Now with chapters 11 and 12 begin the Jerusalem days. Mark gives a graphic account of the triumphal entry, the deep impression of which upon the apostolic band may be seen by its recording by all three synoptics, as well as in John (John 12:12–19).1 The triumphal entry of the Messiah into his capital city was the fulfilment of many an Old Testament prophecy; here at least was nothing to stumble the disciples. But the mission of the two disciples which preceded it was still a mission of faith, for they went forth into the unknown in trust and obedience to their Master’s word. It was, further, like all such missions, one ‘through faith for faith’ (Rom. 1:17), for naturally their faith for the future would be immeasurably strengthened by finding that every detail was as Jesus had said (4). Jesus always seems to have sent his disciples out in fellowship, as here, even if it was only ‘two by two’ (6:7). The solitary Christian is never a biblical ideal; it was left to later Christian ages to introduce the monachos, the ‘on-his-own’, or ‘monk’, and the erēmitēs, the ‘hermit’, that is, the one ‘living in the wilderness’, where no others live.
2–5. This is only one instance out of several where Jesus shows supernatural knowledge of what will afterwards occur or be afterwards found in another place: compare his words to the two disciples who go to get ready the Passover (14:13). Admittedly, in both cases, the individuals to whom the disciples were sent must already have been friends or followers of the Lord, or else the words, put by Jesus into the mouth of his disciples, would have fallen upon deaf ears. But the actual circumstances described to the disciples in either case required prophetic foreknowledge, of the type sometimes granted to prophets of Old Testament days (cf. 1 Sam. 10:1–6). It is of course possible, and has been claimed by some scholars, that what we have here is not an instance of prophetic foreknowledge, but evidence of a prior arrangement: this might fit this instance, but is less likely.
6. Here is a good example of the power committed to the disciple of acting in the Master’s name2 and asking at the Master’s bidding. At his word, the disciple may do as Elijah did for Elisha, and claim another for the Lord’s service (1 Kgs 19:19). The sole justification needed is that the Lord needs such a one (verse 3): even if we translate ho kyrios as ‘his owner’ instead of ‘the Lord’ (which seems banal in this context), the point can still be maintained. Compared with the claim that Jesus makes, the rights of all those who stand in the position of the ‘owner’ in the text shrink into insignificance; not even father and mother have the right to withhold one whom Jesus calls to his service.
7–8. The first few pieces of clothing laid on the donkey’s back by the disciples were no doubt strictly utilitarian, to serve as a rough saddle, but those garments hurled recklessly on the road, like the leafy branches, were purely in his honour as a king.3 So a Davidic conqueror should be greeted, on his triumphal ride into his capital. That day, all had a share, however small, in the sacrifice associated with such a ride; for if one gave the donkey, others sacrificed their clothing; and, on this day at least, none spoke of such sacrifices as being waste. Love’s extravagance in self-giving always goes unrebuked by Jesus, though not always by others (14:4), as the woman of Bethany was to find to her cost. The reason for this is to be found in the self-giving of Jesus for our sake (2 Cor. 8:9): that is why ‘God loves a cheerful giver’ (2 Cor. 9:7).
9–10. The song of the pilgrim crowds (not necessarily the same as the Jerusalem mob that called for the crucifixion of Jesus within a few days, 15:14) made the meaning of the identification of Jesus with the Son of David clearer. To the crowds, Jesus was ‘the Coming One’ (cf. John the Baptist’s wording, in 1:7), the expected king of David’s line, about to establish his earthly kingdom there and then. This was still an expectation of the disciples even after the resurrection (see Acts 1:6). If the word hosanna was anything more than a pious liturgical exclamation at that time (cf. ‘amen’ and ‘hallelujah’), then it was a cry to this Davidic King, pleading for immediate salvation: ‘save us, now, we beg.’ Bartimaeus had called Jesus ‘Son of David’ and begged for help: were these crowds doing the same? But history would show that, unlike Bartimaeus, their blindness remained.
That certain of the Pharisees took grave exception to the theological implications of such an attribution is clear from the other gospels (e.g. Luke 19:39). In Mark, however, we have no reference to this opposition as yet, until after the cleansing of the temple (verse 18).
Mark alone makes clear that Jesus made a preliminary inspection of the temple on the evening of arrival in Jerusalem, but that, probably owing to the lateness of the hour, nothing further was done until the next day. This, again, is a small piece of factual information, maybe derived from the Petrine reminiscences, which was lost in the other traditions, overshadowed in them by the magnitude of the actual cleansing of the temple on the next day. It also gives one of the little details of the domestic life of Jesus: he did not sleep in Jerusalem itself, crowded with pilgrims for the festival and full of his enemies, but at a welcoming home in Bethany4 (presumably that of Mary and Martha, John 11:1). Even Bethany, with all the other surrounding ‘outer suburbs’, was probably crowded with pilgrims over festival time, so that the presence of Jesus and the twelve would not arouse particular comment. Is it symbolic that Israel’s Messiah could find no place within Jerusalem, but must lodge outside the walls at Bethany (Minear)?
The resources of a Bethany household may have been somewhat strained by this extra group of Galilean fishermen and peasants. To be hungry at such an hour in the morning would be quite unusual. Unless we realize that this whole event was an acted parable we shall be puzzled by all sorts of irrelevant questions. The tree gave outward promise of fruit but nothing more: so its punishment was to remain eternally barren. In a sense, this withering of the tree was only a perpetuation of its present fruitless condition. The fig tree and the vine are two time-honoured symbols of Israel (cf. 12:1–12 for the symbol of the vine), to whom God’s Son had now come, looking for fruit and finding none, though there was outward religious profession in plenty. Henceforth, Israel was to be withered and fruitless; the physical judgment of AD 70 was only an outward sign of this. Immediately below the fig tree passage, in verses 15–19, there comes the further acted parable of the cleansing of the temple. God came to his temple looking for spiritual fruit and found none; so it was inevitable that the judgment of 13:1–2 be pronounced, that, of the temple in all its splendour, not one stone would be left standing upon another.5 Like tree, like temple; like temple, like nation; the parallel is exact. But Mark’s Gentile audience would have no cause to rejoice in this, for Paul warns us that all this is to make us tremble and search our hearts (Rom. 11:21), lest God have cause to do so to us Gentiles as well.
Not the season for figs (13). As it stands, the Greek clearly means ‘It was not the right time of the year for figs’, and it would be unfair to translate ‘its season for figs’, as if referring to this tree only, just to avoid a difficulty. But it is fair to say that presumably Jesus was hoping for the small ‘early ripe’ figs, small protuberances that ripen with the leaves, before the main fig crop, and are considered a great delicacy (Hos. 9:10). It is absurd to suggest that a country person like Jesus would not have known at what time figs were ripe. See 13:28 for the leafing of the fig tree as a sign of summer’s coming, indeed, the first sign.
The Greek particle ara, if, suggests that the finding of figs was only an unlikely possibility contemplated by Jesus. He was therefore in no sense surprised by the tree’s unfruitfulness, as he would have been had it been the time of the regular fig crop. This ‘nature miracle’ is unusual in that it is the only one of a destructive nature performed by Jesus, unless we include the drowning of the Gadarene swine. This was necessarily so, in the case of the fig tree, if it was to be a ‘sign’ of coming judgment on God’s people. Like all such ‘nature signs’ in the gospel, it is performed by Jesus himself and not by a disciple acting on his behalf, as in the case of healings and expulsion of demons.
In a context like this, it is important to notice how different were the aspects of the situation which angered the Pharisees and priests from those which angered Jesus. Both had a high concept of the nature of the temple; but their concepts were fundamentally different. The Pharisees, according to the other gospels at least, had been shocked beyond measure by the words of the children calling out in the temple (Matt. 21:15), but were not in the least perturbed by the uproar of the merchants and the money-changers. After all, they may have reasoned, these services were for the furtherance and convenience of the ceremonial worship, that outward religious form which meant everything to them. There is plenty of early evidence to suggest that the priests also benefited financially by this traffic; the high priest in particular seems to have owned shops in the temple area, presumably around the ‘Court of the Gentiles’, the only area into which non-Jews might enter. They were doubtless also shocked by the prediction by Jesus of ruin to the holy place (13:2), of which they must have heard, and certainly scandalized by his prediction, as they thought, of building the temple again in three days (14:57). But for him, the supreme blasphemy was that this place, which was to have been in God’s purpose a place of prayer for non-Jewish people of every nation, instead of being exclusively a Jewish national sanctuary, should have become a business-house, and for dishonest business at that (11:17). Those familiar with such markets can easily imagine all the petty cheating and haggling that took place in the very shadow of the temple that symbolized God’s presence. It is natural that Mark, a gospel written for the Gentiles, should record the passionate concern of Jesus that Gentiles should be able to worship God in the temple.6
15–16. The vigour with which Jesus dealt with these previously tolerated retailers and financiers left a vivid impression not only on the Pharisees, but also upon his disciples; to them, ‘the wrath of the Lamb’ was a new experience (Rev. 6:16).7 But, if his own followers were amazed, so was the whole crowd: this was new teaching as far as they were concerned, especially at the time of a great Jewish festival like Passover. There is no evidence that they objected, however; it was left to the chief priests and scribes to plan his death from that moment (verse 18). Did they see already a threat to the exclusiveness of Judaism, with the inclusion of the Gentiles in worship?
The attitude of Jesus to the temple is an interesting study, although we must look at other gospels to find the details. The temple (and indeed Judaism) is not a central concern of Mark in the way that it is of Matthew, for instance. His world is that of the synagogue and the overseas mission of the church among the Gentiles, with Galilee rather than Judea as its focus: to that extent at least, Marxsen is correct.
The scale of commercial operations in the temple courts was staggering, by any standards. According to Schweizer, a single merchant once offered three thousand sheep for sale in one day. This very scale has led some commentators to suggest that Jesus performed only a token cleansing of one particular area. But this is not the picture in Mark, and would scarcely have roused the anger of the authorities to such a degree (verse 18).
It seems that the view of the temple here expressed by Jesus was not primarily as a place of sacrifice, still less as a static dwelling-place for God, but a place of prayer and teaching, and an outward reflection to humankind of God’s very nature. Jesus neither despised nor minimized the temple, as we can see from the wrath that its profanation aroused within him. It is in the light of this unexpected side of his character that we can see how he appeared to some of his contemporaries as an ‘Elijah returned’ (6:15): see Malachi 3:1–4 for the prophecy of the purification of the temple, and, for the return of Elijah, Malachi 4:5.
It is not strange that this concept of the temple taught by Jesus continues to be exactly that of the early disciples; they go to the temple at what is to them the ‘hour of prayer’ (Acts 3:1), though it is actually the hour of the evening sacrifice. The colonnades of the temple are where the teachers of the new ‘sect’ sit expounding the ‘way’ exactly as Jesus had done before them (Acts 3:11), until expelled by the parent body of Judaism. This concept of the temple is indeed far closer to that of the synagogue than that of the temple proper; for synagogues were, by definition, places for prayer (Acts 16:13) and instruction (Acts 13:15). But non-Jewish people must still wait to find a place of acceptance in the temple (Acts 21:28). Within the synagogue, on the other hand, the non-Jewish proselyte was always welcome. Seeing that, while the temple may have given a picture of the church theologically, the synagogue was almost certainly the pattern upon which the local church was organized, this point has vast theological implications.8
17. The Greek verb edidasken, taught (i.e. ‘continued teaching’), implies a deliberate teaching programme adopted by Jesus rather than a casual pronouncement, uttered in the heat of anger, amid the wreck of the temple stalls. After the event, Jesus is giving scriptural justification for his action, as any rabbi would. The Scripture quoted by him is Isaiah 56:7, telling how foreign proselytes will one day be welcomed to the temple.9 It is noteworthy that Jesus here quotes only the clause in Isaiah about prayer, and omits that about offering sacrifice, for he himself was soon to be the sacrifice that would unite Jew and non-Jew in one (John 11:51–52). With Isaiah 56:7 is joined here Jeremiah 7:11, a verse which comes in the midst of a searing indictment of the Jews of Jeremiah’s day, whose lives were in utter contradiction to the outward worship which they offered. The quotation would gain force from the fact that Jeremiah, too, had preached it in the temple of his day. It came with a warning about the destruction of Shiloh, and the prophecy that, as God had abandoned Shiloh, so he would abandon Jerusalem and his temple there (Jer. 7:14).
18. Small wonder that the chief priests and scribes now began to plot his death; his meaning was only too plain and they feared him. The amazement of the crowds of pilgrims as they listened to his teaching was not without some fear, too, to judge from the strong Greek verb used, exeplēsseto, was astonished. Not since the days before the fall of the first temple had they heard such explicit words of doom; one wonders how many of them lived to see the great stones topple over, one by one, into the fire in AD 70 some forty years later. Few of the generation who had heard Jesus preach would outlive that disaster, except the infant church, which took its Lord’s advice and fled to Pella in Transjordan (13:14). It is fashionable in some quarters today to deny this flight, but otherwise it is hard to see how the church of Jerusalem would have survived in the general turmoil.
19. It would scarcely have been safe for him to have spent the night in the city now, with so many foes actively plotting his death; but Bethany was still safe, and so there he presumably returned (cf. verse 12).
Jesus does not explain to the disciples why he had cursed the barren fig tree; that we must infer from the passage above (verses 12–14). Instead, he uses the incident here as an illustration of the effectual nature of prayer. Only the Marcan account records that it was Peter who observed the withering; this may possibly show a Petrine source. It is typical of Mark’s style that he ‘sandwiches’ the prophecy of the destruction of the temple between the two halves of the story of the cursing of the fig tree, thus making the application of the parable perfectly plain to his readers.
The disciples did not, as we might today, find any moral problem in the cursing of the fig tree; indeed, if this is seen as an acted parable with reference to Israel, it drops into place at once. Their only reaction was amazement that the cursing by Jesus has been so effectual (11:21) and so immediate. Blessing (10:16) and cursing (14) may both come fittingly from the lips of Jesus, but not from ours (Jas 3:10). Our human cursing would be light and unthinking; his was of the nature of the pronouncement of a solemn sentence, in a prayer that would be fulfilled. This is a reminder to us that prayer is not simply asking God for the pleasant things which we may desire, but an earnest yearning for, and entering into, the will of God, for ourselves and others, whether it is sweet or bitter. This was the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane (14:35–36), and such prayers will always be answered by God.
22–24. Jesus is, in addition, rebuking their lack of faith in him, shown by their utter astonishment when his cursing of the fig tree produced such sudden and drastic results. Wither a fig tree? Given faith, they could uproot mountains (a common rabbinic phrase), and hurl them into the sea. It is obvious, then, that this need for faith when praying was a constant point of the teaching of Jesus which he reiterated to his disciples in various forms to fit different occasions. Faith is not chosen arbitrarily as a condition of prayer: it is the basic condition of all our relationship with God (Heb. 11:6), including prayer. Even on the basis of this faith, however, we may not generalize and think that we can remove any ‘mountains’ and wither any ‘fig trees’ at will. Mountains will truly be removed, but at God’s will, not ours (1 John 5:14). The metaphor is not of course to be taken literally; we never read of Jesus moving mountains physically, although, as Creator-God, he calmed the storm (4:39) and fed the crowds (6:41) and here withered the fig tree (11:21).
25. There is another ‘condition’ of prayer stated by Jesus here, and that is forgiveness of our fellows. This, too, is not arbitrary; we have no inherent right to be heard by God; all is his grace and undeserved favour. But, unless we forgive our fellows freely, it shows that we have no consciousness of the grace that we ourselves have received and need, and so it shows that we are expecting to be heard on our own merits, which cannot be. Mark does not record the ‘Lord’s prayer’ (Matt. 6:12), for whatever reason, but this certainly reiterates one of its clauses.
26. This verse is omitted in several important MSS and may have entered from the very similar saying in Matthew 6:15. In any case, whether properly belonging here or not, the verse not only expresses a logical deduction from verse 25, but also a solemn theological truth. This is not an arbitrary refusal by God to forgive us. We, by our own unforgiving spirit, have made it impossible to accept the forgiveness freely offered by God, since we refuse to adopt the only attitude in which it can be appropriated.
The rumblings of the coming storm grow louder. As Jesus continued to teach the crowds in the temple (see verse 17), the authorities came, angrily demanding to know ‘in whose name’ this Galilean rabbi taught; whose disciple was he, or what official commission had he to show? Only such rabbinic authority or commissioning could warrant and justify to them his cavalier way of dealing with the temple vendors.10 True, Jesus taught in his own name, unlike the scribes, with their continual quotation of precedents (1:22): but he also claimed, and clearly displayed, God’s direct authority in so doing. It was a realization of this divine authority that drew his disciples to him (4:41): it was failure to see it, or rather unwillingness to admit it, that condemned the Pharisees. So Jesus, instead of giving them a direct answer, tells them that his authority stems from the same source as that of John the Baptist. Their greatest condemnation is that they do not seem to have considered this question as a moral probe, but purely as an intellectual trap. Their query as they sought to reply was not ‘true or false?’ but ‘safe or unsafe?’ Similarly, the popular conviction (verse 32) that John’s authority was of God was seen by them, not as an example of a truth hidden from the wise and revealed to the simple, but only as a possible personal danger, if they dissented from it. So, as a crowning irony, they blandly said they did not know (verse 33), whereupon Jesus showed what he thought of such deliberate pretended ignorance by saying, neither will I tell you. The root of the trouble lay not in their intellect, but in their stubborn wills: they stood self-condemned. The question of Jesus to them was not a trap; it was yet another opportunity for them to realize and confess their blindness, and to ask for sight. Theirs was the unforgivable sin, that constant wilful opposition and blindness that is the sin against the Holy Spirit (3:29). If it is true that there is a way to hell from the gates of heaven, as Bunyan has it, then it is equally true that there is a way to heaven from the gates of hell: yet here were those who contemptuously refused to take it.
The parable of the wicked tenant farmers follows very naturally upon the final refusal by the Pharisees to consider seriously the source of the authority of Jesus. In so doing, they refused to admit the obvious fact that they knew its source already. This next parable is, in consequence, a parable of judgment. It is more properly the parable of the rejection of the landlord’s son, than the parable of the wicked tenant farmers, although his rejection is at once the logical result and the supreme proof of their wickedness.
1. As soon as Jesus began to speak, seeing that the Old Testament ‘back-cloth’ of the parable was Isaiah 5:1–7, everyone would know that he referred to Israel – referred to them, in fact – and that this was yet another parable of judgment. All the details of the landowner’s care and preparation of the vineyard are borrowed from Isaiah, though the concept of the tenant farmer is new.11 Whatever the mistakes of the Pharisees, one common mistake of ours they did not make. Their very anger showed their realization that the words of Jesus were directed to them personally (verse 12) and not innocuously aimed at some third party. They did not need to be told that such a parable was ‘paraenetic’: they knew it at once.
2–5. Even the maltreatment of the prophets by their forebears was readily admitted by later Israel (Matt. 23:29–32), for this did not compromise them. Indeed, they prided themselves on their superior spiritual insight, and on showing their piety by building fine tombs for these ancient martyrs. As Jesus drily said, this only showed their identification with their ancestors: one generation killed the prophets, while another generation buried them, as if consenting to the crime (Luke 11:48). Every generation can always see the spiritual blindness of its forebears, but never its own.
6–8. As often in the New Testament, agapētos, beloved, probably here has the force of ‘only’, a sense which is more specifically brought out in this context by the use of hena, one. The uniqueness of the position of Jesus and the extraordinary exhibition of the grace of God in sending him are alike manifested in this word. There is a pathos in the owner’s phrase they will respect my son, but it also contains a truth, for the one who wants to receive the Father not only will but must receive the Son (9:37). The position of Jesus is both similar to, and yet very different from, that of the prophets who came to Israel before him, for there is a finality in his coming. God can, as it were, do no more. Christ is God’s last word to humanity. So judgment is at once passed on the wicked tenant farmers, although the execution of that judgment may be stayed as, in a sense, it is stayed throughout this present age, in spite of a temporal judgment falling upon the Jerusalem of that generation. From now on, the demand made is repentance for our share in that crime (cf. Acts 2:23, 38). This is very different from the message brought by the earlier ‘servants’ the prophets, whose demand was for that spiritual ‘fruit’, which alone could justify the ‘tenant farmers’ in the ‘landowner’s’ eyes. It was not through their failure to recognize the Son that they killed him; that would have been pardonable. It was, as in the parable, precisely because they recognized him for who he was (verse 7): they said, in essence, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours’ (see verse 7). We reject the claims of Christ not because we misunderstand them, but because we understand them only too well, in spite of all our protestations to the contrary.
9. Mark simply records here the judgment of Jesus on the tenant farmers. Matthew 21:41 contains a graphic addition, making clear that the ‘sentence’ pronounced was the spontaneous verdict of the crowd, carried away by the graphic parable. This is very true to the third world: in open air preaching, preachers soon learn not to ask rhetorical questions, or they will assuredly get rhetorical answers from their uninhibited local congregation, as here. Once again the spontaneous moral judgments of unsophisticated folk are vindicated, as against the blindness of the self-styled ‘wise’.
The item in the condemnation that seems to have enraged them beyond all bounds was the promised giving of the vineyard to others. This struck a blow at the position of Israel as ‘the most favoured nation’; the reference to the Gentiles was plain, and they could not stomach it, as is shown by their reaction in verse 12.
10. This quotation is from Psalm 118:22, the very Psalm from which, at the triumphal entry, the earlier pilgrim cry of ‘hosanna’ (11:9) had been taken,12 as well as the ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ (11:10). The Lord’s coming is for judgment as well as salvation, as the tenant farmers will find to their cost.
Jesus is himself the rejected stone, now become, in God’s good purpose, the keystone of the building which is the new temple, the Christian church, his body. But in a sense the Gentiles too, once despised by Israel, yet now finding a place as ‘living stones’ in God’s plan (1 Pet. 2:5), may also be included in the wider meaning of the verse. Contemptuously rejected they might have been, but yet they are chosen by God. This was the miracle that the Lord had done and which was truly marvellous in Gentile eyes (verse 11), among whom Mark’s readers must surely have been numbered.
11. All that we can do, as always, is to bow our heads in reverence and marvel at the plan of God, as the Psalmist does here. The quotation from the psalter is to show us that this plan is nothing new, but God’s eternal way of working; there is a divine consistency in God’s dealing with us (Mal. 3:6). Have you not read this scripture is ironic, directed as it is to those whose whole business and indeed profession was the study of the Old Testament.
12. The Pharisees regarded Jesus from now on as a dangerous revolutionary, deliberately intent on arousing the crowds against them. Later the same charge would be brought against his disciples (Acts 17:6 and 24:5), with just as little reason or justification. Did Gentile Christians at Rome see any parallel to their own case, when they were made the scapegoats and persecuted by Nero after the great fire of AD 64?
Now begins the terrible game of ‘cat and mouse’, the endless Pharisaic manoeuvring that will end in the death of Jesus. The first question about the source of his authority had left them helpless (11:33), but perhaps he can be caught in the same way himself, and be condemned on a political charge. If Jesus had placed them upon the horns of a dilemma, where either answer was unsafe because of the crowd, they will try to do the same with him. The Herodians do not seem to have been a coherent sect in the sense that Pharisees or Sadducees were, but probably were a political pressure group, cutting across other divisions, made up of those who saw in the support of the unscrupulous but outwardly orthodox Herod the hope of Israel; and that meant acceptance of Rome as overlord. As there is no reference to the Herodians outside the New Testament and dependent literature, however, certainty is impossible. Clearly to Mark and his sources, they were an identifiable group, and equally clearly they were opposed to Jesus: more we cannot say with confidence.
14. Nothing is more horrible than the smooth plausibility of the approach, as though they could flatter Jesus into abandoning all caution and compromising himself. The point is that any religious teacher who was a regarder of the position of men, who looked on outer show and not inner reality, would certainly be afraid to say or do anything that could be construed as an insult towards Caesar. Into this political trap they sought to lead him. Yet if he avoided this trap, and lent his authority to the payment of tribute to the hated Roman, the Zealots of hot-tempered Galilee would certainly be alienated: and did not Jesus number at least one such among his disciples (see 3:18)? More, the bulk of the non-Judaean pilgrims, who had so tumultuously escorted into Jerusalem their prophet from Nazareth (Matt. 21:11), were likewise Galileans, always suspect at festival time (Luke 13:1) as likely to riot. If their support was removed, Jesus would be isolated and outwardly helpless.
15. Such hypocrisy, or play-acting, did not deceive him, and he did not conceal the fact from them. From such hollow sham the Son of God must have turned with loathing; the strongest charge that he brought against teacher of the law and Pharisee was that they were utterly insincere (7:6). Jesus was therefore aware of their trick from the start.
16. The production of a coin as an illustration was a typical rabbinic touch, but the use made of it here was new. It is significant of his poverty that Jesus had no coin himself, but had to ask for one. By the acceptance of the imperial coinage, marked by the head and title of the reigning emperor, the Jews had already shown their acceptance of imperial rule, even if unwillingly. There is a world of bitterness in the terseness of their one-word reply, Caesar’s: not even Pharisees or Herodians would have chosen that position.
17. So came the reply of Jesus, with its irresistible logic, which is: the coin already belongs to Caesar: give it back, then, to him. Translated into theological terms, it becomes the Christian acceptance of the state, as an institution ordained by God; this is strongly advanced by Paul (Rom. 13:1–2) and Peter (1 Peter 2:13–14). If we accept the amenities of the state, in law and order, expressed in a guaranteed coinage as in other things, then we have no right to seek to escape the burdens imposed by the state. But this lesson Jesus would leave his audience to infer. If he had spoken so openly here, the Pharisees would have used it as a handle against him, to stir up the Zealots. The Zealots probably did not yet exist as a coherent party (the evidence is conflicting), but certainly Zealot elements were in existence since 6 BC at least. Jesus consistently rejected the path of violence chosen by Sicarii and Zealots, though he may have striven for some of the same goals by peaceful means (so Belo).
To any listening Zealot, the first clause render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s would have been the sting in the answer.13 But the true sting for the Pharisee was in the tail, and to God the things that are God’s, for none of them would dare to say that they were already giving God his full due. Even those trained lawyers were baffled by such an answer; there was no handle that they could use against Jesus, so they were amazed. And yet it may be that we have here one reason why the Galilean pilgrim crowd made no attempt to rescue their prophet at a later stage; did they perhaps suspect that he was somewhat pro-Roman after all? But even so, the chief priests still feared a violent reaction if Jesus was arrested openly at the time of a festival (14:2), so he cannot have completely lost the sympathy of the crowds.
There may well be also here a note of rebuke addressed to the political aspirations of the Herodians, or any other groups so occupied with their little local ‘Caesar’, the temporal power, that they had altogether forgotten God and his prior claims. In that case, as often in the New Testament, the kai, and, is not so much a conjunctive participle as an adversative particle, meaning ‘and yet, for all your doing the first, yet do the second as well’.
So the political attempt to snare him had failed; but perhaps a theological question would succeed. For different reasons, both Pharisees and Sadducees14 alike saw in Jesus a dangerous enemy, although it is unlikely, owing to their bitter antagonism (cf. Acts 23:6), that they ever acted in conscious collaboration here. The Sadducees were attempting, in this instance, to make spiritual truth look ridiculous by interpreting it with the grossest of literalism. By doing this, they hoped that the whole concept of the resurrection would be laughed out of court. The case they presented was doubly absurd, since they themselves did not believe in any such thing. To present an unfair caricature of a view, and then to demolish it, is an old pastime. Nevertheless, they held as strongly to the law of Moses as any others in Israel, and so they began their argument with the Mosaic principle of Levirate marriage.15 In a sense, the Sadducees were the most ‘conservative’ group of all in Israel, accepting only the Law and rejecting, as they did, the Prophets and the Writings, the two later divisions of the Hebrew Bible. They had refused to accept God’s further revelation in the Old Testament: now, they would refuse to accept God’s final revelation in Jesus.
The case brought forward so solemnly by the Sadducees was obviously only a hypothetical instance. The symbolical number seven (20) in itself suggests this, although ‘seven sons’ seems to have been much more common in New Testament times (e.g. Acts 19:14) than in modern ‘nuclear’ families. For those interested, the Pharisees had already decided that such a wife would belong in the resurrection to her first husband (Schweizer).
24–25. The reply of Jesus is a marvel of patience and forbearance, although he rebukes the Sadducees for two things. The first is their failure to understand the very revelation of God upon which they claim to lean by thus quoting Moses. The second is their failure to appreciate God’s power, supremely manifested for Bible writers both in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (Rom. 1:4) and ultimately in the general resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20–26). This Jesus will prove from the very law of Moses upon which they lean.
Jesus first, then, demonstrates the patent absurdity of the hypothetical case, showing that the question is meaningless in the form in which it is put by the Sadducees, because marriage ceases to have any sexual significance in heaven.16 There is an irony in the way in which he shows that the particular concept of resurrection cannot be grasped apart from a whole general ‘universe of belief’, already rejected by the Sadducees, comprising the spiritual world of which ‘angels’ form part. In other words, such a question is a problem only to the Sadducees, not to the Pharisees, and that is because they have already in advance rejected the only terms upon which a solution could be found. There is therefore a subtlety in the statement that those resurrected are like angels in heaven (25), which does not appear on the surface, but which would scarcely be lost on either Pharisee or Sadducee, for different reasons. Verse 28 seems to show that at least one Pharisaic scribe heard it with approval.
26–27. But, having dealt with the Sadducees on their own terms, Jesus as usual proceeds to give a far deeper proof of the resurrection, and one which would be incapable of being caricatured. He has already explained what he meant by their ignorance of God’s power; now he will explain what he meant by their ignorance of the Scripture, by basing himself upon that very Moses on whom, rejecting what they regarded as later accretions, they relied. In God’s self-revelation made to Moses at the burning bush (Exod. 3:6), God describes himself as the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. Now to talk of himself as being a God of the past experience of these men, as a western philosopher might describe him, would be nonsense to a Hebrew mind: for where is the experience apart from the person? Assuredly the experience is not within God; if it was so, God would have described himself simply as ‘I AM’, as he did elsewhere (Exod. 3:14). But to describe himself as Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God and Jacob’s God is obviously felt to be adding a further revelation. Therefore, if God can still so describe himself to Moses centuries after the death of these two men, their spiritual experience must still be existent. If so, these three patriarchs must still be in existence; and the guarantee of their ‘eternal life’ is not the nature of their experience of God, but the nature of the God whom they experienced.17 He is the God of the living because he is the living God himself (Matt. 16:16). So too, it was that, even in the physical realm, contact with Jesus brought new life to the dead (cf. 5:41); while to know God, and the Christ whom he sent, is the definition of eternal life (John 17:3). Here is a great bridge between gospel and Pauline theology (cf. Rom. 6:1–5), although not necessarily a pointer to direct influence by Paul on Mark, as claimed by some commentators.
Now comes the question, perhaps genuinely intended, as to which is the greatest commandment of all. The first questioner of Jesus seems to have been either a Pharisee or a Herodian (13ff.), the second a Sadducee (18ff.). Mark simply tells us that this third questioner was a scribe, but, from his approval of the last answer, it seems likely that this was a Pharisaic move. Certainly, of all the three questioners, this scribe was the most honest, and alone received commendation from Jesus. It appears from verse 28 that he was already conscious of the theological strength of the reply of Jesus to the Sadducees; and from his words in verse 32, he was even more deeply struck by the reply here. The ‘Christian Pharisees’ were a group not unknown later within the Christian church (Acts 15:5), but the ‘Judaizers’ of the early church showed the dangers inherent in such an ambiguous position.
29–31. Jesus’ summary of Israel’s duty was a junction of the famous Deuteronomic Shema, the ‘Godward’ command to Israel recorded in Deuteronomy (Deut. 6:4–5), with the ‘human’ command recorded in Leviticus (19:18).18 It has often been remarked that many of the most telling sayings of Jesus (as in the temple cleansing) were derived from a creative combination of two or more separate passages from the Old Testament; this is another example.
In this summary, the heart of true religion is seen to lie, not in negative commands, but in a positive loving attitude to God and others. This is the Pauline ‘liberty’19 of the New Testament (Gal. 5:1). This is what St Augustine means by saying ‘Love and do as you like’, for such love towards God and others will in itself keep us from licence. If we love others, we will do nothing to work them hurt and, if we love God, what we like and choose will be to do God’s will and pleasure (Ps. 40:8). That is why Paul can say ‘love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Rom. 13:10).
32–33. The law, the temple and the favoured position of Israel were the three great ‘planks’ of Judaism, as we can see from the fierce reaction to any challenge to them perceived in early Christian preaching (Acts 21:28). The second and third had already been challenged by Jesus since his arrival in Jerusalem: this scribe had intended to test his orthodoxy on the first and greatest, the law. This was no doubt the point where Jesus was most suspect by the Pharisees ever since the earlier controversies. One can almost hear in these two verses the trained lawyer weighing the Lord’s answer clause by clause, with almost pedantic repetitiveness. ‘A good answer – a true answer – a scriptural answer’, he agrees, perhaps not without a slightly patronizing air towards this theological layman. He gives his verdict finally; in Scripture, obedience is indeed better than sacrifice (1 Sam. 15:22), and so to love God and one’s fellows is more than all the observances of the law. This was not of course a new view: it was the heart of the prophetic message to Israel.
34. The lawyer had weighed and appraised the answer that Jesus had made; but to his surprise and the consternation of the bystanders, he found that, even as he was answering, Jesus had been appraising him. When humans dare to sit in judgment on the claims of Christ, they find instead that Christ is sitting in judgment on them: they stand either self-condemned or justified by their attitude to him. It is not surprising that, after this, no-one dared to ask Jesus any further question. We are nowhere told that this scribe, so close to the kingdom, ever actually entered it. We know that there were some believers in Jesus, however, even among the ruling Sanhedrin group at Jerusalem (15:43), and priests and Pharisees within the church later. Nevertheless, this is the only ‘teacher of the law’ who appears in a favourable light in Mark (Schweizer).
Now follows the last of the series of ‘hard questions’. As the series had begun with a baffling question put by Jesus to the chief priests on the source of John’s authority (11:30), so it would end with an equally baffling question put by him about the identity of the son of David.20 The Marcan context aims this question directly at ‘the law teachers’, as being propounders of the last conundrum. Of course ‘scribe’ did not denote a separate ‘party’, as Pharisee did, but a profession: but some at least of these ‘writers’ were certainly Pharisees. It may be that the cry of the pilgrims at the triumphal entry (11:10), had brought this particular messianic title into prominence, with the phrase ‘the kingdom of our father David’. It was widely agreed that the kingly Messiah destined to reintroduce David’s kingdom was to be ‘David’s son’, but this would have been understood as being merely by physical descent, and applicable to the earthly deliverer, for whom all Jews looked, and for whom extremists at least worked actively.
36–37. Yet an earthly messianic king could not be the full theological meaning of the title, as Jesus illustrated by an argument which they could not well refute. As usual, he first shows them that, even on their own premises, they are inconsistent. Psalm 110 was accepted both as Davidic and as messianic by every orthodox scribe. But if David is speaking here, and speaking of the coming Messiah, how can he possibly call him my Lord? How is the use of such a title consistent with David’s own occupation of a superior position, that of physical ancestor compared with physical descendant? Mark simply records that Jesus put the question: but the context makes plain that the scholars could find no answer, and that this marked the end of attempts to trap Jesus in his speech, at least until his trial (15:1–5). We today, in the light of the rest of the New Testament, can see clearly how the Christ can both be born of David’s physical line, and yet still be David’s Lord, because he is identical with God himself; but Jesus made no attempt to explain this as yet even to his disciples. It was enough that he was hailed as ‘Son of God’ (5:7; 15:39), or ‘the Son’ (13:32). Whether or no this Psalm can have another historical interpretation is beside the point; the above interpretation was accepted by every orthodox Jew, and so the question asked by Jesus was unanswerable, as far as the scribes were concerned.21 The large crowd of listeners seem to have greeted this discomfiture of the scribes with delight (verse 37): but even greater discomfiture was to follow for the scribes.
Beware of the scribes:22 the scribes or ‘writers’ had now been effectively silenced, just as the politically minded Sadducees had been silenced before (12:27). Such plain talk undoubtedly increased the antagonism of the religious circles towards Jesus, but it is unlikely to have been unpopular with the crowd (cf. gladly at the end of verse 37). In preaching to a western Gentile audience, Mark omits here many details of the fuller account in Matthew. On the whole, only that of obvious practical teaching value is likely to have been preserved, and this would involve only the main principle.
These scribal teachers of the law liked all the fame and outward honour that their unquestioned intellectual mastery of Scripture brought to them. They were, by this date, professional biblical expositors and commentators, and devoted to the biblical text as few others have been; they were conservative and reverent in their approach to the Bible as they knew it. But the gospels often warn against them, as here. Had they rejected the authority of Scripture, their conduct would have been explicable; as it was, they were left without excuse. For those who accept the Bible as a rule of faith and conduct, there is no excuse for disobedience.
40. The law teachers not only loved the outward show and empty glory of religious observance, which is the sin of pride;23 they also loved money, which is the sin of covetousness. Yet all the time they did this under cover of lengthy prayers, a fact which invested all their other sins with the new and awful quality of hypocrisy. The widow and orphan should above all others have been the objects of their compassion and prayer because they are the objects of God’s special concern (Exod. 22:22; Ps. 146:9) and instead, they robbed them. It is precisely because they pray, that their condemnation will be the more terrible, more than that of a rogue who robs outright without pretence of prayer or religion. So comes the irony that Jesus preached love to the sinner, but judgment to the religious, not of course because they were religious, but because they were inconsistent and indeed hypocritical. Greater knowledge and greater opportunities only bring greater responsibility, which can, if rejected, bring greater condemnation.
Now comes, appropriately enough after this warning, the story of the widow’s gift. Avarice and nominal religion, with all its pomp and show, have just been castigated. Here by contrast is one of the very group who are made a prey by the scribes, a widow who, out of poverty and true devotion to God, makes an offering unseen and unnoticed, except by Jesus. Together, the pictures are a matching pair, emphasizing the strong contrast. Jesus, of course, did not deny that the rich gave large sums; he merely said that the widow gave still more, for theirs was only a contribution, generous though it might be, while hers was a total sacrifice. It is well to remember that God measures giving, not by what we give, but by what we keep for ourselves; and the widow kept nothing, but gave both coins, all that she had (verses 42 and 44). As Anderson well says, she could so legitimately have kept one for herself, but she did not.
With chapter 13 we come to the so-called ‘little Apocalypse’,24 the gospel core of the material which is amplified in the book of Revelation (cf. 1 Thess. 4:13–17 for a similar passage). It is noteworthy that Jesus makes no attempt to gratify mere curiosity here; instead, his aim is practical and ethical. Indeed, wherever the disciples expressed such idle curiosity, he at once heartily discouraged them (verse 4). As it stands, the chapter is a fitting introduction to the passion narrative (Lightfoot). On the whole section see David Wenham, The Rediscovery of Jesus’ Eschatological Discourse, quoted in the footnote below.
This opening section deals with the destruction of the temple. The whole of the ‘little Apocalypse’ seems designed to warn the disciples against four great spiritual dangers. The first danger is that of reliance upon the outward symbols of religion, venerable and loved though they may be (verse 2). The second danger (verses 5, 6) is that of deception by false Messiahs; the third (verses 7, 8) is that of distraction by world turmoil around us; the fourth (verses 9ff.) is that of being ‘tripped’ because of the unexpected severity of the persecution for our faith. To be forewarned, in each case, is to be forearmed: we must take heed (verse 5). From now on, we move into a climate of increasing violence, and a sense of impending catastrophe (Lightfoot).
1–2. There is a ring of patriotic pride in the words of the unnamed disciple here. Built by the hated Herod it might be, but the ‘third temple’ was one of the architectural wonders of the Roman world, unfinished at the date of its destruction. The ‘fox’ (Luke 13:32) built well, with the help of his borrowed Roman engineers: Herodian masonry is noted for its excellence everywhere in Palestine. So, too, there is a note of sadness in the reply of Jesus: for nothing in all Jerusalem could match the temple for splendour and apparent permanence (Minear). Jesus was here preparing his disciples for the days when every familiar and outward religious help would be taken away from them, in the expulsion of the Christian ‘sect’ from the parent body of Judaism, when the danger was so great that the infant church would waver or even go back to the well-loved institutions of Judaism (see Heb. 6:4–6). Later still, the sack and burning of the earthly temple, while almost a death-knell to Palestinian Judaism (the final blow came later, after Bar-Cochba’s revolt in AD 135), must have had a great ‘evidential’ value to the Christian church as fulfilling the word of Jesus. After that, there was little danger of going back to the outward forms of Judaism, for there was nothing to which to go. No sacrifice has since been offered in Israel; how could there be sacrifice, without a temple? Some rabbis found the answer in Hosea 14:2, presumably in the sacrifice of praise, but a Christian could offer this as readily as a Jew: there was no temptation to return here.
3. This is an interesting verse, unique in Mark, in that Andrew is joined to the usual three who receive special instruction from Jesus. The real problem is not why Andrew was joined with the others on this occasion (when the four of them sought Jesus out), but why he was omitted on other occasions. John’s Gospel makes more mention of Andrew than Mark does (see John 1:40; 12:22), and so, if we want to know more of Andrew’s attractive personality, we must learn it from John, not Mark. He seems to have been a less forceful character than his brother Peter, just as James seems to have been less forceful than John, to judge from the scantiness of reference to him. But all alike played their part in the purpose of God, and all alike were called by Jesus.
4. Perhaps this question of the four disciples as to the date of the coming judgment is an example of that somewhat unhealthy spiritual curiosity mentioned above. The chapter that follows is an example of the way in which Jesus at once translated all such abstract enquiries into the personal and moral realm. No theological problem can be considered in isolation, for it does not exist in isolation; it has immediate practical relevance to our present position, beliefs and conduct. Interest in God’s ways which is purely intellectual becomes morbid in that it is unnatural and divorced from reality.
In reply, Jesus does indeed give to the disciples some signs of the end, although they are not signs that enable either them or us to give detailed chronological predictions. Nevertheless, some of them were precise enough to assure the survival of the Jerusalem church, if, according to tradition, it took warning and fled to Pella in Transjordan before the Roman ring of steel had tightened round the doomed city in AD 70.26 So, as a sign of the times, Jesus gives the second warning, against false spiritual leaders, whether or no they call themselves by the actual name of Christ (in my name). Of course, there were literal fulfilments enough of this in the next century; Bar-Cochba at least claimed full Messiahship. But in a wider sense and in a later age, to worship Christ with false beliefs about him is to worship a false Christ, by whatever name we call him; the disciples must not be led astray by this. Even before the close of the New Testament period, the wave of Gnostic heresy, with its false teaching about Christ, had struck the church, threatening to engulf it.
Broadly, then, a crop of false teachers will be one sign of the end, as will be a steady worsening of the political world situation. This introduces the third danger, and also the third warning; we must not be alarmed over international crises, as the non-Christian may be. The Christian’s heart must not be troubled (see John 14:1), for these troubles are only a necessary stage. All this is the beginning of the world’s labour pains; the telos, the end, the goal and aim of history which is the final establishment of God’s rule, is yet to come. Paul has a similar concept when he describes all creation as moaning in labour, waiting for God’s consummation (Rom. 8:22). Paul apparently sees these birth pangs as a continuous, present, this-worldly experience, though aimed at one future point of time, an interpretation which may help in the understanding of this passage.
8. If a local and temporary ‘primary’ fulfilment is to be sought, as distinct from a continuous or even final one, then the ‘year of the four emperors’ (AD 69), as the imperial throne at Rome changed hands with astonishing rapidity, while all the time the fortified cities of Galilee were falling, would fit well. In a wider sense, this is a continual picture of the present age of turmoil, in the midst of which the church must live and witness. It is to be noted that neither the ‘primary’ nor ‘continuous’ interpretation rules out a final eschatological fulfilment in addition. If Mark’s original readers were situated largely in Rome, these references would be very meaningful and indeed encouraging.
The greatest danger is lest any Christian should be led astray (verses 5 and 22) or ‘tripped up’27 by the bitter persecution they will assuredly suffer for their faith: again, this would be a special word for a Roman church in the first century. At this time, as the disciples saw the mounting tide of hostility against their Master, they must have begun to understand what was to come, although the full force of persecution did not strike the church until the days of Acts (Acts 8:1). Each of these ‘testings’ cuts closer to the bone than the testing before it, for such is God’s way of dealing with his children (Job 1:9 to 2:7). This last test is no exception; the persecution is now to be so bitter that it destroys the closest natural ties known to humans (verse 12). But even this must not make us stumble, for Jesus has warned us beforehand just so that this stumbling on our part may be avoided (13:23).
9. The mention of councils and synagogues must have struck a responsive note in early Christians, who remembered the bitter persecution of the church by Saul of Tarsus (Acts 8:1–3). It was doubly fitting that Paul, who had already unconsciously fulfilled the first half of the verse by his hostility, should also consciously fulfil the second by his witness before men in authority, like Felix, Festus, Agrippa and perhaps even Caesar himself (2 Tim. 4:16, 17). It would however be absurd to think that this passage was written on the basis of Paul’s career: it is too general for that. The Greek hēgemonōn, rulers, is a technical term in the New Testament, used of Roman officials ranging from provincial governors to Pontius Pilate, the lowly procurator (or prefect, in one inscription) of Judea. Basileōn, kings, covers all royal rulers from local petty tetrarch to emperor. Typically Marcan is the injunction given here to ‘watch out’ (Schweizer).
The wording to all nations does not convey the full meaning:28 ‘to all the non-Jewish peoples’ would be better. Once again comes the axe-blow at Israel’s position of ‘most favoured nation’: the worldwide proclamation is of primary importance to Mark (Schweizer), and here he finds its justification in the words of Jesus himself. All nations must have the opportunity of hearing the good news of the kingdom.
11. It is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.29 There are numerous instances of extempore Christian defence in Acts, although naturally none in Mark: the speech of Peter before the Sanhedrin is only one example among many (Acts 4:8ff.). But we may not trade on this, and put God to the test (Luke 4:12). This promise is specifically given for those who are dragged unexpectedly into courts by their persecutors, not for those who have time to pray and prepare for some known Christian opportunity lying ahead.
12–13. Here, in outline, is the great biblical doctrine of hypomonē, sometimes called in theology ‘the perseverance of the saints’: the one who endures to the end will be saved (13). By saved cannot be meant merely ‘will be rescued from physical death’, for there has already been warning of possible death in verse 12, suffered in Christ’s cause. The ‘salvation’ promised here must mean something deeper, reaching beyond the grave. There is therefore the same eschatological paradox as in Revelation 2:10, ‘Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.’ The disciple, says Jesus, must hold fast right to the end in order to be saved: but, as Paul says, true Christians will in fact hold fast, because God will hold them fast (Rom. 14:4). Here is another biblical paradox which we do well to hold reverently. Its solution, like that of similar theological paradoxes, is to be found not, as with mathematical problems, at infinity, but at eternity, and in God. Matthew 10:22 gives this same saying of Jesus in another context; it was therefore not merely a casual utterance on one particular occasion, but represented an integral part of his teaching.
Now comes the reference to the desolating sacrilege (14), better, if more loosely, to be paraphrased ‘the idol that profanes’. As in all apocalyptic, particularly that produced in troubled times (as most apocalyptic naturally is), the wording was deliberately guarded, lest it fall into the wrong hands; the book of Revelation provides numerous instances of this. Daniel (9:27; 11:31; 12:11) shows the Old Testament background to the phrase. Initially, the word probably referred to the statue set up in the temple by Antiochus, so profaning it, and the sacrifice of swine’s flesh on the altar. In this passage, it fairly certainly refers to the encirclement of Jerusalem by Roman armies (so Luke 21:20 understands it). The Roman ‘eagles’, the standards of the legions, were held by the Zealots to be sacrilegious ‘abominations’, being ‘idols’, and as such forbidden in the ten commandments. In AD 70, Roman standards, often bearing images of Caesar, stood on the site of the ruined temple. Later, of course, after the revolt of AD 135, when a statue and temple of Zeus stood on the ruined site of the temple in Aelia Capitolina, as rebuilt Gentile Jerusalem was called, the horror was complete: for the orthodox Jew, the ultimate desolation had come.
The phrase let the reader understand cannot, by definition, be part of the original spoken saying of Jesus. Contrast the frequent ‘he who has ears to hear, let him hear’ (4:9, etc.), which by its form as well as by its rabbinic ring, must belong to the original spoken words of Jesus. But the words ‘the reader’ certainly suggest an editorial comment made in some early written collection, perhaps made by Mark himself. It was necessary to add some such explanatory phrase, for Mark is the most cryptic of the gospels, in saying set up where it ought not to be, in place of Matthew’s blunt ‘standing in the holy place’, i.e. in the temple itself (Matt. 24:15). If the gospel is early, and written at Rome, this secrecy is understandable, particularly if the Jewish war is still under way.
These verses supply a good illustration of prophetic ‘foreshortening’ of history. Prophecy is basically proclamation or a ‘forth-telling’ of God’s ways and mind, as we are constantly reminded by modern scholars. But it undoubtedly included in addition a foretelling of God’s purposes, even if this is a stumbling-block to scientific antisupernaturalism today.30 This foretelling is done in a ‘two dimensional’ manner, in that the perspective of time is usually either lacking or vague. This may well be because time has no independent existence outside our temporal order; but to argue this would take us into philosophy. This prophetic ‘foreshortening’ often passes over in silence, in the sequence of the several events, the vast stretches of time that separate them, and so joins closely events which are actually far apart.
Here God’s immediate judgment on his people at one particular point in history is almost imperceptibly dovetailed into his universal judgment on all humanity at the last day. Since both are manifestations of God’s continual ongoing judgment on human sin and rebellion, the whole makes sense. Here, then, in the first place are portrayed the devastations of the Roman armies. Here, too, is pictured the flight of the Jerusalem church to Pella, as the Roman legions purposely delayed their attack on Jerusalem, hoping to persuade this great stronghold to surrender voluntarily. It must indeed have seemed, in the final mopping-up operations of the war, as if the entire population of Palestine was to be extirpated; but God, for the sake of the elect (20), would cut short those days. Imperial Rome had greater interests now, in the form of the sudden scramble to establish the new Flavian dynasty at Rome: many of the troops would be hastily withdrawn. The Christian church would now see a new and deep meaning in the use of whom he chose (20), for the word could not now refer to Israel, coming as it does in the context announcing God’s judgment on the nation. The infant church at Pella, in Transjordan, had survived: here are God’s new chosen people, Jew and Gentile alike.
False Christs and false prophets (22) will appear. This is really a return to the theme of verse 6 and the reference to signs may be drawn from Deuteronomy 13:1–3, with its solemn warnings against signs and wonders performed by misleading prophets. The primary reference may be to the numerous ‘religions’ and pseudo-messianic Jewish rebellions that both preceded and followed AD 70. But for the Christian church, the relevance here may equally well be to the many Jewish-Christian (especially Gnostic) heresies of the first century, although the application could be widened to cover all ages.31
22. Signs and wonders. This is a reminder that, as in the Old Testament, false prophets can perform signs and wonders, as well as true prophets (Exod. 7:11). It is important to realize this today, where there is a renewed interest in these manifestations. Miracles were undoubtedly performed by the apostles in Acts (see for example Acts 2:43). Paul lists them among the gifts of the Spirit, even if not at the top of the list (1 Cor. 12:10). In themselves, even if performed by true prophets, ‘signs and wonders’ are ambivalent. They are only ‘signs’ of the far greater working by God in Christ which we must accept by faith or not at all.
To lead astray, if possible, the elect. Once again, as in 20, we have a reference to ‘the chosen ones’, with a ‘Johannine’ reminder that to succeed in deceiving the elect would be a contradiction in terms (1 John 2:26, 27). Equally ‘Johannine’ is the reminder in verse 23 that the Lord has warned his disciples in advance of these things (cf. John 13:19). Mark has fewer ‘Johannine’ touches than either of the other synoptists; but enough remains even in matter-of-fact Mark to show that he is drawing upon a common ‘bank’ of tradition upon which John also drew.
Next comes a clear foretelling of the coming of the Son of man in a passage which is a veritable jigsaw of quotations from the apocalyptic books of the Old Testament, especially in verses 24 and 25. Verse 26 seems to mark the break, if there is a break, between the immediate judgment of God on his chosen people and his ultimate judgment on all creation. Political stirrings on a world scale are here described in terms of astronomical phenomena, a pattern derived particularly from the book of Isaiah (Isa. 13:10; 24:23). This is typical of all eschatological usage and might refer just as much to toppling first-century Roman rulers as to a twentieth-century clash of ‘north’ and ‘south’, ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. But verse 26, with the clear imagery of the return of the Son of man to judgment (Dan. 7:13), can refer only to one event in history, the second coming of Christ. In view of Jesus’ constant use of the title ‘Son of man’ as a title for himself, his disciples cannot have failed to see that he referred to himself here also, although they may well have failed to understand how such a thing could be, or indeed what it meant.32
27. In Daniel 7, the coming of the Son of man immediately follows the description of the sitting in judgment of the Ancient One, and initiates the establishment of an everlasting kingdom. Daniel 7:10 has reference to countless bands of heavenly ministrants, and so the reference to angelic ‘gatherers’ here in Mark, while owing something to other Old Testament passages, also fits the context of Daniel. In 27 comes the third Marcan reference in this passage to his elect, the ‘chosen ones’ (cf. verses 20 and 22). From the ‘remnant’ concept of the old covenant to the ‘church’ concept of the new covenant is only a short step, for it is a logical development: both are God’s elect.
It is unnecessary to read into the parable of the fig tree in this context a reference to the subsequent earthly history of the Jewish nation. It is true that vine and fig are traditional symbols of God’s people in the Old Testament, and that the fig tree cursed by Jesus (11:12–14) seems to have been an acted parable of contemporary Judaism. Nevertheless that does not prove that every biblical mention of the fig tree conceals a reference to Israel, or that we can predict the date of Christ’s second coming from political events in Israel’s life today, like the ‘return’ to Palestine. This saying of Jesus seems to be merely a general countryman’s parable; compare the shrewd piece of weather-lore in Matthew 16:2, 3. When the trees burst into leaf, summer is coming – and very quickly in Palestine, as Schweizer notes. In the same way, says Jesus, these happenings will warn us that the second coming is at the very door (verse 29).
In the midst of many details that are puzzling, two main principles are clear. First, the Christian is to avoid unhealthy interest in the actual date, and secondly, we are to see the very uncertainty as to the date as a strong stimulant to ceaseless watchfulness. In other words, like every other Christian doctrine, that of the second coming has a moral and spiritual goal; we must be watchful, lest our Master, when he returns, finds us sleeping (36). As Schweizer says, every description of the end time is also an exhortation to the church.
30. This generation must surely be the generation of Jesus’ earthly ministry, some of whom would indeed have lived to see the awful days of the siege of Jerusalem. But the generation of the ministry would not of course see Christ’s second coming, so some have striven, rather unnaturally, to interpret genea as meaning ‘people’, and refer it to the whole Jewish nation, which will not pass away before that time. Undoubtedly, the delay in the second coming of the Lord (the parousia) was a puzzle to the early church, many of whom seem to have expected it in their lifetime, and were therefore saddened and troubled when, one by one, death carried them away before it (2 Pet. 3:4). It is therefore better to restrict the reference in these things to the temporal judgment of AD 70. But, in anticipating the Lord’s return at any moment, the infant church was making no mistake, for every generation should continually be eagerly looking for and expecting the coming (2 Pet. 3:12). In the purpose of God, no event now stands between Christ’s ascension and his second coming, and so it is eternally near.
31. Heaven and earth will pass away, presumably in the shaking of all things, which is to introduce the second coming: the reference may be to Isaiah 34:4. Pass away is probably the link between this and the previous saying. The emphasis here, however, is not on the apocalyptic prediction, but on the permanence of Christ’s words (Anderson): that means that they are equated with the words of Yahweh in the Old Testament (Isa. 40:8). Revelation 21:1 may be taking up this saying of Jesus: the first heaven and earth (i.e. to the Hebrew, the totality of all things) will go, so that the new may come.
32. No one knows: this is a wise warning that, if we calculate to our own satisfaction the date in time upon which Christ will return, we shall certainly be mistaken. This should strike caution into the most daring modern exponent of prophecy. At a deeper level, it teaches that there are certain things hidden even from the Son, in the omniscience of the Father. Compare the statement of Jesus to James and John (10:40), that to sit on his right and left was not in his power to grant. This is the only place in Mark where Jesus refers to himself absolutely as ‘the Son’ (Anderson). It has been claimed by some that a familiar later title for Jesus is here being used by the evangelist: but such an ‘absolute’ usage is not impossible on the lips of Jesus himself in the light of the use of my son in the parable of the tenant farmers (12:6), clearly referring to Jesus.
The final verses underline the moral and spiritual incentive provided by the doctrine of the second coming. Much of this brief parable appears to be ‘back-cloth’ in the particular context, so that there is no need to press the details. Here, it is the watchfulness of the door-keeper that is the main point of the parable; we must stay awake and on duty, a constant emphasis in Mark.
34. The doorkeeper: some feel that the doorkeeper is only part of the ‘scenery’ of the parable, and therefore requires no special exegesis. But there is some evidence to show that the simile of the ‘porter’ was used by the early church for those engaged in Christian ministry. The master of the house, when he arrives after his long absence, must not find us sleeping, but doing our duty and carrying out the particular task which he has left to us. True, the doorkeeper must keep special watch, because that is his special task (Ezek. 3:17), and perhaps therefore this has special relevance to those in pastoral positions who are ‘watchmen’ in the church.
37. I say to all: Watch: this verse nevertheless shows us that the command is generalized, not directed only at the Christian ministry or indeed at any group or class within the church. Further, it may be a clear indication that Jesus himself did not necessarily expect that his second coming would be in the near future, as many modern expositors assume rather than prove. The whole tenor of this parable suggests a long absence. From this solemn last word, watch (Greek grēgoreite, ‘be wakeful’), comes the favourite later ‘Gregory’ used as a Christian name.