Christ in Mark

Mark gives no genealogy and no nativity; he opens with a single headline that is itself the whole confession of the book - The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God (v. 1). From the first line the reader is told who Jesus is and that His coming is good news. John cries in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord (v. 3), and points beyond himself to a mightier One who shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost (v. 8). At the Jordan the text gives, togethe…

Mark 2 is a chain of scenes in which the authority of Jesus presses against the limits everyone assumed, and in each one the Gospel text itself is the Christ Connection. Four men tear open a roof and lower a paralyzed friend before Him, and His first word is not about the man’s legs but his soul: Son, thy sins be forgiven thee (v. 5). The scribes reason exactly right - who can forgive sins but God only? (v. 7) - and instead of correcting their theology Jesus accepts its pr…

Mark 3 sets the mercy of Jesus and the opposition it provokes side by side in the sharpest terms. In the synagogue He restores a withered hand on the sabbath, and the same question He puts to His watchers - Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? (v. 4) - lays bare what is at stake: He is the One Lord also of the sabbath (Mark 2:28), and the day was made for doing good and saving life. He looks round on them with anger, being g…

Mark 4 sets the word of the kingdom and the Lord of the kingdom side by side. Jesus teaches from a boat that a sower went out to sow (v. 3), and the seed He scatters is named plainly: the sower soweth the word (v. 14). The same seed meets four kinds of ground - the trodden path, the stony place, the thorns, and the good ground that did yield fruit… some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred (v. 8). The Sower scattering the word reads, in the wider witness, as…

Mark gathers three hopeless cases into one chapter to show a single thing: there is no bondage, no sickness, and no death that the word of Jesus cannot reach. A man lives among the tombs so violent that no man could bind him, no, not with chains (v. 3), and a legion of unclean spirits cannot stand before Him - What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? (v. 7) - until the man sits clothed, and in his right mind (v. 15) and is sent home to tell&hellip…

Mark 6 sets the rejection of Jesus beside His mercy, and in both the Gospel text is itself the portrait of who He is. He comes to His own town and is despised - Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?… And he could there do no mighty work… because of their unbelief (vv. 3, 5-6) - the same word later written plainly of Him: He came unto his own, and his own received him not (John 1:11). He calls the Twelve and sends them out with His own authority over unc…

Mark 7 moves from the lips to the heart, and in every scene the Gospel text is itself the portrait of who Jesus is. When the Pharisees fault His disciples for unwashen hands, He answers from Isaiah: This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men (vv. 6-7) - the same diagnosis the prophet gave (Isa. 29:13), and the very thing He came to cure, for true worship must b…

Mark 8 is the turning point of the whole Gospel, and it turns on a single question Jesus asks His own: But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ (vv. 29). Everything before it has shown what Jesus does; everything after it moves toward the cross. The chapter opens with the Shepherd feeding a hungry crowd again - I have compassion on the multitude (v. 2) - taking seven loaves, giving thanks, and breaking them until four thousand…

Six days after Jesus first told His followers plainly that the Son of man must suffer and be killed, He takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain, and for a moment the curtain is drawn back: his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them (v. 3). This is not glory borrowed or newly given but glory unveiled - the majesty an eyewitness on this very mountain would later describe: we… were eyewitnesses of his majesty&he…

Mark 10 is the chapter where the road to the cross and the meaning of the cross are spoken plainly, and its center is one of the most load-bearing sentences in all of Scripture: For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many (v. 45). Here the King defines His own kingship as service, and His own death as a ransom - the price paid to set captives free. The New Testament reaches for the same word and the same s…

Mark 11 is the day the King comes to His city, and every scene is a portrait of who He is. He rides in on a colt whereon never man sat while the crowds cry Hosanna; Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord (vv. 7-9) - the very words of Psalm 118:25-26, and the very picture of Zechariah’s promised king, lowly, and riding upon an ass (Zech. 9:9). The long-awaited Son of David enters not on a war-horse but on a borrowed beast, and the first thing He does is go to the…

Mark 12 is the Gospel itself preaching Christ, and so the Christ Connection runs the length of the chapter. Cornered in the temple in His last days, Jesus tells the parable of the wicked husbandmen, and it is a prophecy of His own death: the vineyard’s owner sends servant after servant - the prophets - who are beaten and killed, and at last one son, his wellbeloved , of whom the tenants say, This is the heir; come, let us kill him (vv. 6-7); and they took him, and killed h…

Mark 13 is the longest single block of Jesus’ teaching in Mark, and from first verse to last it is His own voice - so the chapter does not so much point to Christ as let Him speak. He opens by foretelling that the temple, the proudest building His people knew, will be thrown down stone by stone (v. 2), and when the disciples ask when… and what shall be the sign? (v. 4) He answers not with a date but with a long charge to stay awake. He warns that many shall come in…

Mark 14 is the threshold of the cross, and here the Gospel text simply is the Christ Connection. A woman pours costly spikenard over His head, and He reads it as more than she may have known: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying (v. 8), and gives her a memorial that outlasts every monument - wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her (v. 9). At the Passover ta…

Mark 15 is the chapter the whole Gospel has been moving toward, and the cross does not merely tell the Christ Connection - it is the Christ Connection. Pilate asks, Art thou the King of the Jews? , and Jesus answers, Thou sayest it (v. 2); then He is silent under accusation so that Pilate marvelled (v. 5), like the servant who opened not his mouth… as a lamb to the slaughter (Isa. 53:7). The guilty man Barabbas is released and the innocent One handed over (vv. 6-15)…

Mark 16 is where the whole Gospel arrives, and the empty tomb does not merely tell the Christ Connection - it is the Christ Connection. The women come at sunrise to anoint a body and find the stone rolled away and a young man in white who says the sentence the world has never recovered from: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him (v. 6). The same Jesus who died under the centurion’s eyes (15:39) and…