03. The First Call to Discipleship (Mark 1:1-20, Part 2)

“In those days” Jesus arrives on the scene, the Lord to John’s Elijah. He is baptized by John (vv.9-11), tested in the wilderness by Satan (v.12), announcing the beginning of the New Exodus with the arrival of the kingdom, and recruits the first members of the New Israel.

Jesus is Baptized (1:9-11)

Jesus was from “Nazareth of Galilee,” a backwater village in northern Israel. He joined the throngs coming to John to be baptized in the Jordan. Mark gives no reason for or protest Jesus being baptized by him as occurs in Matthew 3. Mark simply relates his baptism and focuses on its aftermath. The experience he relates is Jesus’ alone (“he,” v.10), so Jesus must have shared what happened to him with his followers. 

Arising from the waters of the Jordan Jesus has a vision of “the heavens torn apart” and “the Sprit descending like a dove on him.” The first phrase is from Isa.64:1 a prophetic cry for God to intervened come to his people’s rescue. A seminary student once exclaimed about this expression, “It’s scary. God is loose in the world.”[1] Jesus is like that in Mark. “Not safe, but good” as C. S. Lewis described Aslan the great Lion, the Christ figure in his Narnia stories. In him God is loose in the world! Jesus repeatedly acts with relentless, ruthless, and even reckless grace enacting God’s New Exodus in the world.

The Spirit’s descent on Jesus is more difficult to pin down. “Although ancient writers used the dove symbolically in many diverse ways, it may here allude back to God’s promise of a new world (Gen 8:10-12).”[2] This would make good sense against the background we’ve sketched for Mark.

The divine voice speaks to Jesus affirming him as

-the royal Son (Ps.2:7; “You are my Son”),

-the sacrifice (Gen.22:1; “the Beloved”), and

-the Servant (Isa.42:1; “with you I am well pleased”).

It will be Mark’s burden to tell Jesus’ story in a way that reinterprets him and his work in terms of serving, sacrificial, and suffering figure limned here.

But that’s not all. Jesus Messiah is God’s presence come to save is people. But he is also the people of God come to offer God the faithfulness Israel should have in order to be the vehicle through which God would bless the world (Gen.12:3). So Jesus is a representative figure for God’s people re-walking their path through the world doing right and faithfully what they got wrong in faithlessness. He is

-God’s Son (Ex.4:22): freedom by God to worship him and live in and love the world as God did and desires we do.

-Sacrifice and Servant (Isa.50:1-6): Israel as God’s Servant suffers and sacrifices in obedience to its mission to be God’s instrument to reclaim and restore his wayward world.

As both God come in person to do with he alone and uniquely can and has to do to save his people and as faithful Israel doing representatively what all humanity should do toward God, Jesus is affirmed in his baptism and equipped with God’s Spirit for this dual task.

Jesus is Tested in the Wilderness (1:12)

Mark offers an extremely terse and cryptic account of Jesus’ testing by Satan. Whereas Matthew and Luke give extended accounts detailing the three devilish offers Jesus has to rebuff, Mark simply notes his testing at the Spirit’s impelling (“drove him out”) and that while in the wilderness Jesus was with “wild beasts” and tended to by angels. Like I said, cryptic.

This happened “immediately” (Mark’s favorite word, used 40x in the gospel). Identity affirmed/identity tested. God’s voice addresses Jesus/Satan tests him. God equips Jesus for service and mission/Satan tries to derail the same. For Mark it is enough to note this challenge and highlight its urgency and immediacy, that serving God in this way is a dangerous matter (the “wild beasts”) but one in which God does not leave his servants untended (“angels”). Not surprisingly, these spare details have generated much diverse comment and interpretation. My sense is that it best to be as sparing in interpretation as Mark was in providing detail.

One other detail gives us a more secure foothold and ties in nicely with the baptism narrative. That is the duration of the ordeal, “forty days.” Israel was saved through the waters of the sea, tested on their journey through the wilderness to the Promised land, failed the test, and God judged them and they spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they could enter the land. So here, Jesus recapitulates this part of their experience by going through the waters of the Jordan, aligning himself with God’s New Exodus plan, underwent the testing such commitment provokes from God’s opposition forces, and succeeds in resisting these forces and moving on in faithful ministry to God. Where Israel fell, Jesus passes the test! His reliance on and trust in God’s affirmation and equipping of him in his baptism see him through.

Jesus Announces the Arrival of the Kingdom (1:14-15)

Mark’s narrative moves briskly on. “John has fulfilled his mission and is arrested and removed from the stage before Jesus begins his ministry. John’s death is narrated as a flashback in 6: 17– 29, but he is never to be heard from again (contrast Matt 11: 2– 6 / Luke 7: 18– 23).”[3] John’s about what is coming; Jesus about what is here.

And what’s here with him is God’s kingdom (see Excursus: Kingdom of God). I summarize here:

-the kingdom of God is fully present with Jesus. There is no part of the kingdom yet to come. The fullness of the kingdom we await is everyone’s embrace of it, which scripture gives us warrant to at least hope will be, literally, everyone.

-the kingdom is God’s political control of history and of the peoples and nations that make it. Along with God’s covenant family and the divine presence both kingdom and family lead to are the central elements in the biblical story.

-The coming of the kingdom means a regime change in history, assurance and security for the church venturing out into the world in risky and adventurous mission and judgment of the world of rebellious and disobedient nations, including disobedient Israel whose disobedience made them a part of that rebellious world.

 Jesus announces his programmatic agenda: God’s decisive intervention to set things right in his world gone wrong through his life and ministry, his death and resurrection. This divine intervention means that God now rules his world. Through Jesus he is regathering and reconstituting his Abrahamic people through their embrace of Jesus’ way of being Israel. This intervention means salvation for the world since Abrahamic Israel carries the world’s blessing and destiny with it. This intervention also means judgment for unbelieving Israel and the rebellious pagan rulers who usurped God’s rule and lorded it over his faithful people. Now God is in charge (admittedly in a paradoxical and nonobvious way as Mark will be at pains to show). The king and his kingdom (those gathered around Jesus, his message and mission) are now the ruling center of history. This is what God’s kingdom means.

Now the covenant family of God may venture forth into the world under the protection of watch care of the world’s ruler. It can grow and expand (ch.4) and become the place where God’s presence may dwell and become manifest in the world. Kingdom is here; covenant and presence (temple) are in the process of becoming. All will become as it was meant to be at the end.

Jesus Calls His First Disciples (Mark 1:16-20)

Jesus’ agenda made public, he begins to gather disciples, the nucleus of the reconstituted Abrahamic Israel, he ventures forth under God’s rule and the certainty that his purposes will be fulfilled.

The tone for this section is set by the twofold repetition of Mark’s favorite word “immediately” (vv.18-20). Jesus wastes no time getting started and his time is not wasted.  He finds two sets of brothers, both engaged in fishing ventures, along the Sea of Galilee. He calls them “immediately” (v.20), and “immediately” they respond (v.18). They leave family and home to follow Jesus. The urgency and immediacy of this call demand the radicality of this action.

“In antiquity, the demand to leave the workplace would have entailed more than the loss of economic security. It represented a rupture in the social fabric of the extended family. But there is more: The verb ‘to leave’ is used elsewhere in Mark to connote release from debt! As a later episode will make clear (10:28f. . . ), this ‘leaving’ alludes to the discipleship community's practice of social and economic redistribution. The call to discipleship demands more than an assent of the heart; it invites an uncompromising break with ‘business as usual.’”[4]

This is not the last time we will see Jesus disrupting family ties and reformulating them for the sake of his mission!

He sets the task for these four in terms of their own life work and of a number of references in the Old Testament. We tend to read this image of “fishing for people” positively, largely as the saving of individuals from their sins. The predominant use of it in the Old Testament, however, is negative, of judgment (Jer.16:16; Ez.29:4–5; Am.4:2; Hab.1:14–17). Boring notes: “Here the meaning may be that God’s own judging/saving mission to the world is represented by Jesus, who calls disciples to participate in the divine mission to humanity.”[5] We have seen above that Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom involved both salvation for faithful Israel but judgment for both disobedient Israel and the rebellious nations. The work of Jesus’ disciples will play a vital role in this work of God.

This first draft of disciples seems relatively homogenous – same area of Galilee, same work. Different personalities, to be sure, but likely a pretty similar way of looking at the world. That will soon change.

Thus we reach the close of this first section of Mark’s gospel. Jesus is rooted in the fulfillment of Old Testament, influenced or trained by John the Baptist, stands in solidarity with his people for God’s New Exodus, is marked by baptism as God’s special agent of that New Exodus, tested as the representative new Israel in the wilderness by the devil, announced his agenda, and symbolically built his new people by selecting four fisherfolk to follow him. Now the story picks up in earnest.

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[1] Cited in William Placher, Mark: Belief, a Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible) (Kindle Location 519). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Keener, IVP Bible Background Commentary on the New Testament on Mark.1:10.

[3] Boring, Mark: 1973-1975.

[4] Myers, Say to This Mountain: 318-325.

[5] Boring, Mark: 2189-2191.