mark 7.19). John’s Jesus condemns his Jewish audience as sons of the lower cosmos and children of the devil (John 8): the Law, characterized throughout as that "of Moses" is, implicitly, not "of God," from whom comes grace, peace, and the Son (John 1.16; John 7.19–24). In his Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s Jesus presents his intensification of Torah ethics as if in contradistinction to Torah and Jewish tradition ("You have heard it said … but I say"; Matthew 5). Luke, although retaining the theme of Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus both in his Gospel and in Acts, nonetheless wishes to present the new movement as continuous with a Jewish view of biblical revelation. Consequently he edits out or softens many of Mark’s anti-Law statements. And all the Gospels, no matter how strong their individual polemic against Jews and Judaism (See Anti-Semitism), and hence the Law, still present a Jesus who worships at synagogue on the Sabbath, observes Temple sacrifice, pilgrimage holidays, and Passover rituals, and whose followers, honoring the Sabbath, come to his tomb only on the Sunday after his death (Oxford Companion).

In private, the disciples follow-up and re-ask the question relative to the laws of divorce; this time, Jesus tells them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."  In Palestine, a woman was not allowed to divorce her husband. Jesus here does not contradict the existing Law of Moses.

Probably no scene in the Gospels has been more lifted out of context to illustrate the gentleness of Jesus than the one of him blessing children. Jesus does not depart from the business at hand; he is still teaching about the Kingdom of God.   Using the children, he insists that one must receive the Kingdom of God as would a child, and "To receive the kingdom as a child is to depend in trustful simplicity on what God offers." Children accept gifts to them without thought of desert or merit on their part.

Jesus, leaving on a journey, is next confronted by a young rich man who wants to know what he can do to inherit eternal life or God's Kingdom? He is asked, what did Moses say do?  When he replies that he has kept Moses' laws, then he is challenged to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor.  This, the young man cannot do.   Jesus uses the occasions to instruct his disciples about what it means to serve God's Kingdom:

29 Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, 30 who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. 31 But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."

For some, this promise seems rash and misses the point of the suffering and often lack of material things experienced by people who follow the way of Jesus.  What, however, the Christian inherits is God's spiritual Kingdom now--all the houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, and children, and fields that are a part of this kingdom.  But they also inherit persecutions now and in the age to come eternal life.  Nowhere does Jesus promise anyone that they are to receive any more materially than anyone else simply because they follow him.

Between childhood and adulthood, simplicity is lost; spiritual satisfaction competes with material gain. This makes the above story of the rich young man complimentary to the blessing the children episode.  God's gift is a free gift, but the act of accepting the gift may be costly in its consequences. 

We see here, too, obsequiousness, on the part of the young man who is rebuked by Jesus for addressing him as "Good teacher."  Only God is absolutely good; we have no indication the young man here meant anything about the divinity of Jesus. When Jesus reminds this man of the law, he reports all too easily that he has kept it, indicating a lack of understanding of the full requirements of these laws.  Jesus immediately pinpoints exactly what is keeping this young man from completing his request for eternal life. As the young man goes away sorrowful, Jesus remarks on a Proverb of how difficult it is for a camel to go through a needle's eye, applying this to the difficulty the young man has encountered.  With God, of course, all things are possible by definition.

Jesus now turns again to what is foremost on his mind: this is the third conversation about what awaited him in the Passover celebration.

32 They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, 33 saying, "See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; 34 they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again."

The reader will note that the term Son of Man is used here; he is to be handed over to the Jews (chief priests and scribes) and condemned, then handed over to the Gentiles, who will kill him; he will be resurrected after three days. It should be noted that the ideas of God-man and resurrection are not concepts unique to the Jews or to Jesus at this point.  Jesus has already called attention to himself, although it would seem he attempted to prevent this, by the gatherings and healings; he has been beset by Pharisees and Sadducees relative to his purity in observing the law; additionally, his following has attracted the suspicion of Roman rulers.  A concept familiar at this time, one may wish to reflect upon, is that a God-man is someone, already seen in Alexander the Great, who restores state.  Jesus has gone about pronouncing the Kingdom of God.

The disciples, obvious in their next request, have not understood what Jesus' instructions have meant all along.  In the Messianic kingdom, James and John request to sit in favored places. In the first place, it's not clear that James and John have accepted the invisible nature of God's Kingdom:

38 But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" 39 They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."

While they have already been instructed about the inevitable requirement of suffering, they have ignored the essential requirement that one inheriting the Kingdom of God now does so in this world by taking on its mortal burdens.  Furthermore, James, who is according to Acts 12.2 killed with the sword, and John, who is exiled to Patmos, unaware of what their own futures will require from them. Jesus points to the invisible rather than earthly kingdom when he says "to sit at my right hand or my left is not mine to grant."  Is the implication that this honor is to be achieved by life which the disciples have not yet lived? And would not Jesus gone on to have reminded them of earlier teaching such as the one about who would be the wife honored to sit by her husband in heaven?  It's clear the disciples have as much difficulty understanding Jesus' teaching as the crowds. This section ends with the sobering reminder of Jesus' example as servant: "45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

It's interesting that the last healing Mark chooses to record is that of Bartimaeus in Jericho, a blind beggar, who acknowledges him as Son of David:

As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" 48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Mark reports Jesus as standing very still upon being addressed in this manner; Jesus next responds by having the disciples call Bartimaeus over to him. Bartimaeus springs up, when asks what he wants, replies, "my sight," and is told by Jesus his faith has made him well. Could Bartimaeus have known Isaiah 61.1?

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

because the Lord has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

and the day of vengeance of our God;

to comfort all who mourn;

3 to provide for those who mourn in Zion—

to give them a garland instead of ashes,

the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

They will be called oaks of righteousness,

the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

4 They shall build up the ancient ruins,

they shall raise up the former devastations;

they shall repair the ruined cities,

the devastations of many generations.

 

This time, the one healed is not forbidden to proclaim what has happened.  This comes at the point of entry into Jerusalem for the Passover celebration.

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Last modified: October 27, 2005