These verses seem to mark the first decisive breach between Jesus and organized Judaism. If this is correct, it took place near the start of the ministry of Jesus, and is quite as marked and decisive in the synoptic gospels as it is in John. Jesus now moved away from those who had become his enemies, by a deliberate act of separation, and his disciples accepted the consequences of this separation by following him (7). Not only so, but big crowds poured down, not merely from Galilee now; from Edom in the south to Tyre in the north and Transjordan in the east (so possibly including Gentiles), they gathered to him, eager to be healed. It is as if the sabbath healing by Jesus in the synagogue was being vindicated by the common people, though official Judaism repudiated it. It is a marked biblical stress that in spiritual matters the plain judgment of the simple heart is a truer guide than the wrangling of the learned. What is hidden from the wise is revealed to mere babies (Matt. 11:25–26). For the generally favourable attitude to Jesus of the ochlos, the ‘crowd’, in Mark, see Minear. Yet, at the last, in Jerusalem, this very ‘crowd’ seems to have turned against him, when ‘stirred up’ by the chief priests (15:11).
9–10. There are several other references in the gospels to Jesus’ practice of sitting in a ship moored offshore, and preaching to the crowds on the beach, when ordinary means of reaching such large numbers had failed. It was only one of the instances in which it was proved that the prior life and training of his fisherfolk disciples was by no means wasted, though they had forsaken it to follow him. Frequently Jesus used their skill and strength to cross the sea by boat, although they had to learn that, even in the sphere where they felt most at home, Jesus was still Lord (cf. 4:41). There is at least one gospel reference to Peter being commanded by Jesus to ‘cast a hook’ and fish (Matt. 17:27), and one of the resurrection stories finds the disciples fishing under the direction of Jesus, this time using their nets (John 21:3). It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the skill of the disciples may often have supplied them all with a meal. God does not always meet our needs by supernatural miracles: that is the exception, not the rule. To sit in the boat on this occasion was a good idea, but it was not a miracle, and the boat itself was not miraculous but provided by a disciple, in a perfectly ‘natural’ way. Yet there were miracles in plenty in the context, in healings and exorcisms by Jesus, and indeed it was the crowds resulting from these miracles that led to the need for the boat.
11–12. Note the steady refusal of Jesus to accept demonic testimony to his person or work, though such testimony would have been irrefutable.1 The reason for this refusal is not given by Mark, but it seems reasonable to suppose that Jesus wanted others to find out who he was by listening to his words and by watching his deeds. This is made clear in his reply to the puzzled disciples of the imprisoned John, who were sent to ask bluntly whether Jesus was the Christ or not. ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard’ (Luke 7:22). Here were messianic signs in plenty; but it needed the eye of faith to interpret them.
But the scribes and Pharisees, who, of all others ought to have known from their close study of the Old Testament how to recognize the Messiah when he came, not only watched his mighty deeds unmoved; they actually attributed his expulsion of demons to demonic power (3:22). This was a deliberate distortion of the truth which called forth from Jesus the solemn warning as to the danger of such sin against the Holy Spirit, which, by its very nature, is unforgivable (3:29), since it has rejected in advance the only path to forgiveness provided by God.
Following this breach with the church of Israel, Jesus began to constitute his own church. He retired from the lakeside into the hill country of central Galilee (this is more probably the meaning of the Greek oros, rather than some one particular mountain near Capernaum),2 and spent a whole night in prayer (Luke 6:12) before selecting for special teaching and training twelve from out of the general company of his followers.3 Johnson acutely points out that Mark is not particularly concerned with church order, or with the later status of apostles: to Mark, the twelve are pattern disciples, to spread the good news.
14–15. The primary purpose of the appointment of the twelve was so that they should be continually in the company of their ‘rabbi’, who was at once teacher and leader of the group. They would thus receive both formal and informal instruction, and treasure and lay to heart his casual sayings, in the manner familiar from the disciples of Socrates and Confucius as well as from the common rabbinic practice of the time of Jesus and later. The secondary purpose was so that he might send them out as his own personal representatives, on missions for him. At this stage, their mission was defined as that of being heralds of the news of the establishment of God’s rule. By virtue of this, they had an authority, delegated to them by Jesus, to expel from human lives the demon forces that had hitherto ruled them (15).4
16–19. Mark’s list of the apostles contains more of the personal nicknames, naturally Aramaic,5 than do any of the lists in the other gospels. If, as suggested in the Introduction, even if his gospel is not directly Petrine, Mark depends directly upon early Palestinian tradition, this is very understandable. Simon (16) is to be Peter, or Cephas in Aramaic, ‘the rock’.6 James and John (17) are a hot-tempered pair; they are to be called Boanerges, translated by Mark as sons of thunder. Thaddaeus (18) is probably to be equated with the Lebbaeus of other lists, an equation specifically made in some manuscripts. It is in either case probably to be translated as ‘big-hearted’, though, if it is a nickname, the exact point made by the name (courage? intelligence?) is uncertain. Some, however, had equated this apostle with ‘Levi’, as Origen seems to have done, presumably on the basis of the similarity between ‘Levi’ and ‘Lebbaeus’: but this may be simply an attempt to settle the identity of the twelfth apostle. All lists are agreed on eleven of the names, though additional names are to be found in apocryphal and Jewish sources (Schweizer). Simon the Cananaean (18) would be better translated as ‘the Zealot’ (see BAGD) or ‘the activist’, following Luke 6:15. This also is more likely to be a nickname than to denote actual membership of the later Zealot party. If we translate the name as ‘the keen’, we can recapture some of the original pun as well as the sense of the word. Perhaps Cananaean is not so much a mistranslation of the presumed Aramaic original form qanān as a deliberate precaution against possible suspicions of treason. Mark’s Gospel was written early, and there was no certainty that it would not fall into the wrong hands. Other instances of similar caution in Mark’s wording will be mentioned below, in chapters 13 – 14. Likewise Iscariot (19) is at least as likely to mean ‘the dagger man’ (the ancient equivalent of the modern ‘gunman’) coming from the mixed Graeco-Latin word sikarios, as it is to mean ‘the man from Qeriyōth’ (meaning either ‘villages’ in general, or one specific place-name). Even if translated ‘knifeman’, it could be either a pure nickname, or a hint of direct political associations with the various extremist parties loosely grouped together under that name. For the suggestion that the name was sheqarya, ‘deceivers’, see under 14:10. Whether Thomas (‘The Twin’: see John 11:16) is a nickname or not, is quite uncertain: he may well have been so named from the circumstances of his birth.
Even if these last few instances are indeed to be understood as nicknames, however, there is no direct evidence that they were names conferred by Jesus, as the names ‘Peter’ and ‘Boanerges’ certainly were, according to Mark (verses 16 and 17), but there can be no doubt that they were the names used within the group, to judge from their later familiarity in the church. The Talmud contains many examples of what we would call today ‘surnames’ or ‘nicknames’, used to distinguish various rabbis who shared a common name. A ‘trade-name’ is for instance frequent (cf. 6:3 ‘the carpenter’, of Jesus), or a ‘place of origin’ (14:67 ‘the Nazarene’), or a parent’s name (6:3, ‘the son of Mary’): Jesus, after all, was a widely used name (see on 15:7), and even ‘Jesus, son of Joseph’ was not uncommon as a combination, even being found on a tomb.
In the choice of the disciples, there is an example of what can only be a mystery to the modern mind. Jesus chose at his own sovereign will, and those whom he chose responded to his call (13), so much is clear from Mark. But why choose this particular twelve? Or has this question any meaning when applied to God’s sovereign grace? It would be easy to say that Jesus chose those who had already proved themselves most responsive to his teaching, since he chose the twelve from among the larger number of those who were already his followers, and had therefore been to some extent already sifted and tested. It may even be said cautiously that the parable of the talents would tend to support this general line of argument. But this cannot totally plumb the mystery, for perfect divine foreknowledge (John 2:24–25) still chose Judas among the others (19). Perhaps it was because Jesus saw capacity even in Judas for response to divine truth, or perhaps the choice of Judas was like the handing to Judas of the morsel at the Last Supper, a token of love (although some would dispute this meaning: see Morris, NICNT, John, p. 627, note 27), that would either win him over or else condemn him. In his usual way, however, Mark does not concern himself with the abstract problem: he simply records the incontrovertible fact of the choice of these twelve by Jesus, stumbling-block though it may have been to the early church in certain instances. Indeed, so far from avoiding the difficulty, Mark underlines it: Judas Iscariot is described as who betrayed him. Mark does not mention the handing of the ‘sop’ to Judas at the supper, though he can hardly have been ignorant of it: it is his way to understate rather than overstate.
21. The consequence for Jesus of sonship of his heavenly Father was misunderstanding by his nearest and dearest upon earth: his family went out to seize him, believing him mad (verse 21). His own brothers apparently did not believe in him during this earthly ministry (John 7:5), although Acts 1:14 shows that afterwards some at least were numbered among the church, and Galatians 1:19 refers specifically to James, the brother of Jesus, as occupying high position at Jerusalem.
In 3:31, ‘his mother and his brothers’ seem to have tried to presume upon their ‘natural’ family relationship, and to have received a gentle rebuke from Jesus.7 When he said ‘a man’s foes will be those of his own household’ (see Matt. 10:36), he may well have been speaking from bitter experience. Why should his friends or relatives say (21), doubtless with rough kindness in spite of their obvious irritation, that he was beside himself (i.e. ‘out of his wits’)?8 What had made those who knew him best so convinced that he was mad, that they were even prepared if necessary to detain him by force, for his own protection? It was not, apparently, because of the content of his preaching, but because of its unexpected results; such numbers had come to hear or to be healed that set mealtimes were impossible (20). This, to them, was the last straw; like Peter when he heard of the cost to Jesus of the road to Jerusalem (8:32), they decided that they must save him from the consequences of his own vocation. Again, like Peter, they thought that they acted as his friends: but such friends were more dangerous to him than enemies. Like the disciples at the well of Samaria, they had no concept of the true food that sustained Jesus, the moment-by-moment obedience to the Father’s will (John 4:32–34).
22. Relatives and close friends might misunderstand Jesus; even his followers might be puzzled by him. But it was left to the theological commission of enquiry to misinterpret him deliberately.9 There is a calculated bitterness in their terse judgment which is lacking even in the rough words of his friends or relatives: there is a great difference between he is beside himself (21) and he is possessed by Beelzebul (the original form of the Hebrew ba’alzebûb [‘Lord of the flies’] probably a mocking alteration of ba’alzebû, meaning ‘Prince Baal’). The theological commission was less concerned with speaking the truth than with speaking cutting words. We may compare ‘He has a demon, and he is mad’ (John 10:20).
It is a strange paradox that in any times of religious revival or obvious working of God’s Spirit, it is often the religious leaders who oppose the work of God most strenuously, and seem to misunderstand it most wilfully. This is because every person’s danger of spiritual ‘stumbling’ over Christ comes through that which they take to be their strong point, in which they pride themselves. God, says Paul, traps the wise by their own wisdom (1 Cor. 1:19–21). The scribes in this passage are a living illustration of this truth: their venomous remark was not a sudden outburst of anger, but a sustained attitude.
These Jewish ecclesiastics could not deny that Jesus had indeed expelled demons. Yet, running counter to all common sense, as Jesus himself pointed out by a simple illustration (23–25), they attributed this good work to an evil agency. This would assume a dichotomy of evil, a civil war within the kingdom of darkness itself, which would not only be a practical impossibility, but also a theological absurdity (26). Prejudice, in its full sense of a prior conceived judgment, had blinded their eyes to what was at once obvious to simple souls.
23–26. Nevertheless, Jesus dealt graciously with them, in spite of their stubborn blindness. He first shows by parables the patent absurdity of their position in this assumption of a fatal division within the realm of evil, which would be tantamount to the suicide of Satan.10 The other two synoptists add that he also asked the relevant question as to what power was used by confessedly orthodox Jewish exorcists in performing a similar task with similar results; was that demonic power also? (See Matt. 12:27; Luke 11:19) We may note the casual reference in Mark to the one casting out demons in the name of Jesus, who was not a regular ‘follower’ of his (9:38), and the story of the sons of Sceva, the exorcists of Acts 19:14, as illustrations of the widespread nature of exorcism in first-century Judaism. Exorcism was by no means such a new or isolated phenomenon in Judaism that the scribes should misunderstand it so. What may have been new was the universal success with which Jesus employed it, in contrast to the occasional failure even of his own disciples (9:28),11 and of Sceva’s sons in Acts.
27. There was only one possible deduction; if Jesus did expel demons, it could only be because he was in possession of a power and authority stronger than that of Satan. So great a power, to any Jew, could only be the power of God (Luke 11:20). This in turnmeant that Satan’s reign of sin and death was over, and that God’s reign had already begun, in the hearts and minds of men whom Jesus had ransomed and redeemed from Satan’s power. Nor is there to be any triumphal return for Satan; the strong man has already been bound, as these exorcisms show.
28–30. This leads to one of the most solemn pronouncements and warnings in the whole of the New Testament, coupled, as often, with one of the greatest promises. There is forgiveness with God for every sin and blasphemy except one, which may be the deadly sin of which John speaks so cautiously in 1 John 5:16. This is the sin of the wilfully blind, who persistently refuse the illumination of the Spirit, oppose the Spirit’s work, and justify themselves in doing so by deliberately misrepresenting him. For such, there can be no forgiveness, for they have refused the only way of forgiveness that God has provided: indeed, they have slammed the door (verse 30). Anderson notes that the adjective ‘holy’ very rarely occurs as qualification of ‘Spirit’ in the sayings of Jesus as recorded in Mark, so that we may possibly have the vocabulary of a slightly later period being used here by Mark. But this is no proof that Jesus did not sometimes use it: otherwise, its later almost universal use would be quite inexplicable. Further, the usage is already found in the Old Testament: see Psalm 51:11. The question is purely linguistic, not theological.
Presumably this arrival of his mother and brothers is still to be seen in the context of verse 21, where his family was ready to restrain him by force, through a misunderstanding of the nature of his ministry. A similar total misunderstanding underlay the reaction of Peter in 8:32 to the news that the path of Messiahship involved suffering and death. The reason for the misunderstanding was the same in both cases: God’s thoughts and plans run contrary to all natural human inclinations (8:33).
There are still crowds coming to Jesus and he is still teaching them, in a systematic fashion, to judge from the verb sitting in verses 32 and 34, which to a Hebrew mind would imply a teaching relationship. Compare 4:1, where Jesus sits, as a rabbi might do, in a boat to teach the crowds. Preaching, on the other hand, seems usually to have been done while standing, to judge from the prophetic pattern of the Old Testament. It was the work of a herald, and the messages were usually much terser.
32. Your mother. Those who brought the message through the crowd to Jesus obviously felt that an external family relationship such as that of mother or brother constituted a valid prior claim on Jesus.12 There is even a note of mild rebuke in their words, a certainty that as soon as Jesus knows the true facts of the case, he will at once acknowledge the justice of the claim and interrupt his teaching to come out to them. But of such a claim, based on such a physical and natural relationship, the biblical Jesus shows himself utterly unaware. Even to Mary, this son of hers was a stranger, until she learned the nature of the new relationship which must now bind her to him. For, having first destroyed the initial false confidence with which his mother and brothers came, Jesus shows that there is indeed, in the doing of the will of God, a new and deeper confidence with which they may come, and which does allow such a claim to relationship (35). This new relationship is, however, spiritual and inward, not outward and ‘natural’, as was generally assumed by Israel in the time of Jesus, when they assumed that the Messiah belonged to them by right. The attitude of Mary and the brothers of Jesus is therefore only typical of the attitude of the whole nation: they confidently claimed a prior right to the kingdom of God because of their physical descent from Abraham (Matt. 3:9; John 8:39). To find that this is not so will be the great stumbling-block of the gospel.
But it cannot have been easy for one as loving as Jesus to say such stern words: they can be understood only in the light of the searching demands of the gospel (10:29), overriding all natural human relationships, however close.
35. There is only one condition for admission to this position of peculiar intimacy with Jesus; we must know and participate, as he did, in doing the will of God. It is a constant New Testament stress that mere knowledge of doctrine, even with intellectual assent and appraisal of its truth, is inadequate without acting on it (Jas 1:22). To that extent, the modern phrase ‘doing theology’ (rather than ‘studying theology’) contains a biblical truth: ‘good soil’ is that which produces a crop (4:8). Mere intellectual assent ultimately leads to our self-deception and downfall.
If we are to stress the Greek word palin, again, ‘a second time’, in this verse, it would mean, as in 3:7, a determined turning of his back by Jesus on those who misunderstood him, and so a fresh acceptance of his divine vocation.13 But while in 3:7 those on whom he turned his back then had been his enemies, here they were his own relatives and friends. The path of Jesus was to be a lonely path, as Hebrews 13:11–13 makes plain. He must suffer ‘outside the camp’ and be rejected by his society: but, as in Hebrews, so here, there were others who were prepared to risk the wrath of official Judaism and go out to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach.
Indeed, so great was the response that Jesus was forced to resort to what apparently became for him now a common mode of teaching.14 He taught, as we have seen, sitting in a boat, probably anchored in shallow water, while the listening crowds sat on the foreshore all around. He taught by using parables, or as we might say, ‘illustrations’, a system of instruction specifically designed to sift the wheat from the chaff among his hearers. Other teachers might rejoice when great crowds followed them, but not so Jesus; for he knew only too well the mixed motives of the human heart (John 2:25). Here is an unusual teacher; his parables are designed to test rather than to illuminate, and to test, not the intelligence, but the spiritual responsiveness of his hearers. Further, there is a sort of arithmetical progression in things spiritual. To one who already has something, more will be given (25), since spiritual insight into the meaning of one parable will lead to further insight into the meaning of other parables (13). Contrariwise, failure to understand will lead us further and further into the fog, until we are completely mystified (12). In this, as in all other spiritual matters, either we hear or we do not hear (verse 9). To see the spiritual truth (to hear) is the proof that we have received the illumination of that Holy Spirit who alone can open our spiritual eyes, blind by nature, to the truth of God.
2. The parable of the sower is not the first of the ‘illustrations’ used by Jesus as recounted in this gospel. The reply given to his critics in the Beelzebul controversy was specifically stated to be parabolic (3:23), and the reference to members of a bridal party, and to new wine in old bottles, had been equally obviously so (2:19–22). But this is the first sustained parable of which we have a full explanation given by Jesus himself to the disciples. It stands, in all three synoptic gospels, at the head of a series of parables, apparently corresponding to a definite pattern of teaching which Jesus used. Further, in a sense this parable is the key to all the other parables, for it deals with our reception of all of his teaching (4:13). There was of course nothing strange to the Hebrew mind in this method of instruction: the Old Testament contains examples of similar parables used for instruction (cf. Judg. 9:8–15). In fact this seems to have been one of the favourite forms in which the rabbis couched their teaching, to judge from the Palestinian Talmud.15 A good general rule of interpretation is to remember that a parable is normally designed to convey one central truth only. We should therefore not try to find a spiritual meaning in every fine point, recognizing that some details are only the ‘background’ of the parable. Otherwise, it would become an allegory, not a parable, and allegory has little place in the New Testament, and none at all in the teaching of Jesus.
3. It is very possible that the subject of this parable was suggested by the sight of an actual sower at work on the hillside above the lake. There is, however, no hint in the context as to the season of the year (compare the obvious connection between the injunction to look at the fields in John 4:35 with what the open-air congregation could actually see at the moment). Jesus taught, not in some cloistered rabbinic school, but in familiar everyday surroundings: and for this teaching, he used homely illustrations drawn directly from that life, for teaching divorced from daily life has no support in the example or word of Jesus. As Anderson points out, parables are not allegories: the story is always a possible true life situation. Obviously, this is why the crowds loved to listen to Jesus.
4–8. This parable deals with the problem that is greatest of all to the thoughtful mind: how is it that scribes and Pharisees can so misrepresent Jesus? And how is it that even his kindred and disciples can so totally fail to comprehend him? Why does not the hearing of the doctrine produce the same result in every heart? The answer, as given by Jesus himself, is that the operation of the divine word on the human heart is not automatic, and that, while the doctrine is unvarying, the nature of the response is dictated by the nature of the heart that receives it.
It is sometimes fashionable today for exegetes to blame the sower in the story for the poor harvest, and to point to the indiscriminate nature of the sowing as the reason; but to adopt this attitude is to misunderstand the whole purpose of the parable as well as to ignore a great theological truth. God sends rain on just and unjust alike (Matt. 5:45), and sends his word to all, whether they will hear or whether they will not hear (Ezek. 2:5). We are not called to praise or blame the sower for the choice of methods: the parable is concerned with the empiric fact of the seed falling on different sorts of ground. The hard heart, the shallow heart, the overcluttered heart, and the good heart, all are in fact present, whenever the word of God is preached. This does not merely refer to the initial preaching of the gospel or the initial response of faith, but to all subsequent preaching too. The whole of the Christian life is one of continual and progressive response to fresh spiritual revelation. This illustrates how appropriate it is that the parable of the sower should stand as the introduction to a long teaching passage, itself largely consisting of parables.
9. Let him hear: this cryptic phrase is a warning to the hearers that the parable requires thought and action in response, lest we dismiss it lightly without applying its truth to our own hearts. After all, that is what three groups of those described in the parable had done, and doubtless what the majority of the hearers of Jesus on this occasion would also do.
10. Simple the parable may be when the explanation is known, but it puzzled the disciples enough for them to seize the first opportunity, when they were alone with Jesus, to ask its meaning. Matthew 13:10 adds that they enquired wonderingly as to why he used the parabolic method of teaching at all. Mark does not record the question, but he records the answer in verse 12. It is plain that even the disciples found this parabolic method taxing. Yet only by the use of parables could there be that process of spiritual sifting that would be either eternally rewarding or eternally baffling, according to whether those who listened had ears to hear or not, that is to say, whether or not they earnestly desired to understand God’s ways. If their will was rightly directed, then intellect would present no problem (John 7:17).
11. The answer is given in solemn words, designed to make them realize how privileged was their position as disciples of Jesus, and it introduces some of the deepest theological mysteries of the whole New Testament. God had been pleased to reveal to this little group the ‘mystery of the kingdom’ still hidden from others. They alone could talk with Jesus face to face, and ask for explanations of what puzzled them, whereas to those outside, the only explanation would be by another parable, which will test them afresh. The judgment is written plain for those who hear and yet fail to appropriate: their capacity for apprehension and appropriation of spiritual truth steadily dwindles until it disappears. Contrariwise, the more of God’s revealed truth that we assimilate, the more our capacity for assimilating further truth will grow. Further, spiritual perception of God’s truth is perilous: it only condemns us unless we act upon it. Increased knowledge merely brings increased responsibility (Luke 12:48). God’s solemn choice of us is very far from favouritism, as indeed the history of Israel in the Old Testament makes plain.
12. Because spiritual truth is not a set of isolated intellectual propositions to be mastered, but a whole to be comprehended by that sudden flash of spiritual insight which is the revelation of the true nature of Jesus made to us by God (8:29), so, to those outside, all must be in parable, because it would be useless to teach them deep spiritual truths until they had mastered the elementary level. But in any parable there was enough to lead the thoughtful, questing soul on: as Jesus says in verse 20, those sown on the good soil would hear and receive the word, and would transmute that truth into life. In terms of the parable, they will bear a crop, although in varying degrees.
So that: there are several ways of explaining this verse. One way is by saying that in the Greek of the New Testament the particle hina, which should grammatically mean ‘in order that’ and should therefore express purpose, sometimes at least means ‘so that’ and merely expresses consequence.16 To translate in this way would remove a possible theological problem altogether. The second is to see the strong antithesis as an idiomatic but typical Hebraism, deliberately stating the position in a more extreme form than it really means: this would come to the same result as the grammatical solution suggested above. The third possibility is to see these stern words in their Old Testament context of Isaiah 6:9–10, where it is plain that it is Israel herself who has obstinately shut her eyes and ears against God’s pleading. Israel’s blind condition is therefore culpable and a judgment which they have brought upon themselves; and so it is inevitable that they should fail to understand. This is probably the best solution to adopt. We can add to this the theological truth that God has willed that those who so refuse to accept his truth shall remain blind: in this sense, it is all within his purpose, and we can justify the so that. The fourth possible explanation, which carries the third suggestion even further, is to take a strong theological position, and to say that God has been pleased to reveal his Son to some and not to others, and that what is revelation to some is therefore merely baffling to others. This introduces again the mystery of God’s choice, to which Jesus refers in verse 11. As usual, Mark does not attempt to explain the mystery: he merely records it.
13. Jesus gives warning that this parable is, as it were, a ‘parable of the parables’, for it describes in vivid picture language the reaction of his hearers to the whole system of parabolic teaching. It is not only the simplest of the parables; it is therefore the key to them all, as this verse says.
14. The parable of the sower owes its peculiar appropriateness to the fact that, at the very moment when he was telling the parable, Jesus was himself sowing the good seed of the word, and so, by telling the parable, he was actually exemplifying it, quite irrespective of whether a farmer sowing the fields was at the moment visible to the hearers or not, as some commentators assume.
15–20. There is another question to ask: are people really themselves to blame for the state of their own hearts? This is often denied today. But have they themselves, by multiple prior choices, determined whether their hearts are by now hard, or shallow, or overcrowded with cares and pleasures, or, instead, are ‘good soil’? This problem Scripture does not answer: the sole point made in the parable is that our hearts do in fact vary like this, and that this variation governs our response to the preached word. Although we are not specifically told to copy the seed sown on good soil, this is the obvious lesson, just as verse 9 is an invocation to us to hear.
21–25. It is probable that, in this particular instance, the primary lesson of the parable is not that stated elsewhere, as in ‘let your light so shine before men’ (Matt. 5:16). Perhaps the disciples felt as puzzled as any modern reader by his use of parables, and asked him, ‘Is this teaching in parables a deliberate obscuration of the truth to those outside?’ No, says Jesus, answering as usual on their level: who would light a lamp and then deliberately hide it? If truth is temporarily hidden in the parables, it is only so that it may be later revealed: the ultimate purpose of a parable is therefore not to conceal truth but to reveal it. It is because of this that we must take heed what you hear, remembering the double law of ‘spiritual wastage’ and ‘spiritual growth’ according to whether we respond or not. To those who learn, and then pass on to others what they have learned, more will be given (verses 24 and 25). This argument from ‘minor’ to ‘major’ is a favourite with the Jewish rabbis: if even we humans would not act so foolishly with a lamp which we have lit, how much less so would God?17 The same paradox is seen in the case of Jesus: God is at one and the same time both veiled in him, and revealed in him,18 but the ultimate purpose is that he may be revealed to all (13:26). The ‘messianic secret’ is only temporary.
The first (26–29), which has no parallel in the other gospels (Schweizer), is a further explanation of the parable of the sower, being at once an amplification of the law of spiritual growth, and also a parable in its own right. As such, it illustrates the nature of the reign of God in the human heart: it suggests the Christian doctrine of ‘growth in grace’ (2 Pet. 3:18); and it inculcates a continued trust in God, who will give a harvest in due time (Gal. 6:9 and Phil. 1:6). The sower’s daily sleeping and rising, and his ignorance as to how the seed grows, is only a part of the human ‘back-cloth’ of the parable and need not be spiritualized.19 The process of spiritual growth is spontaneous within the kingdom of God, but it remains a total mystery to natural humanity. For the parable of ‘fruitbearing’ compare John 15 (frequently), Luke 6:43–45 and Galatians 5:22–23, where in every case the spontaneity of the process, given the necessary spiritual conditions, is stressed. The last sentence (verse 29) seems to be a warning of the coming end of the age. When the time is ripe, God will intervene decisively in the affairs of humanity (Joel 3:13) and establish his rule, so that all may see. The metaphor of reaping, with its inevitable separation of wheat from weeds (Matt. 13:30), or grain from husks (Matt. 3:12), is a common picture in the Old Testament of the end of the age. It always involves the concept of judgment as well as salvation: chaff and weeds are burnt, wheat is saved. This is to be the final realization of the rule of God, which has begun already in Jesus.
30–32. The concept of the reign of God was still not clear to the disciples, who seem to have consistently looked for an establishment of the messianic kingdom in their lifetime; witness the selfish request of James and John (10:35), and the eager question asked of Jesus by the disciples even after the resurrection, as to whether now was to be the time for introducing the kingdom (Acts 1:6). The small beginnings and slow pervasive growth of the kingdom were beyond either the patience or the understanding of the disciples, but both were well illustrated by the growth of the tiny mustard seed known to them all. It is quite beside the point to quibble, and to say that ultimately the mustard seed produces only a large bush and not a tree: the point is that, from being a tiny seed, it grows until it far outstrips other similar plants. All Scripture must be read sensibly, and such quibbling would be rejected at once in the case of any other secular book.
The exact point of the reference to the birds of the air (32) is not clear: the words may be merely indicative of the size of the mustard plant, for small birds could indeed perch in such a bush:20 but this need not exhaust the meaning. Some commentators have seen in it a reference to the mixed nature of the church, but this seems to be over-exegesis, though ‘birds of the air’ does sometimes have a sinister meaning in the Bible. It is best to see the explanation as lying in the Old Testament passage from which this is a quotation (Dan. 4:14). There, the birds in the branches, like the animals below the boughs, are part of the ‘back-cloth’ of the vision seen by the prophet, and simply indicate the size and importance of the tree in question. Those who prefer to see a derogatory connotation in the word ‘birds’ will lean heavily on passages like Genesis 40:19, Joseph’s interpretation of the dream of the royal baker, but these are birds of prey, as specifically mentioned in the context. On the size of the mustard bush, see Schweizer for the story of the rabbi who climbed up a mustard bush in his garden, but this must have been exceptional.
Mark has given the above specimens of the parabolic teaching of Jesus (obviously not an exhaustive account), and he now suggests both a reason for the employment of parables, and also for the careful gradation in their use, in the words as they were able to hear it, or ‘to understand’. In the school of Christ, none may move to advanced lessons till they mastered the elementary studies. To the outsider there was always the stumbling-block of the form of the parable to be penetrated: only for his own disciples were there private explanations (verse 34), as Mark makes clear on several occasions.
With the series of parables closed, we enter a new section: here Jesus will be shown as Lord of nature. This is a new revelation in Mark, yet a very necessary one, if Jesus is God: for, both in the Law and in the Prophets, God is seen as Controller of the natural world and natural phenomena. The God who blew with an east wind and dried up the waters of the Red Sea before Israel his people (Exod. 14:21) is now about to make a path over the wind and waves of Gennesaret for the disciples, the new ‘people of God’. Already, Mark has shown Jesus as one who sees heaven opened, one upon whom the Spirit rests, who is responsive to the Spirit’s guidance, who enjoys angelic ministry, and who receives the testimony of demons to his divine nature. Jesus in Mark preaches and teaches with a new ring of authority: he heals the sick, expels demons and forgives sins. Now, only the one who had initially created the wind and sea in the first place would dare to rebuke them so (verse 39): their instant obedience shows his full deity as Creator as well as Redeemer. The wondering question of his disciples in verse 41 shows that they realized in part at least the implications of his action here. It is significant that no ‘nature miracles’ are recorded in Mark as having been performed by the apostles, although (as Anderson well points out) Mark would not have distinguished nature miracles sharply from healings and exorcisms, as we might do today. Apart from calming storms (here and 6:51), Mark records Jesus as multiplying loaves (6:41 and 8:6) and withering a fig tree (11:20): he therefore accepts completely the power of Jesus over the natural world, as Son of God.
36. Mark is the only gospel that tells us of the other boats being with Jesus here: the calming of the storm therefore becomes a miracle of mercy on a wider scale than the mere saving from drowning of a boatload of frightened disciples. We may perhaps compare the closing words of Jonah, ‘and also much cattle’ (Jon. 4:11), with its undertone of the infinite mercy of God. Of course, the detail of the other boats may simply be a small irrelevant reminiscence included by the matter-of-fact Mark, which assures us of the historicity of the event.
37–39. The voyage across the lake had been undertaken at the express suggestion of Jesus, in unquestioning faith and obedience. This, for the disciples, made the coming of the storm all the harder to understand, and the relaxed attitude of Jesus quite inexplicable to them. There is more than a hint of reproach in their words, Teacher, do you not care if we perish? (38)21 Why had he allowed them to enter such a situation? Jonah’s storm, after all, had been a punishment for disobedience (Jon. 1:4), but they had been obedient: no wonder that they felt aggrieved at what had happened to them.
The Lord’s sleep did not only show his very natural weariness: it also showed his tranquil faith (verse 38). Faith and fear are mutual exclusives in the Bible: it was because of lack of faith that the disciples feared that they were about to drown (verse 40), and so it was for lack of faith that they were rebuked. No command is more often reiterated in the Bible than the simple ‘Do not fear’ (see Exod. 14:13; 20:20, etc.).
40–41. In spite of their lack of faith, Jesus calmed the storm with a word. But the disciples, inconsequentially, still feared;22 a friendly, familiar, human Jesus they wanted, but not a supernatural Son of God. Their reaction at the mount of transfiguration (9:6), and even at the resurrection (16:8), was to be the same: compare Revelation 1:17.
After the section of teaching in parables, there follow some miracles of healing, of which the first is the healing of the ‘demonized’ man in the territory of Gerasa, or Gergesa or Gadara, with other MSS. The difficulty is that Gerasa was forty miles from the lake, and Gadara was only six miles away, but with a deep gorge in between. Mark does not say that the miracle took place in any of these towns, however, but only in the general area where they were situated. The manuscripts are confused as to the place name, but this is no reason to accuse Mark himself of lack of knowledge of Palestinian geography (Schweizer), just because his copyists were ignorant of it. Jesus had expelled demons often before: there had been a first specific instance already mentioned (1:26) followed by a general campaign (1:32), and expulsion of demons was a general power entrusted to the apostles (3:15), as surely as was the task of heralding the news. But this particular demon-expulsion has several peculiar features, which merit its inclusion here. For this was a man long ‘under treatment’ (like the woman suffering from a haemorrhage, mentioned in verse 25). It was in the failure of all human methods that Jesus acted decisively. The medical treatment given to this man was that commonly still used in many parts of the world today: he was loaded with chains, in a vain attempt to curb his inner turmoil by outward restraint. Not surprisingly, this proved quite futile (4). It was also probably part of his ‘treatment’ to drive him away from inhabited areas, to find in graveyards on desolate hillsides his ‘isolation block’. But isolation, whether self-chosen or enforced by others (as in the case of lepers), meant only that the destructive force of evil, instead of turning outwards in outbreaks of violence, vented itself on the patient, in acts of senseless self-torture, as stated here (5).
6–8. It is strange that the insight of evil into the nature of Jesus should be so clear and instantaneous, while ordinary people were so slow to see his godhead.23 Such truths, as James tells us, ‘even the demons believe – and shudder’ (Jas 2:19), because for them these truths are not merely abstract principles, but forces with which to reckon. The demons knew Jesus at once, for fear, as well as love, sharpens the eyes. They acknowledged the status of Jesus all unwillingly, confessing at once the vast gulf that existed between them, and showing the searing effect that good has on evil. A better reply to the Pharisaical accusation that the Holy Spirit, which rested on Jesus, and the spirit of evil were fundamentally one spirit (3:22, a view not unknown in some Eastern religions), could hardly be found: here was evil itself refusing to acknowledge Jesus as in any way akin to itself. It is interesting how often in the gospels the demons themselves take the initiative and react violently to the very presence of Jesus, even before he says a word of rebuke or exorcism.
9–10. In this case, apparently Jesus had already spoken a word of authority (8) which was perhaps what provoked this demonic outburst (7).24 Next, Jesus asks the man his name (9), to make his need apparent to all around, and perhaps to bring home to the man’s own clouded mind the awful situation in which he was. In the Bible, name stands for ‘nature’: so the man was virtually asked to confess the nature of the evil by which he was enslaved. His reply is at once a confession of human impotence, and also vivid expression of the might and destructive force of the demonic powers by which he was gripped. It was a veritable ‘army’ of evil25 which controlled him: no wonder that ‘no-one had the strength to subdue him’ (verse 4).
11–13. There are several puzzles here: why did Jesus allow the demons in this particular case to vent their destructive force on the herd of pigs? Sometimes in the gospels the expelled demon spent his force in a last attack on the patient (e.g. 9:26, the epileptic boy); sometimes we have no record of any special manifestation on exit. We know so little in this realm that we do well to tread reverently: it may be that such an outward sign was required in this case to convince bystanders of the reality of the expulsion. The size of the herd of pigs would in turn make plain to all, by symbol, that the man had been tortured by countless conflicting evil impulses: he was not even ‘integrated’ in his evil. It may well be that, in some way that we cannot grasp, this was some sort of spiritual ‘safety valve’ to avert violence from the patient. It is sometimes half-humorously suggested that, if the owners of the pigs were Jewish, presumably engaged in selling what was to them ceremonially unclean pork to the Gentiles of the district, then this was a punishment to them as well. But it seems unlikely that Jesus would take such pains to punish a breach of ceremonial law, when he himself constantly faced the charge of breaking it (7:5). Even today in Israel, it is not unknown for a ‘kibbutz’ to rear pigs, in spite of all the outcry from the orthodox, although, in deference to scruples, they will be called ḥaberîm, ‘comrades’, instead of ḥazirîm, ‘pigs’.
Note that the Bible clearly differentiates between various degrees of demonization. Usually the account only mentions ‘a demon’; ‘seven demons’ is a stage worse, seen in Mary Magdalene’s case history (16:9). But this man is, by contrast, filled by a veritable army of militant demons. No-one familiar with the biblical use of symbolism would press the numbers literally. Seven is continually used in the Bible as a metaphor and symbol, not so much of ‘divine perfection’, as is often said, but of completion and totality (e.g. Gen. 41:2).26 Yet the inference is quite plain: there are varying degrees of control of humans by Satan, just as there are varying degrees of their control by the Holy Spirit. This man of Gerasa was completely bound by Satan as he had never been by the chains and fetters imposed by humans. So, at his healing, equally drastic manifestations of divine power are not to be wondered at. It is worth mentioning that the Bible never uses the term ‘possession’ by demons: humans may be ‘troubled’ by demons, or may be ‘in the power of a demon’, or ‘demonized’ (Wimber’s good translation). If the participle is used, RSV as here paraphrases as the demoniac, but this has lost its force in modern English. Note also that Mark distinguishes very clearly between the sick and the demonized (e.g. 3:10–11): they are not the same.
14–17. The immediate reaction of the herdsmen, at this very obvious exhibition of supernatural power, was fear (cf. 4:41, for the similar reaction of the disciples at the stilling of the storm by Jesus). They seem to have scattered in their flight: both city and country nearby heard the news, and came to see for themselves. As soon as the local people were convinced that the demoniac had been truly healed, they shared in the same fear. When they had heard from eyewitnesses (16) what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine (a vivid detail which Mark adds, alone of the evangelists), they begged Jesus to leave their area. To their terror was now added the thought of the financial loss, possibly mixed with uneasy consciences, if they really were Jewish pig-breeders. The saddest thing in the whole story is that Jesus granted their request, and left them. There are times when the worst possible thing for us is that the Lord should grant our prayer (Ps. 106:15, ‘He gave what they asked’). The Gerasenes wanted only to be left alone by this frightening supernatural Jesus. It was to be their judgment that Jesus did leave them, to return no more, for there is no evidence, in Mark at least, for any later ministry by Jesus in this area.
18–19. There is a striking and deliberate contrast here between the attitude of the inhabitants of Gerasa and the attitude of the healed demoniac. The Gerasenes begged Jesus to go, and he granted the request. The healed man begged to stay in the company of Jesus, but his request was refused. There is another paradox: the healed leper (1:44) had been strictly forbidden to tell anybody about his healing, but this healed demoniac was ordered to return home and bear witness to what God had done for him (19). There are good reasons for what might at first seem arbitrary and inconsistent. For Jesus himself to continue preaching in the Gerasene country was clearly now impossible: therefore, in refusing the man’s request to leave with him, Jesus was ensuring a continuity of witness in a needy area.27 When the leper of 1:44 had been healed, there were already unmanageable crowds milling about Jesus for healing; there was no need to spread the news any further, especially as the main task of Jesus was not to heal but to preach the kingdom (1:38).
20. This healed man was called to a peculiarly lonely and difficult task, which he fulfilled faithfully and with success, as can be seen from the summary account given here. We might have thought that his understanding of the gospel was inadequate: but he had recognized who Jesus was (even if it was initially through a demonic confession), and had experienced his saving and cleansing work. He had made the equation between God (‘how much the Lord has done for you’, 19) and Jesus (how much Jesus had done for him, 20) and knew himself to be the recipient of God’s saving mercy (19). No-one could make such an equation except by the revelation of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3) and therefore, he was truly a disciple, even if not permitted to follow Jesus literally.
The next two miracles continue with the theme of human despair and helplessness meeting with the power of God in Jesus.
22. Jairus by name: there is no conceivable reason for the name to appear here in Mark, unless because it was firmly embedded in the tradition. It therefore shows the conservative way in which Mark handled his sources. ‘Jair’ was of course a familiar name from the Old Testament (Num. 32:41) meaning ‘He (i.e. God) gives light’. We may like to see a spiritual appropriateness in its use here, but there is no evidence that Mark did, let alone his Gentile public, ignorant of Hebrew as they would be.
25–29. The woman suffering from haemorrhage is the centre of a minor miracle ‘bracketed’, in Mark’s fashion, in the context of the healing of Jairus’ daughter. Mark makes plain in the bluntest language, which is somewhat softened down by Luke, the doctor (cf. Luke 8:43), that earthly doctors and treatment were powerless to aid her.28 A doctor, like a fisherman, must learn that without Jesus he can do nothing. It is easy to trust God at our ‘weak points’ when we have no other hope; we must learn that we have equal need to depend on God, at what we consider our ‘strong points’.
The woman heard of Jesus (27) and acted on what she had heard, by coming to him. She showed the greatness of her faith, not merely in that she believed that Jesus could heal her, but in that she asked for so little contact: merely to grasp his robe would be sufficient. Such faith on the woman’s part was at once rewarded by a healing of which she was instantly conscious (29). But Jesus makes plain, in his reply, that it was her faith which had healed her, not the mere touching of his robe. Otherwise it would have been either superstition or magic (with Schweizer). See Acts 19:12 (Paul’s handkerchiefs) and Acts 5:15 (Peter’s shadow) for similar instances, doubtless with a similar explanation: the sick were healed by their faith in Christ, however this faith was shown. We may dismiss later tradition that the woman was Bernice, a princess from Edessa, though there were Christians (and Jews) numbered among the Edessan royal family from very early times.
30. This is an interesting verse, in that it shows that Jesus was at least sometimes conscious of the flow of healing power from himself to the sick individual. It may have been that such healings cost him much spiritual energy, for we read of him escaping for times of recuperation and prayer (6:32 etc.). Mark, unlike Matthew (Matt. 8:17) or Luke (Luke 4:18), gives no theological reason for the healing miracles of Jesus, other than that they were signs of authority (1:27), and that Jesus was moved with compassion (1:41). That was sufficient for the practical Mark; that was all that was necessary for the Gentile mission.
31–33. Here is yet another instance of the disciples’ expostulation with Jesus for what they regarded as his unreasonableness: compare 6:37 with its indignant ‘shall we go and buy … and give it to them to eat?’ But Jesus ignored the expostulation in both cases: for the meaning of his question was at once apparent to one hearer at least, the woman herself (33). It was not enough to believe in her heart: she must as well confess with her mouth (Rom. 10:9). In front of all the crowd, she must confess, first her great need of healing, and then, the glad fact of her salvation.29 That is was a costly confession, we can tell from the words in fear and trembling (33). For a woman to speak in public before an Asian crowd, and above all to speak of such personal matters, would be very humbling for her, but humility is an essential within the kingdom of God.
34. She had been already healed by her faith, but open confession brought her a word of confirmation from Jesus, and so a fuller understanding of her own recent experience. This in turn brought a realization of the means by which she had entered into this experience (your faith …), the promise of God’s peace, and a sense of security for the future. Confession therefore brought to her, not healing, but assurance. This woman’s bodily healing is a good picture of healing of the soul.30 She suffered from a disease which, to Judaism, made her ceremonially unclean (like leprosy) and which, again like leprosy, barred her from access to God in his temple and from fellowship with God’s congregation in worship. Conscious of her need, she had made many costly attempts to remedy it: but the human help, sought by her and given to her in all sincerity, was all in vain – indeed, it only worsened her situation. Her sense of need, coupled with the glad news of Jesus (for both factors must have been present), led her to come, although at first only as a nameless member of the crowd. Her faith was at once exercised and displayed in the contact with Jesus. The exact nature of the contact was, it seems, unimportant: it is the greatness or littleness of faith that dictates the mode. Little faith (like that of Naaman in 2 Kgs 5:11, or Thomas in John 20:25) would have insisted on a close personal contact, but the greatness of this woman’s faith lay precisely in the fact that she asked for so little contact. She would have been willing to slip away in the crowd, with her immediate physical need met: but Jesus had something greater in store for her, which could only come by open confession.
35. This verse brings us back again to Jairus, whose story had begun in verse 22. He also is a man in need, unashamed to make that need known publicly (‘he fell at his feet’, 22). His faith may not have been as great as that of the woman with the haemorrhage, but yet it was saving faith. If Jesus only came and laid his hands on the girl, Jairus believed that all would be well, though she might be at death’s door already. There was a purpose in the delay caused by the slow push through the crowds, which must have irked Jairus sorely; and there was a purpose in the turning aside to heal one woman in the middle of a crowd, which must have tried the patience of Jairus still further. Verse 35 seems to show that such impatience was justified. In this time so spent, the opportunity of healing seemed to have gone, the girl was dead, and there was therefore no need to worry the Rabbi further, they said. But human despair was God’s opportunity. Jesus had already been shown as Lord of nature; it was necessary that he here be shown as Lord of life and death. This was an important proof of Godhead, for it was supremely fitting that he, who had created life even before sin and death entered the world, should show himself Master of death and the grave. More, this was an important piece of preliminary evidence for his own resurrection: he who had already conquered death for others would one day burst its bonds himself. The central miracle of the Bible is therefore the resurrection of Jesus, because it is the central fact of all Christian experience, here and now as well as later. That is why the resurrection is never a matter of indifference in the gospels and why, even in the ‘shorter’ form, Mark’s Gospel ends with a proclamation of it (16:6), even if no resurrection appearances are described.
36. And so to Jairus as well as to the disciples comes the command to abstain from fear and, instead, to only believe. The one condition of God’s working is that we trust him: this is not an arbitrary demand, but a demand necessarily springing from the very nature of the relation between Godhead and humanity. We are called to trusting, dependent love and obedience, for this is the biblical meaning of faith, not merely intellectual assent. Such faith is the only fitting expression of our helplessness, and the only fitting acknowledgment of God’s power; and so it is an essential to salvation, though it is only the means of God’s working, and not the source. This is what distinguishes the miracles of Jesus from socalled ‘faith healings’ brought about by mechanical psychological means alone: this is also what distinguishes them from mere magic, with no moral or religious content.
37. Peter and James and John (rarely Andrew also, but see 13:3 for an exception) were singled out to receive further revelation on this and other occasions, as at the transfiguration (9:2). It may have been because of their responsiveness to what they had already received that they were trusted with more. This certainly is a principle of God’s spiritual dealing, already laid down in 4:25. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Mark records the selfish request of James and John (10:37), along with John’s narrow-mindedness (9:38), as well as Peter’s denial (14:72). Yet, in spite of weakness, all three appear as leaders of the church in Acts (e.g. 3:1). Of James we hear least of all in later days, but that may be due to his early death (Acts 12:2) at the hands of Herod, which meant that his place was apparently taken by James, the brother of the Lord (Gal. 1:19; 2:9).
38–40. The weeping and wailing (38) may not have necessarily been entirely that of hired mourners, though it certainly would have included them: such an influential man would have many friends who would come to share his grief.31 But the scornful laughter (40) with which they greeted the words of Jesus seems to show that there was little real sorrow there, in all the noise. This unbelief (for such it was) excluded them from seeing the miracle to which the parents were admitted. The pity of it was that it was their superior ‘knowledge’ which excluded them (cf. Luke 8:53, which adds ‘knowing that she was dead’). In point of fact, the girl was indeed dead, by our earthly standards: but Jesus, knowing that he would raise her from the dead, rightly described her condition as a ‘sleep’, because from sleep comes wakening.32 So, too, the early church described the dead as ‘those who have fallen asleep’ (1 Thess. 4:14), for the same reason. Mark does not use the verb koimaohere for ‘sleep’ (which also gives our modern English ‘cemetery’), but the verb katheudei, however, the meaning is exactly the same.
41. Taking her by the hand: Jesus never hesitated to contract ritual defilement by touching a leaper, or blood, or the dead, precisely because his touch at once cleansed and revived, and thus, as a Jew would say, removed the ‘mother of defilement’, their term for the source of pollution. In the Old Testament, ritual ‘holiness’ as well as ritual ‘defilement’ could be transmitted, as being contagious: in the same way, others ‘contracted’ life and purity from Jesus, and not he the impurity from them. This too explains his readiness to eat and drink with ‘tax-collectors and sinners’, the morally defiled (2:15).
His words to the girl, Talitha cumi, in her own Aramaic mother tongue (some MSS read cum, which would be the more likely vocalization), are preserved in Mark alone. If, as tradition has it and internal evidence may in part at least support, Peter was Mark’s informant, then the scene must have made such an impression upon the three apostles present that the actual words of Jesus were remembered long after. Mark, as usual, explains the Aramaic phrase in Greek for the sake of his Gentile reading public.
Space does not permit here a full discussion on the assumed linguistic situation in Palestine at the time. Everywhere, Greek would seem to have been understood, but Aramaic seems to have been the usual speech of the Jewish home, especially in Galilee. Greek was certainly the literary and cultural language, even if Hebrew was the religious language of all Jews. Spoken Hebrew may well have lingered on around Jerusalem, as a semi-artificial religious or nationalistic survival: it was certainly so used, in a corrupt form, by the Zealots at a later date. Every appearance is that Jesus and his disciples were bilingual, though, as coming from strongly nationalist Galilee, surrounded by the Gentiles of Decapolis and Syrophoenicia, their mother tongue was probably Galilean Aramaic. Proofs are to be found in the nicknames like ‘Cephas’ and ‘Boanerges’, specifically stated by Mark to have been given by Jesus himself, both being Aramaic in form.33 Other fossilized pieces of Aramaic preserved in this gospel are the command ‘ephphatha’ given to the dumb man (7:34) and the cry ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani’ uttered on the cross (15:34). ‘Abba’, as an address to the Father, is common to both gospel and epistles (14:36 and Rom. 8:15). Whether Jesus ever delivered his teaching in Greek is doubtful, though it was a view held by earlier scholars which has recently been revived. Even if he did so at times, there would be a special appropriateness in using her own mother tongue in talking to the girl, just as the risen Lord apparently spoke to Mary in her own tongue (John 20:16), for she certainly so replied. Perhaps the mention of the fact that Aramaic was used on these particular occasions suggests that it was not always so used. Those brought up in bilingual areas will appreciate to the full the emotive value of such a use of the hearer’s mother tongue, even if another language is just as well understood.
42–43. At once Jesus proved himself stronger than death. Other similar miracles involved the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 7:15) and Lazarus of Bethany (John 11:44), although neither is recorded in Mark. The loving care of Jesus is shown in his command to give the girl something to eat. His usual concern lest idle sightseers flock to him as a miracle worker is shown again by his strict command to the parents to tell nobody of the miracle: compare his similar words to the healed leper of 1:44, on a like occasion, when the crowds were also gathering round him, as now (verse 31).
Jairus had been a synagogue elder in one of the small lakeside towns of the western shore, to judge from the various topographical details. Now Jesus and his disciples seem to have moved inland from the lake to the highlands of Galilee, for he is found teaching, apparently in the synagogue of Nazareth (although unnamed by Mark), which is always his own country, the town of his boyhood, though he may later live and work in Capernaum (Matt. 4:13). To the last he is ‘the Nazarene, Jesus’ (14:67), in spite of his birth in Bethlehem and base in Capernaum. Moreover it is Matthew, not Mark, who sees a prophetic appropriateness in this (Matt. 2:23).
2. Even in Nazareth, the effect of his teaching was startling: no-one who heard it could deny the wisdom displayed in it. Nor did they attempt to deny that he had already done miracles elsewhere, but instead of laying either of these things to heart, they were simply concerned as to their source. They were in fact much more concerned with the mechanical question ‘how’ than the theological question ‘why’. Yet the question in itself was a good one. It was indeed the question that was to exercise the scribes and Pharisees later (11:28): what was the source of the authority of Jesus? Like John’s baptism, his authority could only be ‘from heaven or from men’. For, although the scribes suggested a third possible demonic source, it is doubtful, from the sternness of the reply of Jesus, if even they took this bitter suggestion seriously. So the question of the synagogue congregation at Nazareth was well directed, had they only been ready to accept the obvious answer. From 1:22 onwards, the fact of the authority of Jesus has been obvious to all those not already self-blinded by their own theological prejudice: it only remained to recognize its source, and that would be declared unequivocally by Peter in 8:29.
3. They were right in rejecting the earthly background or relationships of Jesus as being the source of his power. It was not as Mary’s son, nor as eldest brother of Joseph’s family, that he did such things: nor was it as the village carpenter,35 as they would have considered him to be. One can sense their slow bewilderment in the listing of his brothers by name. But, having rightly rejected any human source, they boggled at attributing both the wisdom and the miracles to a divine source. They were staggered by such an equation; they took offence or ‘stumbled’ at him, as the Bible says. The people of Nazareth ‘knew all the answers’ about Jesus: they were not prepared for any fresh revelation. Familiarity, to quote the English proverb, had bred contempt, as apparently it also had among his own brothers (see on 3:31). Jesus himself will sadly quote a similar Semitic proverb in verse 4: the only place where the prophet of Nazareth (Matt. 21:11) was not acclaimed was Nazareth itself.
4–6. So it was that, in the very place where Jesus had been brought up as a boy, the only exhibition of divine power that he was able to give was to heal a few sick folk who were humbled enough by pain and need to believe in him (5). He who was to rejoice at the faith of the Syrophoenician woman (7:29) marvelled at the lengths to which unbelief could go in his own townspeople (6). They might be staggered at him: but here Mark says that he was staggered at them.36
The earthly ministry of Jesus seems to be roughly divisible into periods of intensive localized teaching and periods of more general peripatetic evangelism. The sending out of the twelve was a logical extension of his own ministry of evangelism. It was indeed part of the very purpose for which he had initially called them (3:14), for this was both that they should stay in his presence (intensive teaching) and that he might then send them out (extensive evangelism).
Both in this case and elsewhere (e.g. 11:1), Jesus never seems to have sent out a disciple alone: they normally went in groups of two.37 Perhaps this constant association of disciples in small groups may account for the set patterns in which the lists of names of the disciples have come down to us, apart altogether from the convenience in the teaching needs of the church. The twelve were given authority over demons (7), so they expelled demons: they ‘preached that men should repent’ (12): they ‘anointed’ the sick with oil, and healed them (13). All three functions are illustrated ‘in action’ in these verses,38 and all three were associated with the proclamation of the kingdom of God, which had come in the person of Jesus.
8–9. It may be that here we have a programme of ‘village evangelism’ (see verse 6) after the larger population centres of Galilee had decisively rejected Jesus. This task demanded a scattering of personnel, a wandering ministry, and a deliberate renunciation, a studied simplicity of lifestyle, designed both to encourage and to demonstrate trust in God. This simple explanation serves better than to attempt to find subtle meaning in the renunciation of each particular article: besides, the lists given seem to vary in different accounts. The point therefore lies in the renunciation, not its details nor its purpose or its extent. The Bible never sees renunciation as a good thing in itself, but only as a necessity in some circumstances. We have no reason to suppose that this particular type of renunciation was intended to be a universal rule, binding on all disciples at all times, while such a simple faith as theirs is indeed the universal rule, in whatever way it is expressed. Later, in Gethsemane, Jesus, having first ascertained that his disciples had thoroughly learned this lesson of not trusting to material helps, told them to take with them all the helps that they had: purse, bag, even sword (Luke 22:36). This shows no lack of faith, for they have already learned that none of these things is necessary for the one who goes in simple trust, obedient to the Lord’s command, and looking to God to supply all needs.39 Poverty is never an ideal in the Bible, although, if need be, it must be gladly embraced in God’s service and for Christ’s sake.
10–11. The mission of the disciples was to be marked by a humble persistence: they were to try to get a hearing by all means, but never to force themselves on those unwilling to hear them. Such a rejection they were, however, not to treat lightly, knowing the condemnation that comes to those who refuse the gospel. To preach the gospel is therefore always a joyous task, but never a task to be entered upon light-heartedly, in view of the eternal issues with which such teaching is concerned. The latter part of verse 11 (‘more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah’) is omitted here by both RSV and NEB, following the principal uncial MSS. It was no doubt added here from Matthew 10:15, where it certainly belongs to the text; it rings true to the teaching style of Jesus nevertheless. Orthodox Jews ‘shook off the dust’ when they returned to the Holy Land from Gentile regions (Anderson). Those who reject the message of Jesus, brought by his servants, are not ‘God’s people’, but have similarly made themselves ‘Gentiles’ as far as the kingdom of God is concerned, in front of the ‘two witnesses’ demanded by the Law (Deut. 17:6).
12–13. Often we speak of ‘spiritual’ and ‘healing’ work as though they were two distinct avenues of Christian witness. It is very doubtful if the early church made such a distinction, the more so as they saw most if not all disease as a manifestation of Satan’s power, though not necessarily connected directly with sin on the part of the individual (contrast 2:5 with John 9:3). Anointing with oil was not in this case a medical treatment but a spiritual symbol, though it appears to be used medically in the case of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:34), who poured ‘oil and wine’ on wounds. The anointing by the disciples practised here seems to be the matter-of-fact anointing of James 5:14, which, accompanied by prayer, can heal the sick. Oil is a biblical symbol of the Holy Spirit’s presence (1 Kgs 1:39), and so the very anointing is itself an ‘acted parable’ of divine healing by the Spirit’s power. It seems in the New Testament as if there are two sorts of healing practised. The first is the dramatic use of healing as a ‘sign’, often giving an opening for evangelism: the second is unspectacular pastoral healing, as in the letter of James, a healing which seems to find a place quite naturally in the ongoing ‘body life’ of the church alongside many other activities of the Spirit.
This preaching tour in Galilee brought Jesus for the first time to the notice of Herod, in whose jurisdiction Galilee lay at the time (Luke 23:7). The last mention of John the Baptist had been a brief note (1:14) of his imprisonment, as marking the end of his preaching ministry, and the beginning of that of Jesus. Verses 17–29 will give, in a parenthesis, the reason for John’s arrest and subsequent execution: but at this point, his death is simply assumed.40 (Schweizer and Anderson both note that this is the only story in the whole gospel which is not centred on Jesus.) The chief interest, and indeed the reason for its introduction here, lies in the instant guilty reaction of Herod to the news about Jesus. True, he had killed John, but that he had not silenced his own conscience is clear from his equation of Jesus with a John ‘returned’, raised from the dead. It is true that some manuscripts have suggested that this was a widespread view: but that does not alter the fact that Herod himself believed it. It is strange that, though John in his lifetime had done no miracles of any kind (John 10:41), yet Herod showed no surprise at the thought of this greatest of all miracles, a rising from the dead, taking place in John’s case. Even Herod had theological insight enough to see that, if John had truly risen from the dead, then other miracles, like those reported of Jesus, were not only possible but logical. Compare the way in which Jesus persistently refused to give any ‘evidential’ miracle to his foes except to foretell the greatest possible sign of all, that of his resurrection (8:31). Apparently from this time onwards Herod wanted to see Jesus, hoping to watch him perform a miracle (Luke 23:8), but what may in origin have been genuine religious feeling on the part of Herod had dwindled into a mere craving for the sensational and the spectacular. This craving God never creates, and so he does not satisfy it, though it is at times a dangerous temptation to the church. Spiritual life cannot be nurtured on thrills alone; any more than faith, in the true sense, can be created by signs.
15–16. As later, when Jesus questioned his own disciples at Caesarea Philippi (8:28), there were already various popular interpretations of Jesus’ nature and work: until Casearea Philippi, none saw the full truth. But Herod clung sombrely to the view suggested by his own uneasy conscience, and the very starkness of the words whom I beheaded (16) emphasizes his self-torture. The house of Herod was, true, a strange mixture of cold cruelty and religious fanaticism. The family was by background Edomite, not Israelite, but the Herodian masonry of the great enclosure at Hebron surrounding Abraham’s tomb was intended to show to all that Abraham was their ancestor too. In truth, Herod seems to have been superstitious rather than religious at heart, and his reaction to the news about Jesus makes this plain.
This uneasy speculation about Jesus was on a par with Herod’s moral perception throughout. The Herods (cf. Agrippa in Acts 26:3) were religious dilettantes, and the tetrarch had recognized well enough the spiritual stature of John (20) and had been afraid of his moral greatness. He not only gladly heard him preaching, but paid attention to what John said. He was much perplexed, the best reading in verse 20, suggests that John’s preaching put Herod into a tight corner, and so he evaded the issue by doing nothing. But inexorably he was pushed to a decision, first to imprison John, then to execute him. The less likely reading in verse 20, ‘he did many things’, would make Herod actually respond to John’s teaching: but there is no evidence of that. Similarly, Pontius Pilate would be gradually pushed, against his will, to take a decision about Jesus (15:1–15), which led to the crucifixion. RSV in verse 20, with kept him safe, is banal.
18–22. John’s condemnation of Herod’s incest brought imprisonment by the tetrarch, who could hardly tolerate such open criticism of himself in his own domain: but it also brought something far more dangerous, in the undying hate of Herodias. Even while John was in gaol, he was probably in no great danger of his life, as far as Herod was concerned: that is clear from verse 20. Herod wished only to stop John’s mouth. A humiliating defeat by Aretas, the father of his rejected first wife, was doubtless punishment enough for adultery as far as he was concerned, without John’s condemnation. But with Herodias, it was a different matter: she was only waiting her time to kill John. She would have killed him at once, but there had been no opportunity (19); and now the opportunity had come, in the birthday feast of Antipas, as this member of the house of Herod is usually called. A glance at the family tree of the house will show the succession of murders and incest that it contained: one more murder was not surprising.41
22–25. It was Herod’s infatuation with Herodias that had led him to imprison John: and so even devotion to partners can lead astray. Such is the human distortion of values that his courtiers saw Herod’s rash promise to a dancing-girl as generosity, and his compliance with a wrong demand as faithfulness to his word. Even the obedience of a daughter to her mother becomes in this case a sin: and so, outside Christ, even ‘natural’ virtues can become distorted into vices. Jezebel, in the Old Testament (1 Kgs 21:7), is another example of one who was bitterly opposed to a servant of God, and through devotion to whom a marriage partner becomes equally guilty. Similarly, in Acts, Ananias seems to have led his wife Sapphira into the sin of lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:2). The kingdom of God demands a deeper loyalty, overriding the closest of earthly ties (10:29).
26–28. Unquestionably, Herod’s grief at this request was real (26); but he had already been trapped, and he knew it. It had been wrong to bind himself to such a rash promise. It was doubly wrong to keep it; but if he did not keep it, he would ‘lose face’ before his own nobles, who had heard the royal oath. So John died alone in the grim dungeon of Machaerus, by the shores of the Dead Sea. One wonders whether even Herod’s callous courtiers were not shocked by such a banquet dish as this (verse 28). But Mark does not point the moral: he simply leaves the tragic story to speak for itself. John’s career ends with his body lovingly laid in a tomb by his disciples (verse 29). Does Mark see a parallel in the action of Joseph of Arimathea in 15:46?
29. Within Palestine, this seems to mark the end of ‘John’s disciples’ as a coherent group, whose ritual practices can be quoted against those of the disciples of Jesus (2:18). Ever since early days, the disciples of John had been gradually leaving him, according to John’s Gospel, and following Jesus: and John was content that it should be so (John 3:30). Now, when John was dead and they came to bury him, Matthew 14:12 adds a further significant clause, saying that ‘they went and told Jesus’, which probably points to a further amalgamation, although Mark tells us nothing of this. Outside of Palestine, however, John’s disciples still persisted as a separate group, as can be seen from Acts 18:25 and 19:3, where they are still a ‘sect’ waiting for the coming of the Messiah. John’s disciples were therefore fully orthodox Jews (2:18), who had a messianic expectation, but little more. Those of them who were not absorbed into the growing Christian church may have slipped back into the pre-Christian Essene movement, to which they had many similarities, or heretical groups like the Mandaeans, in whose writings John the Baptist has a prominent place.
There is a delightful naivety in the account of the apostles’ reporting to Jesus, not only what they have done, but also what they have said. This was true wisdom on the part of Jesus in allowing them time to unburden themselves to him, before even suggesting a time of rest. After the weariness and rush and strange faces of the mission, the disciples craved solitude and rest in the company of Jesus. While he did not care that he himself had no time to eat (cf. 3:20), yet he would not ask the same sacrifice of his weary disciples. There had been a similar preaching tour in Galilee before (1:39), but that had been undertaken in the company of Jesus; this was the first time that the twelve had gone out alone, relying solely upon his word.
33. The short lake voyage, back to the old familiar surroundings of the sea, after tramping the dusty roads, must in itself have been a rest and relaxation for the Galilean fishermen. But the small size of the Sea of Galilee made it quite possible for the crowds, travelling along the shore, to outdistance the little ship, which probably had no favourable wind. Many a modern deep-water harbour is bigger than the whole Sea of Galilee, and the average harbour ferry boat of today far bigger than the ship used on this occasion.42 There is no biblical reason to hold that ‘big is beautiful’: God works often in the small and despised. To small groups of Christians, dwarfed by the scale of Rome or Antioch, this was all-important.
34. It is easy to imagine the groan of despair that must have gone up from the exhausted disciples, when they saw, long before they had reached the other shore, that the inevitable curious crowd had forestalled them. It is probable that this natural weariness accounts for the note of irritation in their question to Jesus in verse 37, as well as their obvious hint in verse 36 that the crowds had had more than enough teaching already. But Jesus, just as weary as the disciples and seeing the same crowds as they, had compassion on them (34).43 Note that he did the preaching to the crowds himself; he did not call upon his disciples to join in the task now. Compare his anxiety to secure proper rest for them after their wearisome preaching tour, careless though he might be for himself.
35. The objections raised by the disciples were all very reasonable. It was indeed late, and the place was in truth lonely. If bread must be given to the crowds, it would have to be brought in from a distance; and it certainly would have cost, at the most conservative estimate, two hundred denarii to feed them all. Their calculations were therefore quite correct; but they had omitted from their calculations Jesus, the incalculable factor. At the seeming ‘unreasonableness’ shown by Jesus their suppressed irritation grows, for God’s way is always foolishness to ‘natural’ humans (1 Cor. 1:18). This miracle is therefore an illustration of the central stumbling-block of Christianity: all alike stand condemned with the disciples here, an example of Mark’s ‘paraenetic’ used of his material, a use all the more remarkable in that he never draws attention to it.
36–38. The sequence here is interesting. Once the disciples have seen the need of the crowd (35–36), then Jesus lays upon them the task of meeting that need (37). Half angered, and half humiliated, they confess their own utter inadequacy to do so. Then Jesus reminds them that they can meet any emergency which is not of their own making (for we may not ‘test’ God, Matt. 4:7), by the use of what they have, though it is totally inadequate, if only it is first offered in its totality to Jesus to be used by him. God does not usually lead us to see a need, unless it is in his mind to meet that need, often through us, unwilling though we may be.
39–40. The disciples must have faith that Jesus could and would use their inadequacy, and this faith must be shown by making the crowd sit down in ordered expectancy, by hundreds and by fifties. Perhaps it is not unfair, too, to see a hint in this detail, that God is a God of order, One who at the dawn of time brought order out of chaos (Gen. 1:2), and who loves order even in worship (1 Cor. 14:40), instead of the disorder that could so easily arise from the unrestricted use of spiritual freedom, as may have been a danger at Rome as well as Corinth.44 But it is not enough for disciples to have faith: the faith must be exhibited in some action that, as it were, implicates them. The disciples would indeed look foolish now, in the eyes of the expectant crowd, if no miracle of feeding took place; but this is the risk which faith must take, if it is to be truly faith. ‘No risk, no faith’ is a good rule of thumb, if over simple.
41. The loaves were taken up, blessed45 and broken by Jesus and finally given to the disciples to distribute to the crowds. By this the disciples were themselves, almost unwillingly, pulled into participation in the miracle. So, too, at a deeper level, Jesus himself had already taken up and blessed a human body at his incarnation, though Mark does not actually mention this in his gospel. But Mark’s readers would remember how, at the last supper, Jesus had taken bread, given thanks, and broken it, before giving it to the disciples to eat, saying ‘This is my body’ (14:22). So too, he can take, bless and use our lives, once given to him, to bring blessing to the crowds hungry for God in the world around us.46 Yet in all of this legitimate spiritualization we must not forget what actually happened on that day so long ago: five thousand hungry people had been fed, as Belo would insist. It is true that they were hungry because of long hours listening to God’s Word, but that does not lessen the deed.
42–44. It is a mark of God’s provision that it is always enough and more than enough for all our needs: and yet it is also typical of God’s economy that there should be no waste (43), and that we should learn to be good stewards of God’s bounty. Of the twelve, each disciple had presumably gathered a basketful of pieces, and we may be sure that this was to be their food in the days to come. They could not simply throw away the bread already provided and expect Jesus to work a special miracle like this every day, exciting though that would have been. Note that God guarantees to supply all our needs, but not necessarily all our foolish desires: the meal by the lake was satisfying, but the food was simple. There will always be those who grumble at what God supplies. Israel in the desert soon tired of ‘the bread of the angels’ (Ps. 78:25) and begged for more earthy sustenance (Num. 11:6). No doubt many a disciple was tempted to similar thoughts as he chewed dried up fish and stale crusts on the next day, or the day after. But, in God’s economy, that which we call the supernatural shades into the natural; he meets our needs through both alike, so that ultimately there is no distinction between the two, as far as his provision is concerned.
A further touch of the understanding love on the part of Jesus was to send his overtaxed disciples on in advance, while he dismissed the crowd, perhaps giving them farewell counsel. Yet even after that, he went, not to rest, but to prayer on the hillside: indeed, it was only the sight of the storm-tossed disciples that brought Jesus from prayer to their rescue (48). No supernatural vision is necessarily implied here, although it is possible. The boat could have been clearly visible from the spot where Jesus was praying high up on the hillside above, especially if there was moonlight at the time. The supernatural element will enter later, with the words walking on the sea (49).47 The author remembers watching such boats on the Sea of Galilee after dark, clearly outlined in black against the silvery water.
This whole episode is a good illustration of the life of discipleship, seen as a constant experience of testing and deliverance; for it was again (cf. 4:35) not through stubborn self-will, but through direct obedience to the command of Jesus, that the disciples found themselves in this danger. The storm did not show that they had deviated from the path of God’s will: instead, God’s path for them lay through the storm, to the other shore of the lake. Moreover, it again appeared as if Jesus had forgotten them; they were alone, at night, and making heavy weather with the rowing. This storm, however, was no sudden squall such as had preceded the earlier calming of the waves (4:37), but a tiring, continuous head wind, necessitating steady, back-breaking rowing. Then, at the darkest hour of the night, in their time of greatest need, and in a totally unexpected way, Jesus came to their rescue. In both of the storms at sea (cf. chapter 4) it must have seemed to the disciples at first as if Jesus was irrelevant: on the first occasion, he was asleep in the stern of the boat, and on the second occasion, absent at prayer on the mountain. On both occasions it must have seemed as if he was careless of their danger, and yet the result showed that nothing could be further from the truth. Why does Mark say that Jesus meant to pass by them (48)? Perhaps it was a test of their faith, just as his sleeping in the stern of the ship had been on the previous occasion (4:38). If they had sufficient faith, they would be content even without his presence with them. Perhaps Jesus, on the other hand, wanted his disciples to recognize to the full their need of him before he came to their help: Mark does not tell us which it was.
49. The cry of the disciples was merely one of fear, and not even necessarily a cry of prayer, let alone a cry of faith directed to Jesus; but it was enough to ensure his instant response. God’s willingness to answer is not limited by the poverty of our asking, and Jesus was often contented with an initial response of what we would consider a totally inadequate nature (9:24).
50. As so often, the exhibition of miraculous power by Jesus merely threw the disciples into fresh fear and confusion. So the initial entry of Jesus into their situation was marked by an increase in the tempo of the strife (cf. 9:26, the healing of the demoniac boy), although that would soon pass into tranquillity. Minear points out that, in answering with the words It is I, Jesus may have been deliberately using the name of God (Exod. 3:14). This would only have increased the awe of the disciples, although it could also have given them a clue as to the true nature of Jesus, if their hearts had not been hardened (verse 52).
51–52. As before, at the previous storm on the lake (cf. chapter 4), the presence of Jesus brought peace and calm to the disciples. But their fear and their amazement alike are traced by the evangelist to their failure to learn the previous lesson of the feeding of the five thousand. Smallness of faith and hardness of heart are two constant sins even of the disciples in Mark. Hardness of heart is that lack of spiritual perceptivity, that lack of readiness to learn, for which we are ultimately blameworthy ourselves, and which, in the extreme case of the scribes, can lead at last to the sin against the Holy Spirit. Smallness of faith is a failure to remember God’s working in the past and to apply that knowledge of his nature to our present problems. If the early Christians, especially in centres like Rome, saw these storms as pictures of persecutions through which they must go, then this was an important lesson to learn.
This brief account in Mark is a summary of what must have happened on many similar occasions: the spontaneous spreading of the good news under the stimulus of the presence of the healing Jesus. This is what has led many Christians today to claim that physical healing is either an integral and inseparable part of the gospel itself (which seems to go beyond Scripture) or at least an important adjunct to it.48 There was on the part of the crowds a recognition of Jesus, a realization of their own need, a belief that Jesus could meet that need, and a determination to grasp the opportunity afforded by his presence: all these are factors in every case of healing of the soul or body. The reaction of the crowd was both spontaneous and unselfish. There must have been many a patient carried in on a mat by friends (verse 55), and the faith of the patients in asking only to clutch at the fringe of his clothing reminds us of the faith of the woman with the haemorrhage (cf. 5:28). Again, as in her case, it was not the magical touch of a garment which healed them, but their faith in the one who wore that garment.
The Pharisees and scribes described here are presumably another official fact-finding commission of theologians from Jerusalem (verse 1), sent to investigate a campaign of healing and preaching that by now must have caused some stir. Even the secular ruler Herod knew of Jesus (6:14), let alone the religious authorities. Such a commission had come before, as the incidental reference in 3:22 shows. There, the bitter words about the casting out of devils through the power of Beelzebub had been spoken by the scribes from Jerusalem. That being so, it is probable that the carping criticism with regard to sabbath observance came from the same source. A previous commission had similarly examined John as to his right to preach and baptize (John 1:19, 25), to which Jesus may refer in 11:30. It thus comes as no surprise that the theological commission in this chapter is biased and suspicious from the start. This is apparent in their niggling, fault-finding attitude. They attacked Jesus, not personally, but through his disciples (verse 5), just as in 2:24 they had attacked his disciples for picking corn on the sabbath, and in 2:18 they had criticized the failure of his disciples to fast. They here attacked the disciples again on a point of ritual, not of faith, and a point of ritual drawn not directly from the law, but from the body of explanatory tradition that was growing up round the law, later codified to form the Mishnah and Gemara, the modern Jewish Talmud. Of course, if the disciples were found to be ignorant of the ‘oral tradition’, the inference as to the ignorance of their rabbi would be obvious. Mark thinks it necessary to explain the whole system of ritual washing to his Gentile readers (verses 3–4), though the sabbath, he assumes, will be familiar to them already.49 The Pharisees themselves, in so asking, betrayed their own position, for their indignant question was confined to a breach of the tradition of the elders (5), not a breach of the Mosaic law itself. So Saul the Pharisee could describe himself as being ‘extremely zealous for the traditions’ (Gal. 1:14) before his conversion.
6–8. No-one ever disputed the earnestness of the Pharisees in keeping these traditional observances, nor disputed that such customs were genuine historical traditions, nor denied that they were originally aimed at the honouring of God, as being extensions, perhaps legitimate, of biblical principles already given by revelation. Why then is the strong word hypocrites or ‘those acting a part’ (6), used by Jesus here, with reference to scribes and Pharisees?50 he sees, in their hollow, insincere attitude, a fulfilment of biblical prophecy, and therefore a vindication of the authority of the very Scripture upon which they claim to lean, but for which they actually substitute their own traditions (verse 7). It is noteworthy that Jesus here not only quotes Scripture but also adds to it in verse 8, thereby interpreting it. Indeed, the whole of the New Testament is a wider illustration of this, for the words of Jesus always stand on a par with any ‘thus says the Lord’ found in the Old Testament, and so the early church treated them. In the first place, then, Jesus sees the Pharisees as those who act a false part, who pretend to be other than they are. They indisputably display an outward honour to God, but this is directly and totally contradicted by the Pharisaic attitude of mind. Their outward show of reverence does not correspond to any of that inward reality of which it should only be an outward expression and sign: compare the prophetic attack on much of the meaningless and hollow religious ritual of the days of the kings of Israel.
That is the first ‘prong’ of the attack by Jesus. But the second, in verse 7, is more serious still. Even if the Pharisees had been earnest in heart, yet their whole position is vitiated by the fact that what they teach depends entirely on human, not divine, authority. Nor is that all, though it is bad enough in all conscience: this clinging to human traditions makes them actually neglect the plain command of God. Once again, note how Jesus answers on two levels those who criticize him. First, he answers on their level, using their premises: then, having thus demolished their position, he takes the argument to a far deeper level.
The latter part of verse 8 is not found in the best MSS. It may have been included, as an explanation of tradition of men, following Mark’s own earlier explanation for Gentile readers in verse 4. It is, in any case, a fair summary of the position.
9–13. Such outspoken criticism may well have caused a murmur, so Jesus at once gives an instance of how obedience to a rabbinic tradition means breaking God’s command. This, however, is only one instance chosen out of many, as he reminds them (13). At the very heart of the law, honour to parents is commanded, but, by a typically rabbinic twist of values, it was possible to vow to the temple all the money that would normally have been expended in the future on the maintenance of parents, and so avoid the plain demands of duty, obvious enough to the pagan outside.51 This is a wise warning that the reference to leaving parents for the sake of Jesus (10:29) must be seen to be in the context of genuine family love as a Christian duty: natural ties are not abrogated, though they may be overruled by Jesus. Perhaps, when biblical scholars today are tempted to use distorted exegesis of the New Testament to prove a pet theory which is the very opposite of the plain sense of a passage, we are guilty of exactly the same sin as the rabbis blamed here.
14. This rebuke by Jesus seems to have silenced the scribes for the time being, but the major principle of the validity of the ritual law was still at stake. The disciples of Jesus had, in point of fact, eaten with unwashed hands, and therefore still stood condemned, if the traditional law on this point was valid. The discomfiture of the Pharisees in the last argument did not therefore necessarily mean the acquittal of the disciples, unless the whole principle behind this piece of oral tradition was to be overturned: and so it was, in this miniature parable. It must have seemed to many Pharisees in early days that Jesus came dangerously near to espousing the Sadducean cause, with his firm rejection of the ‘tradition of the fathers’. Of course, no Sadducee would agree with that estimate: the championing by Jesus of the doctrine of the resurrection made him an enemy as far as they were concerned (12:24).52 What Jesus had to say next was too important to be restricted to scribes or Pharisees alone, so he deliberately called the crowd together before he spoke, to enunciate a new principle.
15. This bold statement by Jesus ran contrary to all the rabbinic teaching. To them, for any defilement to occur, there must be a ‘mother of defilement’, an external source, by physical contact with which the uncleanness was contracted. They, in other words, assumed an initially pure state: not so Jesus. For him, the source of defilement was not external, but within, and already existent. There is a world of difference between these two theologies, as there is between the two views of sin.53 To the Pharisees, lack of ceremonial purity, as in the case of the disciples of Jesus, was undoubtedly sin: whereas the list of sins given by Jesus here is restricted to moral failures, whether in thought or act.
Verse 16 is omitted by RSV and NEB following the best MSS, but it may well be genuine, for it is the usual injunction to ‘listen’, commonly appended by Jesus to his parables (cf. 4:9).
17. There must have been many other such occasions when we owe the explanation of a parable presented in the gospel to the inability of the disciples to see its relevance and application in the first place, and to their consequent coming to Jesus to ask for an explanation later. The classic instance is the full explanation given of the parable of the sower in chapter 4. Naturally, if not understood, an unexplained and meaningless parable would be of no value in the teaching programme of the early church, and so would not be included in the gospel. Therefore, even if we fail to understand a parable, we are not justified in saying that the early church likewise failed to do so: if so, it would not have been preserved. If there is no explanation asked or given, then the disciples (and therefore the early church) must have understood the parable immediately. Of course, there were some sayings of Jesus which the disciples understood fully only after the resurrection of Jesus (cf. 9:10).
18. The unbelief of the disciples grieves Jesus. Their spiritual dullness amazes him even more (16:14), for this is the quality that also distresses him in the Pharisees (3:5). The chief thing obvious to a modern reader is the utter failure of the disciples to understand even his simplest utterances. They consistently and crassly misinterpreted him, taking his words in the most crudely literal sense (cf. 8:16). Admittedly, all this was before the coming of the Spirit, the great Interpreter (John 14:26): and the same blindness is, according to Paul, still seen in ‘natural’ unconverted people (2 Cor. 3:14).
19. The outspoken words of Jesus might be paraphrased as saying that ‘the mind and not the body is the danger-point for man’. The last clause of this verse, he declared all foods clean, is best taken as an explanatory comment on the words of Jesus by the evangelist: we could paraphrase it as ‘by saying this, he was abolishing all distinction between ceremonially clean and unclean foods.’54 This generalized interpretation is born out by the additional negative clause in Matthew 15:20 which does not appear in Mark: ‘but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man’. If we see the interpretative comment in Mark as coming from the preaching of Peter, then it takes a new meaning in view of Peter’s vision before the visit to Cornelius (Acts 11:5ff.). God had taught Peter that Gentiles, who did not keep the ceremonial law, were still to be acceptable in God’s sight (Acts 10:35), and were therefore ‘clean’. Even if this did not come through the Petrine tradition, its relevance to the Roman church and the Gentile mission is obvious.
20–23. Jesus here (as more explicitly in Matt. 5:28) makes no distinction between sins of thought and sins of deed, unlike the law of Moses, which, like any other law codes, can take cognizance only of outward acts, not the mental attitudes which ultimately find expression in such acts. The one possible exception is the tenth commandment, which forbids coveting. Of course, in view of the fact that the central principle of the Mosaic law was love (Exod. 20:6 ‘those who love me’), ultimately the law was basically concerned with attitudes as well. See 12:28–31 for the summary of the law given by Jesus in terms of love towards God and love towards neighbour.
The previous activity of Jesus had been on the lake shore of Galilee: now he withdrew further north and west to the territory of Phoenicia, on the Mediterranean coast. Possibly it was for a time of rest and preparation, for he wanted his presence kept secret (24), although this proved impossible. Crowds even from this area had already come to him for healing (3:8): it would be interesting to know if any of them had been Gentiles.
25. The story of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter recorded here reminds us that Elijah the prophet had, in roughly the same territory, worked a miracle for another, presumably also heathen, widow (1 Kgs 17:9ff.). It may be a recollection of this Elijah incident that prompted Matthew to add ‘and Sidon’ after ‘Tyre’ (Matt. 15:21) in his geographic note,56 from which it has entered the text here in some MSS. The two towns of ‘Tyre and Sidon’ are often loosely linked together in the New Testament (compare 3:8). This story shows that Jesus was known at least to the Jews settled in those parts, since it must have been in the home of some Jewish disciple or friend that he was now staying incognito. That this miracle of Elijah was already in the mind of Jesus is shown by Luke’s account in 4:25–26, where, after his rejection at Nazareth, Jesus gives clear warning of a coming mission to the Gentiles, using the widow of Zarephath as an illustration. It is in the light of this background that we must read the initial response of Jesus to the woman, for, although Mark does not mention the widow of Zarephath as Luke does, she cannot have been far from his thoughts as he recorded this story.
26. This woman was a Greek, that is a Gentile, as the woman of Zarephath of 1 Kings 17:9 had almost certainly been (cf. the wording of 1 Kgs 17:12, ‘as the Lord your God lives’). We are not told that this particular woman was a widow, but as no husband is mentioned, it is likely: and, like the widow of Zarephath, it was the great need of her child that brought her to God. It was fitting that both widows should receive help from a God who cares specially for widows and orphans (Deut. 10:18; Ps. 146:9, etc.).
27. First, it is important to remember that Jesus is here probably only quoting a popular proverb on the appropriateness of an action. Secondly, his quotation of the abusive term dogs occasionally used for ‘Gentiles’ (kynaria, puppies, the diminutive form found here, is not in any sense affectionate, nor does it lessen the blow57) did not mean that he recognized this description as in any sense accurate. He may have wanted to see whether the woman was ready to take such a lowly position in order to win healing. True, Matthew stresses that Jesus had a strong consciousness that, in his earthly lifetime, his immediate mission was restricted to Israel (Matt. 15:24), so that he actually forbade his disciples, at this stage, to preach to Gentiles or Samaritans (Matt. 10:5). Mark contains no such direct statements, but certainly the words of Jesus here, with their sharp contrast between children and dogs infers it, and it is clear that the woman understood it so (28). After the cross and resurrection, it would be a different matter: then, the gospel must be preached ‘to all nations’ (13:10). It is not surprising that Mark, with his interest in Gentile mission, does not mention these early restrictions on Gentile evangelism, particularly since they were removed later: but his recording of this incident shows that he knew of them. At this stage therefore, a Gentile woman had no claim, as a Jewish woman would have had. She must realize that her only hope lay in the uncovenanted mercies of God. Unless she was prepared to approach the Jewish Messiah in the knowledge that she was still a Gentile, outside the old covenant, then her day of healing had not yet come. After the cross, when the ‘dividing wall’ had been broken down, it would be another world (Eph. 2:14), with Jew and Gentile made one in Christ.
28–30. The Syrophoenician woman gladly accepted this humble position as an ‘outsider’, and showed that, even on such terms, she still claimed healing for her daughter. God’s abundance for his children was so rich that even the total outsider could share in it. It was a great Old Testament truth that in Abraham, and therefore in Israel, all nations would be blessed ultimately (Gen. 22:18): she claimed this. In an attempt to avoid the difficulty, some commentators say that the dogs are simply part of the ‘stage scenery’ of the parable, since the whole stress is on the children of the house, whose the food is by right: but this, while true, only highlights the plight of those who have no such rights, not being ‘children’. It is true that in most parables there is a certain amount of ‘back-cloth’ which is incapable of exegesis, but to explain in this way would ignore the express statement that she was a Gentile (26). Other more shallow exegesis would make the healing a mere reward from Jesus, delighted by her quick wit, but there is no hint of this in Mark. To Jesus her reply demonstrated not her wit but the depth of her faith (Matt. 15:28). As often in the Old Testament, what would pass today as a witticism had a solemn religious meaning then. All that really matters to Mark and his readers is that the woman’s daughter was healed (30). As she was a Gentile, this clearly has relevance for the Gentile mission of the church of Mark’s day.
Decapolis, though again largely a Gentile area, had considerable resident Jewish colonies, and was indeed the very region where the healed demoniac had already witnessed so faithfully to what Jesus had done for him (5:20). Even in early days, numbers of Jews had come across from this area to hear the preaching of Jesus (3:8). There is therefore no need to assume necessarily that this man was a Gentile, the more so as Jesus spoke the word of power to him in Aramaic.58 Of course, throughout Syria many of the Gentile population were Aramaic-speaking, under a superficial layer of Hellenism; there cannot have been many Greeks by blood in these country areas, although the frequent use of ‘Greek’ in the New Testament, as the opposite of ‘Jew’, suggests at least a veneer of Greek speech (7:26). Even today, however, Orthodox Jews continue to use ‘Greeks’ in this way, to describe ‘Gentiles’. To Mark’s Gentile readers, the healing of a man from a predominantly Gentile area may well have been a sign of what was to come, irrespective of whether the man himself was Jew or Gentile. But it is probably over-exegesis to see the feeding of the four thousand in chapter 8 as being a feeding of Decapolis ‘Gentile’ crowds, as opposed to the ‘Jewish’ crowds fed in chapter 6, even if chapter 8 is still set in the Decapolis area.
32–35. Here, too, it was the faith of friends that brought the deaf mute to Jesus at first: but, as in the case of the paralytic (2:3–5), Jesus seems to have looked for at least some response in the man himself as well. All the actions of verses 33 and 34 were miming the man’s present need, the process of healing, and the source from which such healing alone could come, in a way which even a deaf mute could understand (the blocked ears opened, the symbolic removal of the speech impediment from the tongue by spitting, the upward glance and sigh of prayer). So there is no need to assume purely vicarious faith here, any more than there is in the case of the paralytic of 2:3. Saving faith, however small, must be exhibited by the subject of salvation: but it is not irrelevant to point out that the faith of his friends came first. For comments on the use of the Aramaic Ephphatha (34), see the discussion on 5:41. Some have felt that the abrupt form of the command indicates an exorcism by Jesus (Anderson): but no mention is made of a demon here, so this is unlikely.
36. Presumably, Jesus, in issuing this command for silence, had no wish to be known as a mere miracle-worker, like some of the early rabbis of the Talmud: wonder-working in itself had no necessary moral or spiritual connotation, any more than magic would. That the result was unwelcome publication of the news and notoriety, contrary to the command and expressed wish of Jesus (the more … the more …), is only an illustration of the strange perversity of human nature of which Paul speaks (Rom. 7:8), and which Augustine feelingly confirms from his own experience. It certainly does not prove, as is sometimes suggested, that Jesus had this very result in mind when he forbade any telling of the incident. Such cheap-jack psychology is utterly inconsistent with the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel, and would defeat the whole purpose of the ‘Messianic secret’.
37. The parallelism between the words of the crowd and Genesis 1:31 may have been unnoticed by the original speakers, but can hardly have escaped unseen by the early church. All God’s creative works are perfect, and so is the manifestation of his Son’s power. Not only God saw that his work was good (Gen. 1:4), but even, on this occasion, humans also. Nevertheless, while it amazed them, it did not enable them to make the equation between Jesus and God: only revelation and faith could do that.
By no process of the imagination can the feeding of the four thousand be regarded as a mere ‘doublet’,59 or a variant account of the feeding of the five thousand. There are too many differences of detail in the stories for this view to be maintained: and both Matthew and Mark contain separate accounts of the two miracles close to each other, which shows that the early church had no such doubts. See on 7:31 for the suggestion that one was a ‘Gentile’ and the other a ‘Jewish’ feeding: but this is most unlikely, and there is certainly no hint in the context of Mark that this is so. A little reflection will show that, in oral tradition, it is far more likely that two originally different accounts should be later assimilated, rather than that two parallel accounts of the same event should be later ‘dissimilated’. Further reflection will show that if we find two stories of generally similar miracles, there is no need to assume that they are necessarily variant accounts of the same miracle. Jesus performed many unrecorded miracles, as the early church knew well (John 21:25). There must have been several similar original incidents in many cases, of which one would live on in one line of tradition and one in another. It is interesting to note that one theory of textual criticism (the multiple source theory) broadly agrees with this: it postulates multiple early variant sources, only later to be ‘ironed out’ into the great major traditions of later days.
2–3. There is a tendency today to spiritualize the miracles so much that we lose sight of their primary meaning, which is that, when Jesus saw anyone cold, hungry, ill or in distress, his heart went out to them in love and pity (verse 2).60 In other words, although the miracles of Jesus were certainly used as ‘signs’ to point a spiritual message, the recipient was not made merely a spiritual ‘stalking-horse’. The root of all ministry, whether physical or spiritual, is this genuine inner constraint, which the New Testament writers unanimously see as the love of Christ, at work in us (2 Cor. 5:14).61 But Jesus did not attempt miraculously to heal every sick person in Israel, nor to feed all the hungry: there was a curious ‘selectiveness’ in his ministry which is explained by pointing to Old Testament examples, to show its consistency with God’s plan. Nevertheless, this particular group in verse 1 had a special claim on his gracious provision for their needs, in that they had not merely sought him for the food that he would give, as those of John 6:26 had. This audience had proved their sense of spiritual values by three days of eager listening to the preaching of Jesus first (verse 2). It was not merely that they were hungry, but that they had become hungry in God’s service, and so theirs was to be an experience of ‘seek first his kingdom … and all these things shall be yours as well’ (Matt. 6:33). Like Jesus in his ministry (3:20), in their hunger to know and do God’s will, they had scarcely been conscious of their own physical hunger up to this moment. For such people, Jesus would work a miracle, and give them the food that they had not sought first.
4–7. This time, the disciples’ question as to the source of the supply (4) was one of sheer bewilderment. Their own resources were so small that they had never even thought of them as a possibility; and once again they had not taken Jesus into account. So little had they learned from the feeding of the five thousand; equally little were they to learn from this new miracle, as we see from verse 21 of this same chapter. This failure to learn from the second miracle is the strongest possible confirmation of the truth of the statement that the first miracle had left no impression on them: their attitude was constant throughout. There is still a puzzle, it is true; but it becomes now the puzzle as to the reason for such continual failure to understand that the paucity of their own resources was irrelevant. Modesty and self-distrust, even a shrinking from the task, is an essential preliminary to all Christian service: but, once we are convinced of God’s call, to persist in such an attitude betrays lack of faith in God’s power, and is therefore culpable (Exod. 4:14). The siting of the feeding in the desert may be highly significant, as Minear points out. Israel had been fed by God with manna in the desert, and, in the messianic age, the desert was to blossom (Isa. 35:1–10).
8–9. It has often been pointed out that the spyris, the word used for basket here, is quite different from the kophinos, or travelling basket, used to store the fragments in the former miracle (6:43). In fact, the spyris seems to have been a flexible bag rather than stiff wickerwork (see Morris on ‘John’, NICNT, p. 345, note 25). These little differences of vocabulary must go back to the original tradition; otherwise it is hard to account for the fixity of the vocabulary in either case. The kophinos was essentially a Jewish ‘travelling-bag’ as we can see from Roman accounts, commonly used by travelling salesmen, or ‘bagmen’ in the ancient world. Luggage made of wickerwork is still standard in many parts of the third world today for its cheapness and lightness.
There is no need to see any spiritual symbolism in the numbers. The twelve ‘vendor’s baskets’ would doubtless be those regularly carried by the twelve apostles, hence the number. The seven baskets now borrowed (it is unlikely that peripatetic preachers carried such things around with them) simply pin the story to history as surely as does the number ‘four thousand’ for the crowd. Such a figure as this could in no sense be used either symbolically or metaphorically for a large number, as five or ten thousand could perhaps have been.
This is an account of a mission to Dalmanutha (or Magadan, Matt. 15:39) apparently on the opposite shore of the lake (10). It might have been as spiritually fruitful as any other place, but seems to have failed to achieve any spiritual results, because it was met from the outset by a stubbornly ‘theological’ opposition on the part of the argumentative and unbelieving Pharisees. We may compare the attitude in Nazareth, where little exercise of the miraculous power of Jesus was possible because of stubborn unbelief (6:5–6). It is striking that in both cases the stumbling-block to faith was self-important knowledge, whether theological knowledge here, or knowledge of the local origin of Jesus in the case of the people of Nazareth. Knowledge is not of course wrong, but, as Paul says, it can ‘puff up’ (1 Cor. 8:1) and create pride, which is a spiritual obstacle: it is love that ‘builds up’.
11–13. This demand by the Pharisees for a sign is so significant that it is recorded in all four gospels. The reaction of Jesus (he sighed deeply in his spirit, 12) may be impatience which he always showed towards lack of faith in those who might be expected to possess it. Compare his reaction towards the faithless and powerless disciples, at the foot of the mountain of transfiguration (9:19). It is clear that unbelief lay at the root of the Pharisaic attitude too. To those in such a state of unbelief, even a sign if given would not convince, for these Pharisees must surely have already heard of some at least of the many miracles which had already taken place in Galilee, such as the feeding of the four thousand just before. John’s Gospel rightly says that the difficulty lies in the will, not the intellect, as far as acceptance of the ‘signs’ of Jesus is concerned (John 7:17).62
But even apart from the impossibility of convincing people against their will by mere signs, such an attitude of sign-seeking strikes at the root of the biblical concept of the nature of faith. It might be theoretically possible to base a belief upon signs and wonders, but this sort of ‘belief’ would not be ‘faith’, but only a logical conclusion (Schweizer). Perhaps this is yet another reason why Jesus used his undoubted miraculous powers so sparingly, and only in response to already existent faith. So Jesus refused the request of the Pharisees of Dalmanutha, and left the place (verse 13).
By contrast, to the Christian, ‘believing is seeing’. Hebrews 11:1 presses this still further: the eye of faith sees here and now what actually has yet to be realized in the future, and so obtains strength to endure.63 This was the faith which Peter soon to express, in 8:29, in defiance of all outward appearances.
In this section, again, the lack of spiritual perception of the disciples is brought out, although the rebuke loses some of its sting, when we realize that the story owes its very preservation and recording to the recollections of one at least of this very group. Hence we have not merely a condemnation of the disciples by Jesus, but a condemnation of the disciples by themselves as they remembered. There is no need (with Nineham) to see this episode as a deliberate creation by Mark: as usual, he is bluntly telling the truth, and showing the disciples exactly as they were, faults and all.
14. It does not appear that Jesus was greatly concerned as to whether they had brought bread or not: he had already shown that he could meet their needs. But the disciples certainly were worried about it, and probably they had a guilty conscience about their oversight. This can be seen both from the use of the words had forgotten (14), and from the way in which, as soon as Jesus mentioned leaven (15), their minds at once flew to this point. Psychologically, this is very true to life: they expected to be blamed for their culpable lack of foresight, and so they saw reproof where none was intended. They were not blamed by Jesus for their lack of foresight, but for their lack of faith. We look for good business men in his disciples, but God looks for saints, in whom businesslike qualities are of course encouraged (Rom. 12:11; 1 Cor. 14:40).
15. Jesus, by his use of the word leaven here, was using a pithy one-word parable for unseen pervasive influence. This influence was something that unfitted for the service of God, if we are to judge from the analogy of the use of unleavened bread in Old Testament religious festivals (see Lev. 2:4, etc.) and Paul’s ‘cleanse out the old leaven’ (1 Cor. 5:7), referring to the well-known Hebrew custom in both biblical and modern times of clearing the home of yeast, before Passover is celebrated. Yeast is in this context clearly a biblical symbol of sin: but the clarity with which it bears that meaning here is due to the direct association with ‘Pharisees’ and ‘Herod’. In itself, the symbolism of ‘yeast’ is merely that of unseen pervasive spreading, as in the parable of the kingdom (Matt. 13:33). Admittedly some exegetes have been forced, by a false ideal of consistency, to see the picture even here as one of the spreading of evil within the church: but the more natural meaning would seem to be simply the gradual spread of the church within the world.64
What then was the insidious danger that lay before the little band of disciples, the proto-church at that time? It was the danger of allowing their thinking to be approximated and assimilated to that of the world around them, the world of the Pharisees and Herodians, two religious and political circles respectively of their day.65 In the Old Testament, Israel had been warned of the gulf between God’s thinking and its own (Isa. 55:8), and Jesus’ words of rebuke to Peter would underline this in the New Testament (8:33). The leaven of the Pharisees was hypocrisy (7:6), while the leaven of Herod (a variant reading has Herodians) may have been that procrastinating time-serving which had led Herod first to imprison John the Baptist, then to execute him, though fighting his own conscience all the time (6:14–29). Matthew 16:6 has ‘Sadducees’ in place of Herod or Herodians here: they were the shrewd, wealthy, priestly aristocracy, with a worldly leavening influence at least as dangerous as that of the hard religious formalism of the Pharisees. But at each stage of the history of the church, the exact source and nature of the danger changes, while the danger itself remains. Vigilance is always necessary (14:38).
16. The Greek hoti, untranslated in RSV (AV, because), may be used here merely as a particle to introduce a direct quotation. A lively translation would then be: ‘They reasoned “But we have no bread at all!”’ NIV paraphrases more tamely as ‘“It is because we have no bread.”’
17. ‘Why do you discuss?’ The Greek word dialogizomai represents a mental activity which often has a bad sense in the gospels, like meteōrizomai, ‘to be doubtful’, or tarassomai, ‘to be troubled’. It is not their discussion which is being condemned, but the lack both of faith and of spiritual perceptiveness which had given rise to the discussion in the first place. They are still as blind and spiritually obtuse as ever: this is what grieves Jesus. Even the experience of God’s provision of their physical needs during their preaching trip of chapter 6 (note especially v. 8 no bread), had left no mark on them.
18–21. The disciples credited Jesus with spiritual insight, and did see in his previous remark supernatural perception, but limited that perception to material objects: they thought that he was referring to their lack of bread. They were so blinded by their immediate bodily needs that they had again forgotten to seek first God’s kingdom, with the faith that, as they did this, their bodily needs would be met, as those of the hungry crowds had been met twice already (verses 19 and 20). As Jesus said, they still did not understand (verse 21): see again 6:8, where Jesus had forbidden them to make provision for their own needs, and yet those needs had obviously been met by God (Luke 22:35).
The disciples had been blinded to spiritual truths by their constant preoccupation with their own immediate bodily needs. It was only fitting therefore that the next miracle should be the opening of the eyes of the physically blind man of Bethsaida, as a picture of what God would yet do for them. It is also fitting that 8:29, immediately below, should contain the account of the opening of the eyes of Peter to the Messiahship of Jesus, and that chapter 9 should contain the story of the transfiguration. Of course, we are specifically told that Jesus healed many blind in the course of his ministry (Luke 7:21), but this particular miracle is recorded only in Mark, naturally enough, if it occurred in Bethsaida, the home town of Peter (John 1:44), and if Mark, even indirectly, depends on Petrine tradition. No name is recorded: with the exception of Bartimaeus (10:46), such people are usually nameless in the gospels, particularly in Mark.
22. It is clear from the words brought and begged in this verse that, as in other miracles, the faith of others besides the afflicted man was also involved. Here is the great gospel warrant for intercessory prayer to God on behalf of others, both on behalf of the physically sick and of the spiritually blind.
23. The taking by the hand is an eyewitness touch, particularly appropriate in the case of a blind man, as is the leading out of the village of the sightless man, bewildered by the noise of the crowd, to a place of quiet, where he can hear and understand Jesus whom he cannot yet see. The saliva applied by Jesus to the man’s eyes is unlikely to have been used for its supposed therapeutic effect. It was simply an acted parable, to draw the man’s attention to what Jesus was about to do. The laying on of hands by Jesus would have the same effect; touch means more than sound to a blind man, and only by touch could the meaning of Jesus be conveyed. There must be an understanding by him of the act of Jesus before that act could become revelation. Unexplained miracle, unrelated to God’s loving purpose, is too close to magic, and of magic we have no instance in the Bible, except outside a Christian context, where it is strictly condemned (Acts 19:19–20).
24. The point of the man’s reply seems to be that he could and did see, but indistinctly. There are non-biblical parallels to this sort of phrase (see BAGD), but the contrast with the adverb tēlaugōs, clearly, in verse 25, makes the meaning abundantly plain in any case. We must not blame the excited man for inaccurate description: after all, he had seen neither people nor trees before until that moment, though he was doubtless familiar with both by touch. The English use of the word ‘trunk’ for the body of both tree and human does denote a basic visual similarity between the two. The unusual nature of the reply (one would expect ‘yes’ or ‘no’), and its vivid detail assures us that we are dealing with a well-remembered tradition.
25. Scripture does not make plain why two applications of the hands of Jesus were necessary here: was it a lack of faith on the recipient’s part? Nowhere else is such twofold healing action recorded of Jesus.66 But the important theological point is not how difficult the healing was, nor what the peculiar nature of the difficulty was, but that Jesus did not desist till the man was completely healed (cf. Paul’s confidence, expressed in Phil. 1:6). The very fact that Jesus, after laying his hands on him, asked the man whether he could ‘see anything’ (23) suggests that he was conscious of some lack of faith in the blind man. There was no need to ask such a question of others, for they were completely healed. At Nazareth, Jesus had not been able to do many miracles, because of their unbelief (6:5–6): perhaps this is a similar instance of little faith.
26. Jesus does not want to be known as a miracle-worker; and so (as in 7:36) he forbids the man to tell others. He is to go straight to his home: he is not to go even into his own village first, for fear the news spreads. In a village, there are no secrets: the alternative manuscript reading, warning him not to speak about it to anyone in the village, therefore comes to the same thing. Whether the man obeyed or disobeyed, we do not know: but certainly the story of the healing made a great impression on the disciples, and found its way into the tradition, perhaps because of the incident which followed.