Straight to the Heart of Mark

60 bite-sized insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857216434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblischer Kommentar

The ancient writers tell us that Mark wrote down the words of Peter as he described what it was like to follow Jesus around Galilee and Judea. That's why Mark's gospel is so fast-paced and action-packed. He wants us to experience the same highs and lows as Peter in his journey of discovery. Through Mark's gospel, we are able to discover Jesus for ourselves. Mark invites us to step into the story.

God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you read it and let it change your life. If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore's devotional commentaries. Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship. Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible. Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

Part One:

The Messiah’s Story

(Mark 1:1–7:23)

Journey’s End (1:1–8)

The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.

(Mark 1:1)

There is no Christmas in Mark’s gospel. There is no stable. There are no angel choirs. There are no shepherds or wise men. Mark covers in his first 13 verses what it takes Matthew 76 verses and Luke 182 verses to say. Mark has no time to beat around the bush. He takes us straight to the point where Peter came face to face with the adult Jesus.

There is a reason for this. Matthew wrote for Jewish readers and needed to explain how Jesus fitted into the Jewish story. He begins with historical background because he needs to prove that Jesus is the much-prophesied Jewish Messiah. Similarly Luke wrote for Gentile readers and he needed to explain how a man who was crucified as a criminal could be the Saviour of the world. He locates the life of Jesus in the history of the pagan world. But Mark is different. He isn’t writing about the Jewish story or the Gentile story. He is writing about one man’s encounter with the story of Jesus and about what made him step into the story.¹ He does not mention the early life of Jesus because Peter was not there. He takes us straight to the moment where their two stories collided.

Jesus does not appear in these opening eight verses. Mark builds anticipation for the moment when he appears in verse 9. In comparison to the other gospel writers, Mark tells us very little about what John the Baptist said. Instead he fills our senses with vivid detail so that we can sense how Peter felt at the beginning of his journey. Eyewitness detail is a major feature of Mark’s gospel. Jesus doesn’t just go to sleep in a boat; he goes to sleep in a boat on a cushion (4:38). Jesus doesn’t just make people sit down to eat; he makes them sit down on the green grass (6:39). A blind man doesn’t just leap up to talk to Jesus; he throws his cloak aside in his eagerness to talk to him (10:50). Mark sets the scene with vivid detail in these opening verses. He describes the clothing and the diet of a strange preacher who appeared in the wilderness.² He describes the crowds that gathered to him at the River Jordan. He tells us little about what John actually said.³ What matters more is that we feel we are there at the start of Peter’s journey.

Mark invites us to participate in Peter’s confusion. He quotes far less from the Old Testament than Matthew does because his Roman readers are largely unfamiliar with the Jewish Scriptures, but he begins his gospel with two Old Testament quotations in order to convey to us just how confused first-century Jews were about what to expect from their Messiah. In verse 2, Mark quotes from Malachi 3:1, where God says “I will send my messenger before me to prepare the way for me,” but note the way Mark changes the words so that it hints at the divinity of the Messiah: “I will send my messenger before you to prepare the way for you”. In verse 3, he quotes from Isaiah 40:3, which says this messenger will prepare “a highway for our God,” but he changes the words again: the messenger will “make straight paths for him”. Mark therefore invites us to share in the crowd’s confusion. How could the Scriptures prophesy that the Messiah would be a man and yet be God?

Mark invites us to participate in Peter’s offence. Southerners from Judea looked down on Galilean northerners such as Peter. When he heard that swarms of Judeans had adopted John the Baptist as their own, it did not endear him to the Galilean fisherman.⁴ Worse still was John’s message. Non-Jews who wanted to embrace the God of Israel needed to be baptised in water as a confession that they were dirty Gentiles who needed a bath before they could become part of God’s holy people. John’s message was therefore outrageous. He told the Jews that their ethnicity could never save them; it could only lull them into a dangerous sense of spiritual pride.⁵ They needed to humble themselves by accepting that they were just as spiritually unclean as any pagan. The Greek word for repentance means a change of mind, which is why in verse 4 it is repentance, rather than simply confession of sin, which brings forgiveness. John told them to confess their sins, to repent of their spiritual pride and to prepare their hearts for the arrival of the Messiah by being baptised in the River Jordan. He called them to admit that they were just as sinful as people from any other nation.

Mark invites us to participate in Peter’s excitement. He summarises John the Baptist’s message in two short verses: The Messiah is so much greater than the Old Testament prophets that John is not even worthy to take off his shoes like a common slave, and the Messiah will fulfil the great promise of the Old Testament by baptising with the Holy Spirit those who follow him.⁶ Whoever this Messiah might be and however offensive his message, Peter could see he was worth giving up everything to follow.

Mark therefore begins his gospel with a vivid description of how it felt to live in Galilee in the weeks leading up to the start of Jesus’ public ministry. He ignores the Christmas story because he wants to take us on the same journey of discovery as the crowd. Jesus told Peter to follow him and now Mark tells us to walk with Peter.

But Mark is too excited about the journey to leave us in the dark completely. He is like a TV newsreader who blurts out the final score of the big match, even though he knows his viewers have not yet had a chance to watch the game. He reveals the end of Peter’s journey in the very first verse of his gospel. Peter discovered that Jesus is the long-awaited Christ or Messiah,⁷ and that he is therefore the Son of God. Mark uses the Greek word euangelion (the word used by Roman emperors when they claimed that their rule was gospel or good news for the world) in order to tell us that what Peter and his friends discovered was the ultimate Gospel.⁸ Mark cannot resist encouraging us as we set out on the same journey of discovery as Peter by telling us what amazing treasure we will find at journey’s end.

Can you sense Mark’s excitement as he prepares us for the moment when the Messiah finally walks onto the stage of history? Can you feel the anticipation in these first eight verses as he builds up to the climactic moment in verse 9? Then come alongside Peter and walk with him in the early days. Mark is inviting you to step into the story.

A Single Step (1:9–20)

He saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said.

(Mark 1:16–17)

An ancient Chinese proverb tells us that “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”¹ But what the Chinese proverb fails to tell us is that the first step is usually the hardest. That was certainly the case for Peter when Jesus appeared on the beach and shouted to him in his fishing boat that it was time to set out with him on a journey. Peter had plenty of reasons to refuse when Jesus commanded him to “Come, follow me.”

Mark goes out of his way to emphasise Peter’s ignorance of Jesus in these verses. Mark wants us to grasp that we already know as much about Jesus as Peter did at the start of his journey. He does not even mention Peter until the moment when Jesus calls him to take a first step of faith in him. Nothing should stop us from taking a similar first step of faith in Jesus too.

In verses 9–11, Mark tells us about the rumours Peter heard from the River Jordan. When Jesus obeyed John’s call to be baptised, something happened that set him apart from the crowds of people who were baptised with him. The divine voice rang out from heaven and proclaimed that the carpenter from Nazareth was in fact God’s own Son.² When the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form and anointed him to begin his public ministry, God the Father, Son and Spirit testified together with one clear voice to the Jewish nation that the Messiah had finally come. Peter’s first step on the journey with Jesus was difficult, but he was helped by the rumours he heard from the River Jordan. Faith means acting upon what we hear.

Mark’s original Roman readers were used to hearing their emperors claim to be sons of the gods. We will discover later, in 15:39, that one of the most natural ways for a Roman to express conversion from paganism to Christianity was to exclaim that “Surely this man was the Son of God!” But to the Jewish ear this announcement meant something more. It meant that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. The Lord had promised King David that one of his descendants would be known as “the son of God” and would rule on the throne of Israel forever.³ This event struck Peter so profoundly that he quotes these words in 2 Peter 1:16, reminding his readers that “We did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty.” Peter took a first step of faith because he believed the eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ baptism. So can we.⁴

In verses 12–13, Mark tells us what happened next. No sooner had Jesus been revealed as the Messiah than the Holy Spirit drove him away from the crowds to endure forty days of testing in the desert.⁵ For a Jew like Peter, the words forty and desert meant only one thing. Jesus had re-enacted the forty years which the Israelites spent in the desert after their exodus from Egypt but, where they had succumbed to temptation and sinned, he had passed the test with flying colours.⁶ Mark does not give us any detail about how Satan tempted Jesus, because Peter was not there to hear it.⁷ Peter responded to faith in an incomplete story. So must we.

In verses 14–15, Mark tells us that Peter began to understand what it meant for Jesus to be Israel’s Messiah. After John was imprisoned for daring to question King Herod’s actions, Jesus started preaching all around Galilee that “The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” ⁸ Mark uses the Greek word euangelion, or gospel, in both verses and he uses the word kerusso, or to herald, in verse 14 because these were the words used by the Roman imperial machine. He tells us that Jesus proclaimed he was a greater King than Caesar’s sinful governor Herod, and that he told the Jewish nation it was time for them to step into God’s great story. Jesus demonstrated his Kingdom rule as well as preaching it – turning water into wine, healing many people and giving Peter a miraculous catch of fish before he called him to follow him (Luke 5:1–11; John 2:1–12; 4:46–54).⁹ Mark omits this detail in order to take us swiftly to the moment when Jesus commanded Peter to step into his story and when Peter acted at once on the evidence he had seen.¹⁰ Immediately he left his fishing nets behind and followed Jesus.

When Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, he exclaimed in triumph that “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind.” Mark tells us that for Peter it was the same. In verses 16–20, he emphasises that Peter was a nobody. He calls him by his original name Simon, even though John 1:42 tells us that by this time Jesus had already renamed him Peter, which means Roc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Straight to the Heart Series
• Introduction: Step into the Story
• PART ONE: THE MESSIAH’S STORY
• PART TWO: THE WORLD’S STORY
• PART THREE: THE COSTLY STORY
• PART FOUR: THE SURPRISING STORY
• PART FIVE: THE UNFINISHED STORY
• Conclusion: Step into the Story