Mark

Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible

William C. Placher

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781611640724
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

The volumes in Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible from Westminster John Knox Press offer a fresh and invigorating approach to all the books of the Bible. Building on a wide range of sources from biblical studies, the history of theology, the church's liturgical and musical traditions, contemporary culture, and the Christian tradition, noted scholars focus less on traditional historical and literary angles in favor of a theologically focused commentary that considers the contemporary relevance of the texts. This series is an invaluable resource for those who want to probe beyond the backgrounds and words of biblical texts to their deep theological and ethical meanings for the church today.

1:1–1:13
Good News!

1:1
Title

George Buttrick, the great Harvard teacher of preachers, used to say that every preacher, just before entering the pulpit, should think, “I have wonderful news to tell these people.” So Mark begins with “good news”—the most natural translation of the word we usually render “gospel.”

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus the anointed one, Son of God” (my trans.)—whether this is the title or the first line of what follows (a matter debated among scholars), every word counts, and most of what follows is already here summarized.

“Beginning” contains a suggestive ambiguity and a dramatic implicit reference. The ambiguity: At an obvious level, “beginning” refers to the fact that this sentence is the first of the story that will follow. But this opening also serves, formally or informally, as the title of the whole book, so this first word invites us to think that the whole story that follows is a beginning. Indeed, when we get to the last sentence, it will turn out that Mark really has no ending: it opens to the future, challenging its audience to continue the story. A book with “beginning” in its title warns us right at the start not to expect closure at the end.

The implicit reference: Mark’s first audience was familiar with a book that started with archē (beginning)—Genesis, the first book of the Torah, in its Greek translation. Starting another book that way suggests a comparison between this story of a recently crucified teacher and the story of God’s creation of the whole universe, the beginning of God’s sacred Word. History, creation itself, is beginning again. Can what follows possibly be that important? So Mark claims.

Euangelion—“good news” or “gospel”—did not refer to just any sort of good news. “Tomorrow will be sunny,” or even, “The cancer does not seem to have spread,” would not have counted. Most uses in classical Greek refer to the news of a military victory; one scholar even proposes that the most literal translation would be “good news of victory from the battlefield.”¹

The Septuagint translation of Isaiah uses the root euangel [phonetic, evangel] to offer a different image of good news as announcing peace and salvation:

How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,

who brings euangelion, who announces salvation.

(Isa. 52:7)

It is from this prophet that Mark quotes:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring euangelion to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners.

(Isa. 61:1)

Here “gospel” is good news not just of victory but of victory’s hoped-for fruits: peace and an end to oppression. Mark takes that path even further. The contemporary peace activist Ched Myers writes, “The ‘good news’ of Mark does not herald yet another victory by Rome’s armies; it is a declaration of war upon the political culture of the empire.”² This story will describe a different kind of victory. Thiswarrior Jesus is a servant whose weapon is love and whose victory lies on the other side of a cross; his story will be good news very different from that proclaimed by imperial heralds—or by presidents or hedge-fund managers or fan magazines telling about the stars—and will thereby raise questions about the ultimate importance of those other forms of news.

Already in Paul’s earliest known letter, 1 Thessalonians, written within twenty years of Jesus’ death, Paul used euangelion as if it were the natural term for the basic Christian message (see for instance 1 Thess. 2:2 or 3:2—six times in all in a very short letter). Christians must have been using the word in that sense very early indeed. Mark, however, seems to have been the first to use euangelion as the name of a book, a usage not picked up by what we call the other “Gospels” and indeed so far as we know not used in a generic sense (“four Gospels”) until the middle of the second century.³ We take the term for granted and lose the surprise and puzzle it might have occasioned among Mark’s first listeners/readers at the beginning of a book. “Gospel” was one of Mark’s favorite words (1:1, 14, 15; 8:35; 10:29; 13:10; 14:9) and for him captured what he wanted to say—he had wonderful news to tell, news of a kind, he was signaling his readers, that no previous form of writing could appropriately convey.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

—Romans 1:16

His wonderful news was about Jesus. Listen to John Wesley’s definition: “The gospel (that is, good tidings, good news for guilty, helpless sinners), in the largest sense of the word, means the whole revelation made to men by Jesus Christ; and sometimes the whole account of what our Lord did and suffered while he tabernacled among men.”⁴ The good news is not abstract, not first of all about human beings in general or some particular type of human beings, but about one particular individual, identified by a name. The popular modern chorus “There’s Something about That Name,” written by Gloria and William Gaither, emphasizes the point by repeating “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” along with the titles “Master” and “Savior.”⁵

Indeed—the name matters, as a token of a particular person. Mark has nothing to say about his own authority, or some authenticating source from which he heard his good news. The authority of the story comes not from the person telling it but from the person about whom it is told. As Karl Barth wrote, the New Testament binds its message “strictly and indissolubly to this name … presenting it as the story of the bearer of this name. … Without this name it is left insecure and unprotected. It is exposed to the suspicion that it might be only a postulate, a pure speculation, a myth.”⁶ But no—there was this human being, who lived within the lifetime of some in Mark’s original audience, and the story, with all it implies, concerns him.

In the Christian “God with us” there is no question of any other source and object than that indicated by this name.

—Karl Barth

CD, IV /1:17.

This Jesus, Mark tells us, is the Christ, the Greek translation of the Hebrew mashiach, “Messiah” or “anointed one.” To a purely Gentile audience, the word would have meant merely “someone smeared with oil,”⁷ a puzzling word for such a significant context. By Mark’s time, Christians may have treated it just as part of Jesus’ name. But in ancient Israel kings (and also priests and prophets) were ritually anointed with oil, so in the first instance the anointed one was the king. As kings who should have served the Lord and the people too often failed to do so, however, the people’s hope turned to the future, to a king someday who would be what a king should be—a messiah. As the Jewish scholar Martin Buber explained, “The history of the kings is the history of the failure of he who has been anointed to realize the promise of his anointing. The rise of messianism—the belief in the anointed king who realizes the promise of his anointing—is to be understood only in this context.”⁸ Jews in Jesus’ time meant many different things by “Messiah,” but any who used the word hoped for a coming one who would transform the world—defeat the Romans or restore the Law or whatever, but anyway change everything.

Buber published those remarks, in an essay titled “Biblisches Führertum,” in Germany in 1933, when talk of biblical leadership implied a dramatic contrast with and criticism of Germany’s new “Leader.” But “Messiah,” properly understood, was always a critical term, with its implication that Israel’s actual anointed ones had failed to match the ideal of monarchy. To say that Jesus is the Messiah, then, meant at least two things. First, it indicates that we need to understand who Jesus was and is in a Jewish context. “Messiah” is a term from Jewish history. In Barth’s words, “The Word did not simply become any ‘flesh,’ any man humbled and suffering. It became Jewish flesh.”⁹ Given the tragic history of Christian anti-Semitism, this cannot be emphasized enough. Second, in the face of every kind of human leadership, reference to “Messiah” implies that something immensely better is possible, that we should not ultimately settle for what is only somewhat better.

The term thus poses problems. Jews, Buber said, cannot believe that the Messiah has come: “We know more deeply, more truly, that world history has not been turned upside down to its very foundations—that the world is not yet redeemed.”¹⁰ The identification of Jesus as Messiah already in this first line of the Gospel raises a difficult question for Christians: If the Messiah has indeed come in this man Jesus, why does the world not look different?

Jacques Derrida, Jew by tradition and postmodernist by faith, pushed the matter further. The Messiah, he said, has to be a critique of present imperfection; that is how the term functions—and therefore anyone who actually appears cannot really be the Messiah.¹¹ His paradox poses another challenge to a Christian reader of Mark. If this Jesus challenges earthly powers, how can those who follow him avoid becoming yet another earthly power? A radical Christian fighting for a change in government in Latin America once told one of his revolutionary comrades, “Of course, you understand that once you win and take control of the government, I will have to be opposed to you!” That does seem to be the logic of following a messiah—but can one responsibly have such a politics?

In most early manuscripts, though not some of the most ancient ones, Mark’s first line concludes, “Son of God.” Since the term unquestionably appears later in the text, it seems best to save discussion of it until then. Reflection on the first verse has already raised many issues. Can the good news about this Jesus really be as important as Mark claims? How can that be, given that the world does not seem to have changed much since he came? Dare Christians, inevitably creating their own sort of institution, claim to be his followers?

1:2–8
The Messenger

Verses 2–3 are not in fact “written in the prophet Isaiah”; Mark combines phrases from Isaiah 40:3, Exodus 23:20, and Malachi 3:1. It is unlikely that he just made a mistake. Here as elsewhere he is not much concerned about the details that might preoccupy a biblical literalist. He wants to set his story in the context of Israel’s history, and particularly not just one passage but the whole set of texts modern scholars call “Second Isaiah,” the most hopeful and universalistic of the prophets.

Second Isaiah, this great anonymous prophet, speaks tenderly, offering words of comfort to a people then in exile. Israel has already “received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins” (Isa. 40:2), and now they can indeed anticipate good ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• Series Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Why Mark? Why Now?
• 1:1–1:13: Good News!
• 1:14–3:6: Healing the Rejected Ones
• 3:7–6:13: Parables and Deeds of Power
• 6:14–8:26: The Inclusive Banquet
• 8:27–10:52: On the Way to Jerusalem
• 11:1–13:37: Challenge to Authority
• 14:1–15:47: Arrest, Torture, Death
• 16:1–8: Afterword
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects