The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

γάρ gar • “for/because”: a small connective that reaches forward

Gar is a hinge, joining one thought to the next: this happened, because of that — and in Greek it rarely ends a sentence, because “because” needs something to come after it.

It is the last word of the Gospel of Mark.

Central Question for Part 5
Why doesn’t gMark end the story?

Hello!

Two comments this morning for anyone new, because it shapes how I read this text: I am a Jewish philosopher and historian, and I’ve spent much of my career examining the Middle World, particularly the first century. On this final occasion of our five-part series, I offer this single personal comment: I take what this text describes axiomatically for my own life. What is called herein the Kingdom of God — a world without war, run on God’s terms instead of Caesar’s, ever-present wherever two come together in peace — I hold this with my whole heart. I come to the kingdom as a Jew, but then, that’s also how the apostles came to it as well. It’s the reason I hope I am able to hand you something surprising from the text. Especially this morning, at the end.

In our first four Sundays together, we picked a fight with gMark’s opening sentence (the “good news,” the “Son of God”), as they were first engraved on monuments to the divine Caesar, then hung on a crucified Galilean Jew. We then witnessed the Kingdom arrive — without manger, angel, or star — irrupting from the wilderness, seeking John the Baptizer. Then we read a Gospel obsessed with sight — who sees, who’s blind, and who only half-sees — that ended with a blind beggar who saw clearly and followed. And, in our fourth lesson, we arrived at Jesus’ Last Week, in Jerusalem, and watched two powers — the Roman politicians and the Temple priesthood — see this Galilean as a threat that ended in Roman mockery on a Roman cross.

And here is our key word for the morning — the last of the five we’ve gathered on this walk: evangelion, the empire’s declaration of victory, which gMark reverses; exousia, the authority which Jesus illustrates by doing; horaō, the Greek verb for not just seeing with one’s eyes but perceiving a thing’s true nature, and lēstēs, a word which is often translated thief but in the first century was closer to insurgent. And today, perhaps the strangest key term of this series: Gar. It’s small. Depending on its usage, it can mean “for,” or “because.” It’s the kind of word you’d probably never notice — a little hinge that joins one thought to the next: this happened, because of that. It is, in Greek, almost always a word in the middle of a sentence, because “because” needs something to come after it. So I want you to hold onto that “because” — that gar. Because gMark is going to do something with gar that, as far as we can tell, practically no one in the ancient world ever did on purpose. He’s going to end his entire gospel with it. He’s going to stop his scroll — the first story of Jesus — on the word “because,” and we’re going to investigate why and what follows from it.

Now, a fellow scholar might stop me right there and say a handful of ancient texts do trail off on gar — and that’s fair; I’m not claiming it’s grammatically impossible. My point is, nobody ends an ancient story this way. You don’t close the most important account you will ever write on a word that is still reaching for the next phrase. That is the move gMark makes — and that broken-off sentence is the puzzle the whole morning will be built on.

Part One · The Women’s Terror

In this series, we generally begin each lesson with something strange, but I believe this one takes the cake. The oldest copies of this earliest gospel end mid-sentence. The text on our oldest copies ends on the word “because.”

The women go to the tomb. A man dressed in white tells them Jesus has been raised and sends them to go and tell the others. Instead, they run away terrified and say nothing to anyone. No appearance of the risen Jesus in this earliest gospel. No reunion with the disciples. No “go therefore into all the world.” The women flee in silence, the sentence breaks off on the word “because,” and the Gospel of Mark simply… stops. The earliest, best manuscripts we have give you nothing after that. And the question I want to sit with on our last morning together is this: why doesn’t gMark end the story?

There were also women looking on from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome, who followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him, and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem. MARK 15:40-41

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for (gar) they were afraid. MARK 16:1-8

Let’s start with who is standing there. Mark has been building toward this moment for sixteen chapters, and most readers will walk right past it.

Who’s at the cross? Not the twelve. The twelve are gone.

Judas sold him out and is shortly thereafter found dead.
Peter, the Rock, denied Jesus three times before the rooster finished crowing.
And at the arrest, gMark tells us flatly, “all of them deserted him and fled.” (14:50)

The men with the names — the men who’d asked the Christ for thrones and position, the inner circle — they all ran.

Then who stayed? gMark gives us a list: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome — and, the text adds, many other women who had followed him from Galilee (15:41). The women stayed. They stayed through the violence of the crucifixion. They watched where the body was laid. And at first light after the Sabbath, while the men are completely absent from the story (gMark won’t even tell you where they’ve gone), the women are walking to the tomb of an enemy of the state, with spices in their hands to honor their crucified Messiah.

Now notice the rhyme gMark builds into this scene. Just days earlier in this story — it’s one of the last things gMark shows you before the arrest — a woman at Bethany pours a jar of costly perfume over Jesus’s head. The men in the room called it a waste. And Jesus defended her with a strange sentence: she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial (14:8). This unnamed woman anointed Jesus for the grave while he is yet alive. And now, here, these women come to anoint his body in the grave. But this time, the body is gone. One woman prepared him for burial before he died; these three women arrive to finish the burial and find there’s no body to anoint. So, the women in this earliest gospel arrive at the truth, over and over again, while the men keep missing it. Here, at the end, we’re seeing the pattern repeated.

Now, let’s focus again on the tomb. The stone (a huge one — they’d worried the whole walk over about moving it) is found already rolled back. And inside, a young man in a white robe. gMark doesn’t call him an angel, by the way; gMatthew will, later. But this earliest telling of the story simply identifies him as a young man, dressed in white, just sitting there. And he says to the women, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here.”

Now, listen closely because this gets missed by the crowd who says “gMark has no resurrection.” The Gospel of Mark absolutely proclaims the resurrection. It’s right there, in our oldest manuscripts: he has been raised. The announcement is made (the evangelon, if you will) at the empty tomb. So when I tell you Mark “ends without a resurrection appearance,” it’s important that you hear my exact word: appearance. What gMark gives us is the announcement. What gMark withholds is the seeing. He never lets you lay eyes on the risen Jesus. gMatthew, gLuke, and gJohn — they all bring you face to face with the risen Jesus: in a garden, on a road, on a beach over breakfast. But this earliest gospel refuses those reassurances.

Here, the resurrection is declared. It is never displayed.

So let’s turn our attention to the announcement itself; it’s full of amazing insight if we slow down and read it carefully. Go, tell his disciples (the disciples who ran) and Peter (16:7). And Peter. The young man names him specifically. Peter, who swore three times he’d never even met Jesus — and the very first message from the empty tomb makes a point of including him by name. Here, I am reminded of the prophet Isaiah.

O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by name, you are mine. Isaiah 43:1

Here, after the crucifixion, Peter is called by name. Qarati veshimcha. “I have called you by name.” The denier is not written off; he is sent for! A few weeks ago in this Gospel, Jesus healed a blind man in two touches — the first left the man ‘seeing people as walking trees,’ while the second touch made him whole. That miracle was gMark’s picture of Peter — he sees Jesus’ title right (“Messiah”), but his sight is blurred. Peter doesn’t see Jesus clearly yet — in Lesson 3 we discussed why Peter can’t fathom a crucified Messiah. Like the half-healed man before him, Peter is waiting on that second touch. It arrives with being called by name from the tomb.

Now Jesus has risen. Peter is redeemed. And his sight is made full.

And where is Jesus going? To Galilee — back where the whole thing started, Mark chapter one, the wilderness and the lakeshore. In gMark, the risen Jesus doesn’t go up; he goes back — back to the beginning, back to where the apostles were ‘first called,’ as if to say: we start again, from there, and you’re all invited again, even those who denied me.

But the women… the women have it. They feel, and act on, and understand the good news of this Gospel in ways that leave the men behind. And in the last chapter, they have a direct command to carry it. So let’s look at the last sentence of the text. “They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). They said nothing. To anyone. They were told to go and tell, and they ran, and they were silent, because they were afraid.

Here, gMark pays off something that has been building since the first chapter. All through this Gospel, the truth keeps getting hushed. The demons name Jesus, and he silences them (1:34). He heals, and tells people to say nothing (1:43-44). Peter names Jesus the Messiah, and is ordered to keep it quiet (8:29-30). The truth of this Gospel seems too much to speak out loud — pressed down, redirected, silenced. And now, at the empty tomb, the command comes full circle. Now that it is accomplished, the young man says to the women, don’t be silent. Go and tell!

For the whole Gospel the order was to hush the truth. Here, at the end, that order is rescinded, and the new order is to carry the truth forward. Yet the women — who have followed more faithfully than anyone else — are also struck silent. Not by Jesus’ command, nor for fear of their lives. They are struck silent because they are asked to do something that no one had ever done before. Their moment brings to mind the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the ape throws a bone — the first tool — and the shot transitions into a spaceship thousands of years later. The women at the tomb, those closest to Jesus’ death, cannot wrap their heads around this cosmic encounter, and a hush falls over them. As they stand at the edge of tomorrow, glimpsing darkly at the future, gMark says they are seized by “terror and amazement.”

The Greek word we translate here as terror is tromos. It denotes physical trembling, not just a state of mind. And the word here rendered as amazement is ekstasis. It is the root of our word “ecstasy.” In Greek, it literally means to stand (stasis) outside (ek) of yourself. This is not an emotion, like joy or sadness. It’s less definable than that. You feel ecstasy when you experience transcendent moments beyond rational measure. You can feel it gazing at a field of stars or witnessing the birth of a child. I could spill a lifetime of ink in an attempt to explain what it is to be a mother, and I would fail. It is simply beyond the mind’s ability to measure. Instead, you experience it. The ecstasy of a swift ocean current carrying your boat, of seeing the first flight in the sky, or gliding through a light field of burning stars. This is the state of amazed silence that the bravest of Jesus’ followers found themselves in at the empty tomb.

They simply did not have the words. And gMark ends the passage with the Greek “gar.” Because. Then nothing.

So here’s what we have so far: after every man debating titles and thrones had run, the women saw Jesus, understood what he was doing, and stayed with him through his violent and tragic end. A discussion last week with a close friend emphasized this point for me: the cross was always going to be Jesus’ end. Rome would have it no other way. Then the resurrection comes, and the gospel ends with trembling, ekstasis, and finally, gar.

This word, “because,” ends gMark with a sentence fragment. The question I pose today is whether “gar” is the gospel writer’s mistake, or maybe — just maybe — it’s the point.

Part Two · The Broken Sentence

Now, your first instinct, and it would be a reasonable one, may be that something must be wrong with this text. No story can end on “because.” Maybe a page got lost. The last leaf of the scroll tore off. The Gospel writer died before they finished. Surely the real ending is missing and what we have is an accident. Right? Well, I want to take that instinct seriously, because for 200 years, serious scholars have argued exactly that. But to weigh that idea, you have to see what's actually printed in the back of your own Bible. If you have a Bible with you now, look at the last page of gMark — or do so when you get home.

But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. MARK 16:6-8

[And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.] Intermediate Ending

At the end of modern copies of the Gospel of Mark, there are brackets. Maybe a line across the page. A footnote, in small type, that says something like: the most ancient authorities bring the book to a close at the end of verse 8. The scholarship is printed clearly. The editors knew exactly what I’m about to tell you, and they flagged it — and who reads the footnotes? Listen, class, read the footnotes! They’re where honest scholars leave the truth.

So what are those footnotes flagging? Well, it turns out we have two great treasures, worthy of an Indiana Jones movie — the two oldest manuscripts that preserve the complete Gospels: both from the 4th century. One is called the Codex Sinaiticus; the other, Codex Vaticanus. Got that so far? The Sinai (because that’s where it was written) and the Vatican (because we have no idea where that one was written, but it ended up in the Vatican). Both of these manuscripts, independently, end the Gospel of Mark at chapter 16, verse 8. For they were afraid. The twelve verses that follow in some Bibles — the resurrection appearances, the snake-handling, the going into all the world — those twelve verses are not in the oldest copies. They were added later.

And let me show you one of my favorite details in Markan scholarship. In Codex Vaticanus, the scribe finishes gMark at verse 8, writes the closing flourish that indicates the end of a book… and then leaves the rest of that column, and the entire next column, blank. Empty. Ok, you may say, what’s the big deal? Well, nowhere else in this manuscript’s entire New Testament corpus does the scribe waste writing space on expensive, hand-made, animal skin parchment like this. The scholarly consensus is that this scribe had heard other endings, but didn’t have a copy whose provenance they trusted, and thus couldn’t bring themselves to invent the verses or pretend they didn’t exist. So — as the women witnesses did four centuries before him — the scribe left the tomb in respectful silence.

Ok, that’s a nice explanation of the Vatican manuscript, but it doesn’t answer where the longer, later ending of gMark came from. Well, the longer ending is still ancient. Scholars date it to the Church Father Irenaeus quoting it in 180 CE. But the evidence that it isn’t part of the original text is strong.

A few key points:

• The longer ending was a known issue, even in the ancient world. In the early 300s, Eusebius wrote that accurate copies of gMark end at “for they were afraid,” and Jerome, the Latin translator of the official Greek New Testament, agreed.

• The literary seam between verses 8 and 9 doesn’t knit: verse 9 restarts with an out-of-place “he” pronoun, then re-introduces Mary Magdalene (as if she hadn’t been named 3 verses earlier), and the other women of verses 1–8 vanish.

• The 12 verses of the longer ending use 17 words not found anywhere else in gMark

• It’s missing all of gMark’s usual tics, for example the overuse of the word “immediately” (euthys). In the 16 brief chapters of gMark, there are 41 immediately’s. Here, there are none, and no other Markan tells or tics.

• The longer ending is a digest of scenes from later gospels: Mary in the garden (gJohn 20), the Emmaus road (gLuke 24), the great commission (gMatthew 28), the ascension (gLuke 24). This patch simply gathers what the Church already knew.

• Lastly, the patches don’t even agree with each other: beyond the shorter and longer endings, the Codex Washingtonianus (5th c.) carries a third expansion stuffed inside verse 14.

So, who were the people writing the longer ending of gMark? In a word, they were part of the Ancient Church. They were people who loved the Gospel of Mark — loved it enough to copy it by hand, word by word, for years — and who got to verse 8, to three trembling women and a sentence fragment that ended on “because,” and could not bear it. It was too abrupt, too different from the later gospels. It left them standing at an open grave with no risen Lord in sight. So they completed the story with the ending they were sure it deserved. They supplied the appearances gMark withheld. They wrote in the reunion. They let you finally see Jesus. The longer ending is the Ancient Church smiling knowingly, with other gospel writings sitting next to them. So, please understand. The longer ending isn’t a scandal in your Bible; it’s a fingerprint of the Ancient Church’s love and affirmation of the faith.

Having said that, as a fellow traveller on the Way, I want to offer an alternative for the modern reader. Maybe the open sentence at the close of gMark isn’t a flaw or an omission needing a tidy fix. Maybe it was left open for us. Maybe it’s a gift.

Part Three · You Are the Ending

So, scholarship tells us the original ending of gMark ends at verse 8 with the word “because,” and the women trembling in “ekstasis.” And we’ve watched the gospel writer, these past six weeks, using brilliant literary tools and devices to bring their story of Jesus to vivid reality. Irony. Intercalation. Intertextual quoting. This text is clearly the author’s magnum opus. This gospel has 661 verses, 600 of which were later copied in gMatthew and 350 copied in gLuke. Of the copied verses, roughly half of gMark’s verses are repeated verbatim — each phrase and Greek conjugation held firm.

So, what can we possibly make of the broken sentence at the book’s end?

Let’s read it one more time in modern English.

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror (tromos) and amazement (ekstasis) had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for (gar) they were afraid.
MARK 16:8

I posit that the unclosed sentence at the end of gMark is not a problem for theology. Instead, I propose that the unclosed sentence is theology.

Six weeks ago, we started with a violent tear in the world. gMark’s schizō happens in two moments: When the heavens are torn open at the baptism (at the beginning), and when the Temple curtain is torn in two at Jesus’ death (when it all seemed to end).

Now pay attention to precisely when the Temple curtain tears. It tears the instant Jesus feels most abandoned by God. “Why have you forsaken me?” God hears, then rips the veil apart. Why? The holy room behind the veil stood empty. The famous Ark of the Covenant: gone for at least 600 years. When the Roman generals forced their way into the Beit HaMikdash, they were astonished to find no idol, no carving, nothing. The Holy of Holies was God’s vestibule for Israel. But it did not ‘contain’ God. The Israelites knew no room could contain the uncarved, unfathomable Infinite. God was not shut in, so the ripping of the veil had nothing to do with letting God out.

So, why? Well, remember back at the beginning of gMark, the “torn open” sky? The text never repairs it. Where gMark says the heavens were ripped open, the text leaves the sky unsealed above us. Unfinished. And at the close of the story, the Temple veil between God and the people is likewise ripped open and left unrepaired. God doesn’t close that either.

And finally, here, at the very end, gMark tears its own story wide open, leaving the final sentence ending in an unrepaired rip. Unfinished. Do you see it?

I therefore claim that the form of the Gospel is the key to this earliest Gospel.

The heavens above us, the veil between us, and the story in front of us are torn open. Grace has flowed out, from above, in between, and ahead of us — and gMark refuses to seal it back in. The last word of this Greek text, “gar” — “because” — is a word that reaches forward. It demands something of the reader! It is the most perfect unfinished word with which this gospel could end. No “Amen.” No “The End.” The writer ends on a word leaning toward a sentence not found on the page. Because the next sentence wasn’t theirs to write.

Think about it. The first person to carry this news was not Peter; he ran. It was not the men; they hid. The Gospel’s final word entrusts the story of Jesus to the women who stayed. The Church has argued for two thousand years about the place of women. But the Gospel of Mark is quite clear.

Now put these three beats together.

• The heavens and holy veil are ripped open and never closed

• The last word of the text reaches for a sentence not yet written

• The people trusted to carry the good news forward are the women who stayed

And there the text stops. The next sentence isn’t written down. Why?

Because, my friends, you are the ending to the Gospel of Mark.

The first word of the Gospel is archē — beginning. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” (1:1). This text represents some of the earliest chapters of the Church. But you are also writing a chapter of the Church, aren’t you? To follow the Way of Jesus is to take up the pen and craft the next sentence. Because… why?

And this is no easy task. Those closest to Jesus’ death — the brave women at the end — they became lost in “terror and amazement.” They lost their nerve. The Way leads through the cross, a burden these women knew all too well. And they went silent. The text is handed to you anyway. Across two thousand years of men refusing to be their brother’s keepers, choosing instead to exalt the steel, flag, and coin of empire.

What will you choose when offered power and position over your brother and sister? If you turn away from Caesar and toward the Kingdom, how will you respond if confronted? Will you run? Will you deny that you’ve heard the words? Or, with pen in hand, will you choose hope and grace?

In closing this series, I am reminded of something the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said. Rabbi Sacks was a tzadik — a master teacher of the spiritual. He said:

Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that — together — we can make things better. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. The Dignity of Difference, 2002

I’m not asking you to go home and imagine that “justice will come rolling down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). I’m no optimist, and I don’t truck with those who shrug away our troubled world and say, “No, this is just fine. I’m sure everything will work out on its own.” Similarly, gMark gives us no reason to be optimistic. The text offers no reunion scene to assuage our doubts — no guarantees for the future of the Kingdom of God. No, the Gospel of Mark has a far more honest ending. With its last broken word, gMark invites you into the Kingdom to come and make it true. You hold the pen now. In answer to our fifth and final question — Why doesn’t gMark end the story? It is an unfinished story because the Gospel of Mark is holding the door open for you. I invite you to walk through it, in the shared hope that together we can bring forth the justice, righteousness, and the kingdom the prophets promised long ago.

Thank you.

The Gospel of Mark · 5th of 5 Sundays: Terror, Amazement, and the Ending of Mark. This concludes our five Sundays together in the earliest Gospel. The whole series lives right here. Thank you.

The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

λῃστής lēstēs • from leia, “plunder”: one who takes by force

Modern Bibles often translate this to “robber,” “bandit,” or “thief,” which can be misleading. Rome used lēstēs the way empires still use the word insurgent: not a pickpocket, but a man who defies the imperial order. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing after the war, calls the revolutionaries lēstai. It is the empire’s word for those who rebel. Freedom fighters. Rome did not crucify mere shoplifters…

Central Question for Part 4
Why did Rome kill Jesus?

We are now three Sundays into gMark, with two Sundays to go.

On our first Sunday, we picked a fight with gMark’s plagiarized promise of “good news,” lifted from Caesar’s monuments. On our second Sunday, we watched the Kingdom arrive: without manger or star, we found a man irrupting out of the Judean desert. And in our last lesson, we followed a Gospel obsessed with seeing Jesus, until a blind beggar saw him clearly and followed the Messiah on the Way.

I told you then where the Way goes: it goes to Jerusalem. Well, today, we arrive.
At the Temple. During the Last Week of Jesus’ life.

Now, recall at the beginning when we pointed toward the Gospel’s dual use of schizō — to rip — the Greek verb used to describe the heavens torn open at the baptism and the curtain torn open at Jesus’ death. Today, in our penultimate Markan lesson, we will bear witness to that closing tear. I also asked you last time to consider how the Gospel writer cuts the various narrative threads together. Today, we will see how that skillset pays off theologically.

Finally, from our last lesson together, recall that for a first-century Jew, a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms — and that we said we would pick that thread back up when we reached the machinery of the crucifixion. Well, today we have reached it. This will be the heaviest of our five Sundays for this series. Today, you will see a single Greek word, lēstēs, bring the final Week of Jesus’ life to a remarkable and dramatic conclusion.

First, we begin with a tree. And I warn you: this story will seem to make no sense…

Part One · Where They Hide

It’s a Monday. Jesus is on his way into the city, and he’s hungry. He sees a fig tree with leaves and approaches it looking for fruit. Yet he finds only leaves. So he curses it!? “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” This poor tree, condemned for being empty of fruit...

And if that were all there were to the story, we might just shrug and move on. I mean, prophets do strange things, right? But the gospel writer adds a small explanatory note, the kind a careful author includes when he wants to be certain you catch it — it was not the season for figs.

Let’s think about why the gospel writer tells us this. gMark did not have to include it. In fact, when gMatthew retells this scene a generation later, the line about the season is gone, and the omission makes sense: it can make Jesus look unreasonable. But gMark leaves this detail in there, because the author wants it to bother you. A detail that fits the narrative can too easily slide right past us; but a detail that troubles you is worth coming back to. So let’s look closer. Because, as you may have guessed, this story isn’t really about trees.

On the following day, when they came from Bethany, [Jesus] was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves, and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him, for they were afraid of him because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” Jesus answered them, “Have faithfulness toward God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

“Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.” MARK 11:12-25

Now notice the cut here that I alluded to at the beginning; the editor’s hand is hard at work from our last lesson. The effort is quite bold here. The gospel writer starts the fig tree story: fruitless. He interrupts it, mid-action, for a completely different story: Jesus in the Temple. Then the story resumes: cut to Tuesday morning and the tree is withered to its roots. Scholars call this an intercalation — one story sandwiched inside another — and by now you know this gospel writer never builds one idly. The two halves interpret each other. Whatever is in the middle explains what’s on either side.

And what’s in the middle? The Temple.

Here, the editor’s hand has done real theological work: the fig tree is the Temple. The barrenness, the curse, the withering. To read either story by itself empties the narrative of its theological gravity.

Now, before we go on, I want to make sure we’re not guilty of a shallow or problematic reading of a passage deserving of nuance. The easy reading would be that: the Temple was corrupt, greedy priests were fleecing the faithful, and then Jesus storms in to shut it down. Good riddance. Now we have something better!

This reading is not only bad history but problematic theology, insofar as it has been a jumping-off point for centuries of antisemitic accusation and stereotyping.

Here is what the Temple was to Jesus’ circle: the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy House of God, the beating heart of the Jewish people. The one place on earth where heaven and earth met, where prayer and sacrifice and memory and identity lived together in one house of stone. So if the scene is not about Jesus condemning mismanaged money, then what is it? It’s something older, darker, and far more Jewish in its native context.

Listen again to the line the writer gives Jesus, because it is in fact a quotation, and the source changes everything. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.” That’s from Isaiah 56, a verse that gathers foreigners to the Holy House in Jerusalem. “But you have made it a den of robbers,” Jesus proclaims. A den of lēstai. But that phrase originally came from the prophet Jeremiah, who stood at the gates of the Jewish Temple six centuries earlier and similarly wept over its state.

Where gMark uses the Greek in his “den of lēstai,” Jeremiah, of course, uses the Hebrew “den of paritsim.” The word parits comes from a Hebrew root meaning to break through. So, the parits of Jeremiah that Jesus is quoting is a breaker — a violent man who smashes what is lawful. When Jeremiah was translated into Greek, this word was rendered into our Greek key term for this lesson: lēstēs. What’s critical to our reading today is that neither parits nor lēstēs means anything like ‘a petty thief.’ And, importantly, a “den” is not where men do their breaking. A den is where such men run and hide after they’ve broken things. So, Jesus’ charge here was not “this Jewish House of God is worthless.” It was quite the opposite: this house is holy, but you are treating it like a common hideout! You wrong the widow and the orphan out in the world, then duck inside God’s house, put on your prayer robes, and think yourselves protected from judgment!

Jeremiah said all this long before Jesus. He called his people breakers (paritsim), and did so from within the tradition and cadence of the Jewish Temple.

In Jesus’ time, the money changers were not some fraud needing to be overturned; they were necessary to the Temple’s operation. Pilgrims arrived carrying every possible coinage, while the Temple tax was payable in one standard of silver; in this way, the changers turned the empire’s money into money the Temple could accept.

For those who could not afford to buy a sheep with their exchanged money, the Torah had long authorized doves or pigeons as affordable alternatives (Lev. 5:7; 12:8). According to gLuke, the dove alternative was, in fact, the offering Mary made after giving birth to Jesus (2:24). This whole endeavor of the money exchanged for Temple sacrifices had been a cultural norm for centuries. Again, following Jeremiah’s logic, when Jesus calls the Temple a “den of robbers,” the “den” is not where the crime happens. The “den” is where the breakers hide after the crime. When we see Jesus overturn the tables, he is not cleverly exposing a Jewish financial scam; he is staging Jeremiah’s prophetic warning inside the House of God by stopping the Temple’s operation to shine a powerful and righteous light on where the breakers chose to hide.

So, no. Jesus is not hungrily yelling at random trees and cursing Jewish price-gouging.

Instead, we find Jesus quoting Jeremiah as his way to Biblically grieve how ‘fruitless’ the Temple leadership had grown. The fig tree was a prophetic sign, one of the oldest idioms of Jewish wisdom. What makes this moment prophetic? Remember that this scene is set around the year 30, while gMark is written around the year 70, and by then the Holy Temple is gone — burned and desecrated by the Roman state. So when gMark’s community reads Jesus quoting Jeremiah in those same courts, they heard a warning they knew had come true, and it echoed their own grief. Let me say that a different way: the story resonated with those presently agonizing over the destruction of their families, homes, and Temple from Imperial Rome. The gospel does not say that God was finished with the Jewish People. The Temple in Jeremiah’s time also fell — and the Jewish People grieved then, and endured, and live on today.

Read carefully, the Gospel of Mark is a lament in parallel. While Jesus (ca. 30 CE) mourns what the house’s keepers had become, gMark’s reader (ca. 70 CE) similarly mourns that the House of God now lay in ashes.

Thus, the imperial violence in Roman Judea comes to the modern reader in two guises: their destruction of the Jewish Temple, and their torture and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. So let us zoom in on Jesus’ arrival to the Holy City the previous day. Because, little known to most armchair historians today, there was not one procession into Jerusalem that day.

There were two.

Part Two · Two Processions, One City

You already know the first procession. Many of you as kids, dressed in your best pastel outfits, gathered together to wave palm fronds on a beautiful Sunday in spring.

This, of course, is in glorious commemoration of Jesus’ Final Week, when he rides down the Mount of Olives, from the east, on a borrowed donkey, while people spread cloaks on the road and shout about the coming kingdom of their ancestor, David. Palm Sunday. The Church has celebrated that scene for two thousand years. But most modern readers remain ignorant of the second procession, which is attested to by Josephus (Jewish War 2.223–224; Antiquities 20.106–107). The following is what Easter pageants generally miss, but what any pilgrim arriving for Passover would have seen in the context of Jesus’ arrival.

That same day, on the west side of the city, came a second procession: Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, riding up from the coast at the head of a column of deadly imperial cavalry. He made that ride every Passover. This was Roman policy. As Passover celebrates a people God freed from an earlier empire, Pilate knew this was the week Jerusalem was most likely to foment an insurrection, led by Jews singing about peace, freedom from tyranny, and the freedom to worship and honor their God.

So Pilate wanted his soldiers seen. Let’s picture his imperial strategy. Roman steel, gallant warhorses, and the ruby red Roman banners of eagles signaling the power of the West. While from the east, a Galilean peasant rode atop a borrowed donkey. Two kingdoms, in one city, on the same afternoon. The entirety of Jesus’ Last Week is the collision between these two worldviews.

In contradistinction to Roman West, from the east we see a staged performance that quotes Zechariah: a king “humble and riding on a donkey,” who cuts off the chariot and commands peace to the nations. A different kind of king, and a procession built to say so. The authorities sense the ideological danger immediately.

They come to Jesus in the Temple with the blunt instrument first: “By what authority are you doing these things?” There is our word from Week 2, exousia, and the question is a trap: if he claims God’s authority, it’s blasphemy; if he claims none, the palm-waving crowd melts away. So he answers with a question about John’s baptism that they cannot afford to answer either way, and they retreat with “we do not know.” Beaten in their own arena, in one move.

However, their next line of questioning is sharper…

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were amazed at him.
MARK 12:13-17

Notice who springs this one: the Pharisees and the Herodians, together.

The same strange pairing that first plotted against him back in Mark chapter 3. Religious authority, hand in hand with Rome’s puppet kings. Take note that this pairing is the machinery of the Last Week — not “the Jews,” an old slander this series has refused from the first Sunday and refuses still, but an alliance of the powerful, the preacher and the politician, each with its own reason to want Jesus gone.

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”
Say yes: Jesus is a Roman collaborator.
Say no: Jesus is a rebel zealot, and taken to Pilate by sundown.

So Jesus flips the coin over. Whose image is this? Whose inscription? Caesar’s, of course. And the inscription on that denarius named Tiberius, son of the divine Augustus. A self-proclaimed Son of God. The very title gMark stole in his opening line, jingling around in everybody’s pocket. As sure as you know Washington is on the dollar, Jesus’ audience knows the inscription on a denarius. “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The crowd is amazed; Jesus has slipped through their trap again.

But what, exactly, belongs to God? The coin bears Caesar’s image, so give it to Caesar. But everyone in that courtyard was raised on the first page of Genesis, and knew whose image they bore. He is not dodging the question of allegiance. He is detonating it. Caesar can keep his silver. But the people — all the beautiful tribes and folkways of this marvelous, good world — never belonged to Caesar, or to potentates or politicians, and never will.

So the preachers can’t trap him, and the politicians can’t buy him. And Rome cannot abide a man drawing crowds singing of Passover freedom who teaches that, like Pharaoh, Caesar has no claim on them, their children, or their scripture.

From an imperial standpoint, something had to change this course of events before a full-on insurrection was at hand.

So, again, here is what the armchair historian often misses: Crucifixion was never Rome’s preferred method of execution. Rome had faster, simpler ways to kill. Rather, crucifixion was Rome’s most successful method of communication. A message, or rather a warning, written in human flesh and displayed beside a public road — where the greatest number of people would be forced to walk past and read it.

The body was stripped naked: shame was part of the warning.
Left to suffocate slowly, often for days: duration was part of the warning.
Denied a grave, left to the birds and wild animals: erasure was part of the warning.

This time-consuming procedure was deliberately reserved for slaves and rebels and lēstai. Empires are deliberate teachers. And this was their lesson: for anyone who imagines a king other than Caesar — Look. Learn. And go home and tell them what you saw.

This. From our third Sunday together, this is why Peter choked on the concept of a “crucified Messiah.” For the Jews living under this terrible European occupation, Messiah meant God’s triumph over imperial violence. It meant united families. It meant everlasting hope. While the Roman cross was the empire’s tool for erasing hope.

This Last Week, two parades came to Jerusalem on a collision course.
One had weapons of steel, flags, and coin; the other had women, fishermen, and a rabbi on a borrowed donkey.

Part Three · King of the Judeans

It’s now Wednesday night, two days since Jesus cursed the fig tree.

Jesus is at a dinner in Bethany, and a woman approaches him with an alabaster jar of perfume worth most of a year’s wages. She breaks it open and pours all of it over Jesus’ head. The room is appalled: what a waste; it could have been sold and given to the poor! Jesus stops them cold. Leave her alone. She’s done a beautiful thing. She has anointed my body before its burial.

Listen closely for the wisdom in Jesus’ response. She knows. All the male disciples have been told three times, plainly, and cannot absorb it. While this unnamed woman has understood it completely, and answers in the purest way that love speaks: extravagantly and without shame. And Jesus says of her what he says of no one else in the Gospel of Mark — wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told, in memory of her. Now count the cuts. Before her: the plot to kill Jesus. After her: Judas leaves to sell him out. Another literary sandwich. Another intercalation. With betrayal on both sides, this woman’s faithfulness glows in the middle. The woman who saw gets a monument built out of the Gospel itself.

It’s now the following night, Thursday evening. And Jesus shares a Last Supper with his friends.

While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” MARK 14:22-25

You all know this meal.

This congregation gathers around it every Sunday; the chalice is the emblem of your church. So look closely at the night where its iconography began. Jesus is not presiding in a sanctuary. He’s at supper with the same flawed, half-seeing friends who have misunderstood him at every turn — one of whom has already taken money to turn on him. Still, Jesus hands them the bread and the cup. The open table of this Gospel, the one that seated tax collectors, and the working poor, and sinners, and turncoats remains open. But listen to the rest of his message, “I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” This is Jesus reserving a table for a future date. The Last Supper does not stop at the cross; it passes through it to the Kingdom waiting on the other side of righteousness.

Late that Thursday night, between the open table and the cross, lies a garden.

In the garden, the Gospel of Mark presents us with a very human Jesus who does not want to die. He throws himself on the ground, distressed and agitated, and begs: Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me. I see here a young man, holy and true, but still frightened and honest about his fear of imperial violence — what Rome — what steel, flag, and coin — were about to do to his human flesh. He asks God for it to pass. Then Jesus sets that ask down. Because it’s not about what Jesus wants in that moment but what God requires. I imagine Jesus wants to laugh with his friends; he wants to continue to wrestle with scripture, to stand at the shore and watch the sunrise over the Galilee. He wants to visit with his mother; maybe start a family of his own.

But he sets all that aside to return to the disciples, his half-blind friends, who still cannot truly see what is happening or why. Of course, they're asleep.

Then, in the dark, the soldiers come for him. Jesus calls out, “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me, as though I were a lēstēs?” See now whose mouth owns this word. It’s no longer Jeremiah’s. It’s not Rome’s. This is Jesus’ word now.

Peter, the Rock, follows Jesus as they take him away. Brave at first, closer than the other disciples, but as night bleeds into Friday morning, he denies even knowing Jesus. The faithful know he will deny him three times. It is then that Peter breaks down and weeps. But remember the proverb we read together: the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn.

They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus. Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.

It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Judeans.” And with him they crucified two rebels, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” MARK 15:21-39

It’s Friday morning, and Rome is openly mocking Jesus.

They mock him with a purple robe (like Caesar).
They mock him with a kingly crown, made of twisted thorns.
And they mock with salutes: Hail, King of the Judeans!

This is their joke, and if you’re a Roman, it’s hilarious. This Jewish peasant from nowhere pretends to the throne of our great master of steel, flag, and coin!

Then, they make it ‘official,’ in writing. On a placard above Jesus’ head, the titulus which ‘communicates the warning’ for everyone forced to walk by.

What is the warning? Messiah? False prophet? No. “King of the Judeans” (the Greek is Ioudaioi — which can be rendered “Judeans” or “Jews” in English). The Romans did not crucify Jesus for religion. They crucified him for sedition. The Empire of Caesar killed Jesus because the Kingdom of God is a rival kingdom — and Jesus is a rival king to the empire of steel, flag, and coin.

As he hung on the Roman cross, a dying testament to Roman authority, two others were crucified beside him. The term gMark uses for these men is, again, lēstai. Shouted in the Temple, taken up in the garden, now hanging on two crosses framing the murder of Jesus. It is the thread that binds the third act of gMark to completion. Whatever Jesus was to Rome, the Romans had a category for it: he was the kind of threat you kill publicly and brutally, between two others just like him, so that no one ever dares to defy Caesar or his empire.

And it gets even darker.

Go back to when James and John asked for seats at the left and right hand of Jesus. He responded with great concern, “You do not know what you are asking” (10:38). It turns out, the left and right seats next to Jesus are crosses. The road to the Kingdom was always thus.

And it gets even darker.

Near the end, Jesus screams in raw, untranslated Aramaic. Words from the deepest reservoir of his feeling: Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” To the Jewish ear listening that horrible day, these are the words that open the 22nd Psalm — poetry that begins in the pit and climbs, line by aching line, until all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to Adonai. A dying Jew, praying his ancestors’ prayer, cries out the opening line of a psalm that knows the way through. The forsakenness is real. But so is the psalm that does not end in forsakenness.

Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about Adonai and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying he has done it. PSALM 22:30-31

And then, at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, Jesus dies.

In that moment, gMark describes the schizō — the second rip — of the veil of the Temple from top to bottom. As we explored in our first lesson together, the gospel writer reserves this verb for two uses: the baptism and the Temple veil. What that finally means I will cover on our final Sunday together. For now, notice again who proclaims Jesus as the Son of God — our Roman centurion from that same Sunday. Jesus may have been sentenced to death, but the executioner’s own verdict proclaims the victory of a tortured Galilean over his own imperial flag.

So, why did Rome kill Jesus?

The fig tree was never about the tree. The “out of season” detail explains the Temple scene afterward: this is prophetic judgment from within a beloved tradition, under imperial pressure. It was Jeremiah’s grief, not Judaism’s repeal. And both powers read Jesus’ threat with clever acumen. That is why the cross follows. Jesus is not killed for being kind, or wise, or inspiring. He is killed because the Kingdom Jesus announces threatens the world of steel, flag, and coin. Rome’s problem wasn’t that they didn’t understand Jesus. I am confident that Rome understood him better than most nations ever will. Rome’s problem was that it was Rome — built on the backs of the poor, the widows, and the orphans of power and prestige.

Caesar’s image was on the silver, so the silver went back to Caesar. But God’s image — the tselem elohim of Genesis — is found in the face of your mother, in the face of your child, in the face of the other you wish to conquer and the enemy you refuse to acknowledge. And God’s image is found in your beautiful face as well.

The Gospel of Mark asks: whose image do you bear? Whom do you serve? The widow answered with her last two coins. The woman at Bethany answered with a broken jar. And for those who dare to leave the glitz and distraction of Caesar’s palace, the eucharist you share each Sunday likewise points you, through the cross, to the Kingdom of God — where all things are made new.

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The Gospel of Mark · 4th of 5 Sundays: Jerusalem, Temple, Empire & the Last Week.
We gather one last time next Sunday, August 9: Terror, Amazement, & the Ending

The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

βλέπω blepō / ὁράω horaō • the two ordinary Greek verbs for seeing
Blepō is the seeing your eyes do: to look, to watch. Horaō reaches further: to see and to perceive, to take in what a thing means. Greek keeps two verbs where English has one.

Central Question for Part 3
What does it mean to see Jesus?

On our first Sunday, we picked a fight with gMark’s opening.

The “Good News” was lifted from Caesar’s monuments and hung on an executed Jew from the Galilee. Last Sunday, we watched the Kingdom arrive: without manger, cradle, or star. Instead, we saw a man irrupting out of the desert, with an authority one witnessed rather than debated. Because his exousia came from doing: from healing communities and breaking bread with the stranger.

Then came a parable about soils, because the Kingdom, once broken through, must still be received. And not every ground is open to parting with the ways of Caesar — of thrones, and banners, and riches. That lesson ended on a promise: that the gap between hearing and understanding runs all the way down to a blind beggar outside of Jericho who, of everyone in this Gospel, finally sees. This Sunday, we pay him a visit.

Now, if you have been following this series, you may have noticed a curious pattern: every part opens with something strange. If you caught that, I’m glad. I wanted you to notice, actually, because I took that tactic directly from gMark. That is to say, when we read gMark closely and invest ourselves in the text, we begin to notice not just the story itself but the way it’s edited together. This entire Gospel is built out of puzzles. And the deepest ones, the writer refuses to solve until the very end — like bookending the text with the torn (schizō) verb — which we’ll tie off on our last Sunday. This week, however, I want to hand you another Markan puzzle, one that the writer set at the dead center of the Gospel, and then walked away from without a word of explanation.

What it reveals is that this is a Gospel about perception: who sees, who’s blind, who half-sees, and who hears everything and understands none of it. And the puzzle at the center is a story of a man who needed to be healed of blindness, not once but twice.

With this puzzle in mind, today we will wrestle with what it means to see Jesus well.

Lesson One · The Name without the Meaning

So here’s yet another strange thing about gMark.

There is exactly one healing in all four Gospels that happens in two stages. One. Everywhere else, Jesus heals with the grand authority we’re used to witnessing: a word, a touch, and it’s done, usually instantly, and certainly completely.
Except this one time…

Once, in gMark, Jesus takes a blind man by the hand, leads him out of the village, puts saliva on his eyes, lays hands on him, and then does something he does nowhere else. He asks: Can you see anything? As if Jesus is checking. And the man looks up, and I love this line, he says, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”

The man is half-healed. Blurred. He can see shapes moving, but cannot tell a man from a tree. (There’s a Lord of the Rings joke in there, somewhere.) So Jesus lays hands on him a second time, and only then does he see clearly. It is the only healing told this way in the entire Gospel tradition. And the writer didn’t bury this odd occurrence. They set it at the dead center of the Gospel, right at the hinge where the whole story turns. The entire Gospel of Mark frames this healing. So here is the question gMark is daring you to ask: why would Jesus, who heals instantly, need two turns — and why would the writer put that odd healing at the very center of the text?

So, picture that in your mind: a man who sees people as walking trees. Because, to understand why it sits at the center of gMark, you have to look at what sits right next to it — six verses later…

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
MARK 8:27-38

Now think about what just happened, because this is the hinge of the entire book.

Jesus asks the disciples the question that the whole Gospel has been circling: “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, the first called, the Rock, gets it right. “You are the Messiah.” The anointed one. The Christos. After eight chapters of crowds guessing, and demons whispering, and disciples scratching their heads, somebody finally says the word out loud, and he’s correct! Bully for Peter.

But this isn’t the mountaintop. This isn’t the end. Because in the space of three verses, it falls completely apart. How?

Because the moment Peter names the title, Jesus starts explaining what the title actually means — and it’s not at all what Peter is prepared to hear. The Son of Man, Jesus says, must undergo great suffering — be rejected, killed, and after three days rise again. And Peter, who two breaths ago said exactly the right thing, takes Jesus aside and rebukes him!

Peter corrects Jesus!

That’s not what Messiah means, Jesus. And so Jesus turns to Peter and says the hardest thing he ever says to a friend: “Get behind me, Satan!” Why the insult? Jesus explains his harsh words with the next line, “For you, [Peter] are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Now, I ask you to resist the easy reading here, because it won’t hold up.

The easy reading is that Peter is simply a fool. He’s not. If we put ourselves in Peter’s first-century Jewish sandals for a moment, we’ll quickly see that, for him, “Messiah” did not mean a man on a Roman cross. For first-century Jews, the “Anointed One” was a king — Judean kings’ heads were anointed with oil to proclaim their kingship. To a simple fisherman reading the terrain in front of him, the expectation was that all these Roman soldiers taxing us into starvation and hurting our families would be thrown into the sea by a new Jewish king. This king would then unite the scattered Jewish diaspora and restore the throne of David. Israel had not had independence since Rome’s brutal conquest a century before. Peter and the rest of the disciples are hoping for the return of the good old days of independence and unity.

Peter knew about the Roman cross. The violence of crucifixion had been common for centuries in the region, and would continue there for centuries more. The Jewish Messiah, on the other hand, stood for triumph and glory! How could Jesus combine Messiah, Israel’s great triumph, with crucifixion — the lowest, slowest, and most humiliating death Rome imposed? A crucified messiah was not merely a difficult idea for Peter. For first-century Jews, to talk of a crucified messiah was a logical contradiction in terms. One could call it blasphemy if it actually made any sense! At our next meeting, we will pick up on this thread. For now, let’s say only that Peter has the right name, but the wrong story about what that name Messiah actually means for Jesus.

The Gospel of Mark redefines the Messiah around the very thing that would make a Messianic leader impossible in first-century Judea. And notice (because this is the detail people often skate past) that the very first thing Jesus does after Peter names him is order them to tell no one. We mentioned that last Sunday, so let’s pick it back up here: throughout the Gospel of Mark, the truth gets spoken and Jesus shushes it. The demons knew his name, and he muzzled them. Now Peter knows the title and is told to keep quiet, because, as we all know by the end of the story, the title without the cross is not good news. The Messiah Peter had in mind was a political design in theological clothes. Another war. Another few years of bloodshed. Then peace — the peace that every leader promises, following the death of its country’s youth and promise.

But let’s continue reading where many readers stop. Having told Peter that the Messiah will be killed, Jesus turns from Peter to the whole crowd and makes the cross theirs too: If any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Let’s think about how strange that comment really is.

Jesus is not only saying I will be crucified. He is saying that following a crucified Messiah willingly invites a certain kind of death — not a hero’s valiant death on a holy battlefield with the wind whipping across your sword and banners, but a martyr’s undignified murder under a gleeful imperial boot. What Peter is hearing, much to his astonishment, is that the shape of following Jesus is the cross. By the end of this lesson, in contradiction to Peter’s response, we will see someone who hears that message and walks the cross-road that Jesus lays before us.

So here is what I want you to carry out of this first lesson: Peter has the right name, but the wrong story. Notice now, who fails to see. It’s not the crowd. It’s not “the Jews” in a corporate accusation as we find in the Gospel of John. The one who cannot see Jesus is in the inner circle. The man with the keys. The Rock. Here, the writer is warning us that those closest to Jesus, by calling and occupation, do not see him. Proximity is not seeing. You can be the Rock and still be staring at trees.

Lesson Two · The Half-Healing & the Woman Who Saw

So Peter can see, but only halfway. Now, at the start of today’s lesson, I invited you to pay close attention to the way the gospel writer puts all of these stories together. Notice now not just the story but the way it’s cut together.

Let’s look again, back at the puzzle six verses before Peter…

Remember the singular healing that takes two touches — the man who looks up mid-miracle and sees people “like trees, walking.” I asked why Jesus, who heals instantly, would need two tries. Here is the answer: he didn’t. The two-stage healing was never about the limits of Jesus’ power. They are about the limits of Peter’s willingness to see.

At first glance, Peter saw real shapes with the wrong focus: a Messiah without a cross. A man like a tree, walking. The writer placed these two scenes together, the strange two-part healing and Peter’s blurred confession, side-by-side at the dead center of the Gospel, so that each could explain the other. Read them apart, and you have a curiosity and a quarrel. Read them together, the way they were actually placed in the text, and the healing becomes a map for understanding Peter’s shortsightedness.

Now look at what sits right before it, because the writer is handing you the caption first. In the boat, the disciples are fretting that they forgot to bring bread, and Jesus rounds on them: Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? Do you not yet understand? He calls out their condition — spiritual blindness — and then, in the very next scene, gMark sets before you a literal blind man.

They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he looked intently, and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then he sent him away to his home, saying, “Do not even go into the village.”
MARK 8:22-26

Let’s look at what the healing actually shows, because it was written with great care.

The first touch is partial. The man sees, but everything’s blurred: people look like trees, there’s motion without clarity. The right shapes in the wrong focus. Then the second touch: wholeness. Fulfilment. Now look again, just six verses later. At first touch, Peter sees. He names Jesus correctly; the shape is right. But it’s blurred. He gets “Messiah” right, but it’s without the cross. Too worldly a viewpoint. The rest of the Gospel is waiting for the second touch, which happens in the Last Week of Jesus’ life.

This is where I want to borrow a line from Marcus Borg, who taught us to take the Bible seriously without taking it literally, and this healing is a perfect case of why that distinction is a gift to gMark’s deeper meaning. Read literally, this healing is a peculiar medical anecdote: a miracle that needed a do-over. Read seriously, in the context of the rest of the Gospel, this healing is gMark’s most carefully constructed metaphor. The two stages of the healing are the two stages of discipleship. Any philosophy professor will tell you: seeing comes in stages. At first read, you have a general direction, maybe a key term, but the point is still a blur. A ‘first-glance’ grasp of the Gospel is not a failed read or a failed miracle. It is the very road St. Peter took to finally see Jesus rightly.

Here, I want to remind you of the Proverb:

The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. Proverb 4:18

That is the mercy found throughout this Gospel’s portrait of the disciples: their initial blindness is the dark before the light of a new day. But gMark also shows us another kind of seeing, even more strange and audacious. In the chapter before Peter’s blurred confession, the text shows us someone who needed no second touch. She (yes, she) sees the whole shape from the beginning! And she is everything someone like Peter would not expect: she’s not a disciple, not a fellow Jew, she’s not even in Israel. Alone in pagan territory, with a sick child and no social standing, she walks straight into the most theologically uncomfortable scene in the Gospel.

I want to give some credit here. When our very own Rev. Dr. Chris Pulliam preached this same scene last year, he was honest about how hard it lands. He said he could not fully tame it, and I trust a preacher who’s willing to tell you that. He has my deep respect, and said something in that sermon that I want to repeat here: we’re not worthy, but ask anyway. What I want to show you now is how far this non-Jewish woman takes her fearless “ask anyway…”

From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go — the demon has left your daughter.” And when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.
MARK 7:24-30

Let me be honest about how uncomfortable this story is, because the discomfort is part of the point, and the moment you sand it down (and many have tried), you have thrown away the whole story.

The woman’s daughter has an unclean spirit. She comes and falls at Jesus’ feet and begs. And Jesus — and there is no softening this — says no. Worse than no. He says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Dogs. Now, I know there is a long theological tradition of trying to rescue Jesus here. St. Augustine in the 5th century points to her humility: “the Lord called her a dog,” he marvels in his 77th Sermon, “and she did not say I am not; she said I am, and was rewarded for it.” The Reformation founder Martin Luther cast the scene as a trial of faith — God's “no” concealing a “yes” for the woman who would not relent. And in the 1950s, William Barclay points out that gMark’s Greek uses the diminutive, little dogs. So, Jesus is really saying puppies, here. Right? He calls her a puppy?

But such a position is special pleading, and it drains the message of its weight. “Dog” or “kalba” was a genuine insult in Israel. In that Aramaic-speaking world, dogs were a sign of being shameless and unclean. Today, in Arabic, dog or “kalb” is still an insult with similar ancient reasoning: if a dog licks you before prayer, most Islamic schools require you to wash its saliva off before kneeling toward God.

So this non-Jewish woman is facing a real insult from Jesus. I’m not going to deny that. The theological wall she faces is real, and her victory over that wall is equally real. In fact, I think it’s the whole point.

The woman does not flinch, does not retreat, and does not weep. She argues.

“Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She takes Jesus’ metaphor and uses it against him. Dogs need to eat, too, Jesus. And listen to what changes his mind here: because of this argument, “you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” This is the only time in the entire Gospel of Mark that someone changes Jesus’ mind. She does not move him with tears. She moves him with a better argument. She is an agent in her own healing, and Jesus becomes the one who is moved!

My mentor, John Dominic Crossan, reads this scene as the radical openness of the historical Jesus: the brokerless kingdom, the open table, the mercy refusing to stop at the border. It is a beautiful reading, and I honor him for it. But it carries a hidden cost: If the point is that Jesus opens the door, then the unspoken premise is that Jewish life was the thing ending behind it. Amy-Jill Levine supplies the needed correction here: Gentile inclusion is not something Jesus invents against Jewish tradition; it is already written into the scripture. Look where the Gentile woman is from. Tyre and Sidon — Lebanon today — where the prophet Elijah famously fed a widow, another desperate mother with no bread (1 Kings 17:7-16). And that scripture has marvelous company: Ruth the Moabite [from a people the Torah bars from the Assembly] walks into Israel with nothing and becomes the great-grandmother of King David. So a Phoenician woman arguing with a Jewish prophet about bread and crumbs is not breaking through a closed tradition. That reading ignores the Book of Kings. Instead, we see a woman standing where Zarephath's widow and Ruth already stood, invoking one of the Bible’s oldest moral claims: that we are called to wrestle with God.

And the Gentile woman is winning.

So, watch what her argument does in the story, because it’s not some charming detour the writer could have cut. Rather, it sets the scene to come. Immediately, Jesus heals a deaf man in the Decapolis, again in Gentile country. Then he feeds thousands in Gentile territory. Amazingly, the Gentile mission of the Gospel of Mark begins here, at the moment a non-Jewish woman wins an argument over crumbs.

The Gospel is never the same afterward. It is the moment that the door opens to Jesus’ entire Gentile ministry. The disciples are the half-healed man. The last question for today is whether anyone in this Gospel ever fully sees Jesus.

Lesson Three · Bartimaeus, Who Sees and Follows

So the Gentile woman saw, and then went home. She picked up her healed child and walked back into her own life, and we never see her again. So, let’s ask: does anyone who walks the road with Jesus, anyone who’s actually trying to follow, ever get the second, clarifying touch?

As the road Jesus walks is revealed to you, the reader, it does not look promising. Between that blind man at the center of the story and Jerusalem at the end, Jesus tells his friends plainly, on three separate occasions, that he is going to be killed. And every time, they show us they cannot see what he’s talking about.

Count them with me.

First, Peter rebuked him in Mark 8. Then, six days later, three of them are taken up a mountain and shown the clearest vision of who Jesus is in the whole Gospel: in blazing white, Jesus stands next to Moses and Elijah. And Peter's response? He babbles about building three tents, because the text says flatly that he did not know what to say, and was terrified. The disciples see him in glory, the curtain pulled back, and still reach for the wrong thing. Then comes the second prediction, plainer than the first — and the disciples respond by arguing over which of them is the greatest. Then the third, in the most detail yet, and James and John walk up and ask for the two best seats in the kingdom, one at Jesus' right hand and one at his left. When Jesus talks about the cross, his disciples ask for thrones.

All the way to Jericho — men like walking trees... And then, at the very last stop before Jerusalem, sitting at the dusty edge of the road: a blind beggar. The one I pointed out last Sunday.

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faithfulness has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him. MARK 10:46-52

Look who gets the last word here:
Not Peter, expecting banners and trumpets.
Not James or John, angling for the thrones and VIP treatment.
A blind beggar.

The Gospel writer rarely names the people Jesus heals, but this one is named: Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, sitting by the roadside with a cloak spread out for coin. The lowest-status person in the scene. An outsider. And he is the one who sees!

He cries out: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Son of David. That’s a messianic title, a royal title, and the beggar shouts it openly in the street. And the difference here is everything: this time, the crowd tries to shut him up. The same instinct that muzzled demons, the same holy order that hushed Peter. Be quiet! But here, for once, watch what does not happen. Jesus does not silence the beggar. The man shouts louder, “Son of David, have mercy,” and Jesus stops the whole procession and calls him over.

The Gospel’s constant shushing is finally broken by a blind man who will not stop proclaiming the truth.

What does the beggar do? He throws off his cloak: his sole possession. It is his bed and his shelter from the heat. It is the table he sets out to catch the alms on which he lives. And he throws it away to come to Jesus empty-handed. By now, you can see that gMark loves to work in contrasts and ironies. Now look a few verses back: the rich man who came to Jesus and could not let go of his wealth, went away grieving. But the beggar has just one thing — and he flings it down without a thought.

Now, focus on the question Jesus asks him, because the writer has rigged it for maximum irony. Jesus asks, “What do you want me to do for you?”

Those are the exact words Jesus said to James and John just a few verses earlier. Word for word. The same question to the inner circle. James and John, with their working eyesight and their three-year theological résumé, heard that question and said: Give us glory, Jesus! Give us the best seats. Make your treasures shower down on me. The blind beggar hears the identical question and says, “My Rabbi, let me see again.” The men who can see ask for thrones. The blind man asks for sight so that he might follow Jesus.

And then: “Go! Your faithfulness has made you well.” And the man receives his sight, and here is the line the whole lesson has been driving toward, the second touch made visible — he followed Jesus on the Way.

En tē hodō. “The Way,” by this point in gMark, it’s not a vague metaphor about life choices. The Way is a road — and the road goes up to Jerusalem, and ends at the cross.

So the blind beggar names Jesus with a royal title and, unlike Peter, turns and walks the cross-bound road behind him. That is exactly what Jesus told the crowd that following him would cost, back at Caesarea Philippi: take up your cross and follow! Peter cannot hear it, while the blind beggar does it. The first and second touch in one motion. The outsider does what the inner circle could not: he sees, and he follows.

So, in closing, let’s think now about how boundaries work in gMark.

We opened with a blind man healed: the two-stage healing at the center of the Gospel. And we finish now with a blind man fully healed: Bartimaeus, at the gate of Jesus’ Last Week. Two healings of blindness frame the disciple’s own road to the cross. Men who, despite their proximity, failed to see. Three predictions, and three times blind to the truth. The Gospel writer wrapped the disciples’ blindness inside two stories about blind men receiving sight, so that we might finally understand that the people who needed their sight healed were not the blind but Jesus’ inner circle.

In gMark, it is the outsiders who see Jesus clearly, the Gentile woman and the blind beggar, while the insiders squint and ask for riches and status.

Seeing Jesus rightly was never about naming names or titles. It wasn’t about text-proofing with chapter and verse what the Messiah means to you, your purse, or the throne you desire. The Gospel of Mark shows us that we know we are seeing Jesus rightly when that sight puts us on the road with him.

The Epistle of James describes this road well.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. JAMES 2:14-17

The half-healing in gMark was never a failure. It was an ancient portrait of discipleship. At first, you may get the name right, but you often miss the meaning. You think you’re on the path, but the truth is, you can’t tell the men from the trees. When you’ve hit that moment in life, you need a second touch.

The blind beggar finally sees — and the seeing is the following.
In this way, you will recognize your healing when you find yourself on the road with Jesus — not asking for a throne like John or worldly things like Peter, but feeding the hungry, hearing the holy rebuke of women and strangers, and healing others eager for their place in the Kingdom.

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The Gospel of Mark · 3rd of 5 Sundays: Bread, Boundaries, Misunderstanding & the Way of the Cross. We gather again on August 2: Jerusalem, Temple, Empire & the Last Week.

The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

ἐξουσία
exousia • from exesti (it is possible) and ek (out of/from)
Exousia is the power that proceeds out of one’s own being — not a permission granted from outside, but a right that comes from what one is.

Central Question for Part 2
What kind of Authority (exousia) is this?

On our first Sunday, we picked a fight with gMark’s opening sentence. “Good news,” evangelion, “Son of God,” “Lord’: every one of those was Caesar’s vocabulary first, and the gospel writer lifted the whole set and proclaimed it over an executed Galilean Jew.

We found two levels running through the text: what Jesus did, enact a Kingdom already breaking through, in the present tense, and what the writer did a generation later: wrap that proclamation in the trauma of the year 70, with the Temple sitting in charred remains. And I handed you a thread to hold from last time. One violent Greek verb, schizō, to tear, to rip open, is used at exactly two moments in gMark — the heavens torn at the baptism, and the Temple curtain torn at the death. Keep holding that thread. It pays off on the last Sunday.

This week, we go back to the start and watch the Kingdom arrive.
Not as an idea, but as a body, walking out of the desert. For this reason, through the following three lessons, we will grapple with what it looks like when the Kingdom shows up in person.

Lesson One · Why No Christmas?

So here’s the next strange thing about this earliest gospel: There is no Christmas in gMark. None. No manger, no shepherds, no star, no wise men, no Bethlehem. This first Gospel skips every last bit of the nativity and opens on a grown man leaving the wilderness and walking straight into a fight. As later writers, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke took on the option to begin with Jesus’ birth. But this was a later, theologically different choice. The Gospel of Mark starts with a single word, “archē” (beginning/foundation), and then sets you in a desert and a confrontation. So here is what I want you to sit with: whatever gMark means by “the beginning,” it isn’t a birth.

So what’s actually beginning? And why would the first Gospel written have no need at all for the Christmas narrative?

So John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the whole Judean region and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John] and were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with[g] the Holy Spirit.”

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him. MARK 1:4-13

Let’s start with what the text doesn’t say, because the silence is deafening.

• gMatthew opens with a kingly genealogy, a virgin birth, and visiting magi.
• gLuke gives you a lowly manger, the shepherds, and the angels over Bethlehem.
• gJohn climbs higher than both, to a Platonic prelude before time itself.

Three of the four Gospels open with a grand overture. While gMark, the earliest gospel we have, shares none of this with you. One line pierces through the darkness, “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ,” and by the fourth verse, he is seeking out a wild man in the desert eating locusts.

It can be a shock. The nativity stories you love were written a decade or more after gMark, by other writers, for their own good reasons. This writer didn’t drop the birth. In fact, they never reached for it. And when our earliest gospel witness feels no need to tell you that the story starts in a stable, you might lean in and ask where they think the real beginning is.

The answer is the wilderness,
and this narrative choice made sense to the ancient Jewish heart.

The wilderness is where Israel became a people: forty years between slavery and the land, the place of the Abrahamic covenant, where God met his people with fire and with bread. It is where the prophets went, where Elijah heard the still, small voice. So when this Gospel opens in the Judean desert, it is grounding itself in the fundament of all Jewish spirituality.

For gMark: in the beginning, there was an exodus. Not a birth, but a departure.

Both gMark and the translated Greek text of Genesis begin with archē: in the beginning. With the weight of this word, both texts announce a new creation. In Jewish texts, auspicious beginnings are declared defiantly into the dark.

And look at who gets sent out there first. John the Baptizer, clothed in camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist. That is not a wardrobe note; it is another Markan quotation. II Kings describes the prophet Elijah in precisely those words, and nearly every Jew reading this during the Roman-Jewish war would have caught that similarity on the spot.

As Amy-Jill Levine keeps insisting, and she is my guardrail all five weeks on the Jewish texture of this book, John the baptizer stands squarely inside Israel’s own tradition of prophetic renewal: the wilderness preacher calling the people back, the way Isaiah’s voice once cried out to prepare the road. The good news does not begin by leaving the Jewish people behind. It begins in Jewish soil, wrapped in Jewish scripture.

Then the baptism, and here is a detail I am only going to name, not unwrap, because I’m giving you the payoff later. Jesus comes up out of the water, and the heavens are torn open. There is our verb again: schizō, the violent one. Not opened gently. Ripped. I’m leaving it there on the shelf for you. Just keep it there for now.

And then what’s with the speed? The Spirit doesn’t lead Jesus into the wilderness; the text says the Spirit drives him — throws him out there. And immediately — that word, euthys in the Greek, which gMark uses more than forty times — immediately he is among the wild beasts, and immediately after that he is in Galilee announcing that the time is full. This is the texture of the entire Crisis Gospel: breathless, urgent, no room to catch your breath. gMark does not stroll through the Holy Land like Rick Steves. Its pace is not the tic of a travelogue or historian. It is, itself, also a theological argument.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him. MARK 1:14–20

Watch where all that speed goes first.

The moment John exits the stage in Roman shackles, Jesus walks into Galilee and says the line this whole lesson has been circling toward — the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. Let’s pause here for a moment. It is the first time in the entire Gospel that the Kingdom is named, and it is named as something that has already arrived, near enough to demand an answer. Repent, and believe in the good news. There is the evangelion again from our first lesson, no longer a slogan stamped on a battle. It is now a summons.

Then, in the same breath, the same immediately: Jesus walks the shore of the sea, sees four fishermen at their nets, tells them to follow him, and they drop everything and go. Not after they sleep on it. Immediately, they left their nets. That is the irruption at the beginning of gMark. The Kingdom does not knock politely and wait to be asked in. It hauls these men out of the water mid-cast. So I ask now that you do something for me: fix these four in your mind exactly here: Simon, Andrew, James, and John. They drop their whole life to follow a stranger out of the desert. We are going to walk with these men for three more Sundays, and we are going to watch these same four, the ones who left everything, turn out to be the ones who cannot see what is standing right in front of them in the end. Remember that they started their journey with nothing held back.

Because here is what the missing manger is trying to tell you: This is my mentor, John Dominic Crossan’s instinct, and it is mine: the Kingdom of God, in this Gospel, is not a doctrine you are born into by blood and land. It is an event that breaks through history. It irrupts. It interrupts what Prof. Crossan referred to to me many times as the normal mode of civilization. A baby in a manger is a beginning you can admire from a safe and tender distance. But a grown man erupting out of the desert, with a torn sky over his head and a clock already running, is a beginning that demands you do something! gMark skipped the cradle because Christmas isn’t his message. The writer didn’t want you watching a life unfold. gMark wants you to be ambushed in the Judean heat, that you might thirst no more.

Lesson Two · Authority You Can See

With John in prison and Jesus now on the scene, gMark will answer the next logical question: what kind of authority does Jesus have? This is our Greek word for this Sunday: exousia, “authority.”

They went to Capernaum, and when Shabbat came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.

Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching — with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. MARK 1:21-28

There it is, in black and white.

The crowd in the Capernaum synagogue was astounded, for he taught them as one having authority, exousia, and not as the scribes. The text draws the contrast itself, and we have to read it carefully, because a careless reading could turn it into a slander. The scribes taught by citation, and there is nothing ill-fitting about that. It’s how a wisdom tradition stays honest: you ground your ruling in your teachers, in precedent, in the chain of those who reasoned before you. That is a beautiful kind of faithfulness, and one I live my own life by. The Gospel is not sneering at scribal learning. Rather, it is marking Jesus as something genuinely strange inside their world, a man who teaches as though the authority simply rests in him. Authority by citation versus authority by act. The whole claim of gMark is that Jesus leans into the second kind.

And watch how the claim gets proven. Not by Talmudic argument. No, rather than reach for a rabbinic passage in the synagogue library, a man with an unclean spirit arrives to settle the whole debate. Ironic, isn’t it? That in a 16-chapter gospel where all of Jesus’ closest friends fail to recognize who Jesus is, the crowds and authorities too, it’s the demons who get it first.

“I know who you are,” the unclean spirit screams, “the Holy One of God.” And what does Jesus do with this confession? He muzzles it! “Be silent.” The Gospel does this over and over, the truth gets spoken, and Jesus hushes it — the why is a thread for another Sunday. For now, I just want you to sit in that strangeness.

The Kingdom shows up, and its authority isn’t the kind to debate citations with evil.
Rather, it expels evil and proves its point by healing and doing.

If you want gMark’s most visceral case of rebuking evil, it sits a few chapters ahead: the man among the tombs, so torn apart that when Jesus asks the spirit its name, the answer is Legion. That is no coincidence of vocabulary. Legion was the Roman army’s word for a regiment of soldiers, and the most harrowing picture of bondage in the whole gospel names the thing holding this man after the occupying Roman army, which is then cast out and drowned in the sea. Here, a private struggle is made public expulsion and vindication. Expel the demon, and you expel Rome from the land.

When [Jesus] returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door, and he was speaking the word to them. Then they came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

Now some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves, and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— “I say to you, stand up, take your mat, and go to your home.” And he stood up and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” MARK 2:1–12

Then a paralyzed man was lowered through a dug-open roof by four friends who would not take no for an answer. Notice that Jesus does not say “rise.” Not first. First, he says, your sins are forgiven. And the scribes sitting there think something entirely reasonable: who can forgive sins but God alone? That objection makes sense! It is good theology, built on the Torah. So Jesus does the visible thing to prove the invisible one, so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority — exousia — our word again, now climbing, authority on earth to forgive sins, and he tells the man to take up his mat and walk. Authority over demons; now authority to forgive. The claims are getting larger. The friction is starting.

It is the same move when, a chapter earlier, he reaches out and touches a leper, lays his bare hand on someone no one was permitted to touch. For Crossan, this is the very heart of the thing: these healings are not merely medical, they are social. To touch the untouchable, to forgive without a priest, to eat with the wrong people, is to reach into a world sorted by purity and status and shame and start un-sorting it by hand.

Crossan calls what Jesus enacts a “brokerless kingdom” — a Kingdom with no middlemen, where you do not climb the ladder through the proper authorities to reach God’s mercy, because the mercy has climbed down the ladder to you.

The Gospel of Mark gives you that un-sorting as an actual scene.

Jesus walks past a tax booth, past a tax collector named Levi, a man his neighbors would have despised as Rome’s bagman skimming his own people, and says the same two words he said to the fishermen: follow me. Then Jesus goes to dinner at his house, and the table is crowded with “tax collectors and sinners,” the exact people a holiness-minded teacher was supposed to keep his distance from. When the objection comes — why does he eat with them? — his answer is the whole Kingdom in a sentence: those who are well do not need a physician, but those who are sick. I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. That is not a theory about mercy, but mercy pulling up a chair at the wrong table.

One Sabbath [Jesus] was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food, how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions?” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for mankind and not mankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”

Again [Jesus] entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They were watching him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. MARK 2:23–3:6

Which brings us to Shabbat, and here I have to slow down, because this is the single easiest place in the whole Gospel to get the text catastrophically wrong. The disciples pluck grain on the Sabbath; some Pharisees object, and Jesus says the line everyone quotes: the sabbath was made for mankind, and not mankind for the sabbath. The wrong way to hear that, and a Christian reader can be tempted to hear it exactly this way, is: there go the rigid, legalistic Jews with their rules, and here comes Jesus to set everyone free with grace. But let’s set that reading down. It is an old contempt dressed as theology, and it has wounded real people. It still does.

Here is what is actually happening, from a Jewish perspective.

What counts as honoring Shabbat was a saucy, loud, internal Jewish debate. It still is. Debating Halacha, the Jewish Way, is in fact one of the principal methods of Jewish worship. Here in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is not standing outside of his Jewish identity, attacking it. Rather, he is standing with both feet planted inside it, arguing, and the position he takes is a thoroughly Jewish one: the conviction that the Sabbath serves human life runs straight through Jewish tradition, and is later formalized in the principle that one should always set the Sabbath aside to save a life.

So when Jesus heals the man with the withered hand and asks, "Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” he is not abolishing Jewish Halacha. Jesus is arguing from inside Jewish Law, in its own idiom, about what the Law is supposed to be for. That is not Jesus versus the Jews. That is a righteous Jewish internal family dispute, written down for the instruction of the nations.

And then the line that closes this whole opening movement — and it is a dark one. The Pharisees go out and conspire with the Herodians on how to destroy him. Hold that lightly, and please do not let it curdle into “the Jews wanted Jesus dead.” That is a slander this Gospel is not making, and history does not support. Notice instead who pairs up: the Pharisees, a religious renewal movement, and the Herodians, the party of the puppet kings who openly served Rome. Religious power and imperial power find common cause against this man. Why both end up wanting him gone is a question for our Fourth Sunday. For now, just remember the result. By the end of chapter three, acting as though the Kingdom is already here has made Jesus very dangerous.

So the Kingdom shows up, proving its legitimacy through righteous action. But when Jesus finally does explain, in a parable, the people start picking sides.

Lesson Three · Same Seed, Different Soil

So far, the Kingdom has been impossible to stop.

It erupts.
It acts.
Demons obey.
The paralyzed walk.
The day itself bends to it.

Then Jesus sits down by the sea and tells a story about a farmer scattering seed, and the story is about all the ways the seed fails. Birds eat it. Rock scorches it. Thorns choke it. After two lessons of unstoppable power, the Gospel hands you a parable whose whole subject is everything that doesn’t take. The authority that nothing could resist can be resisted after all, by the most ordinary thing in the world: the ground.

Again [Jesus] began to teach beside the sea. Such a very large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the sea and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on a path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” And he said, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!”

When [Jesus] was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything comes in parables, in order that ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’ ”

And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: when they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. But they have no root and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are those sown among the thorns: these are the ones who hear the word, but the cares of the age and the lure of wealth and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing. And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” MARK 4:1–20

This is the parable of the sower. Or really, the parable of the soils, because the farmer and the seed never change. Only the ground changes. The same seed falls on a hard path, on thin rocky dirt, among thorns, and on good earth, and only the last of them bears anything. Here is the thing I most want you to see, the reason this story sits right here: the parable is about the reception of the very thing the last two lessons put on display. The Kingdom showed up in person. It erupted; it acted with an authority that made demons obey. And the Gospel’s next move is to tell you that even that, even the Kingdom arriving in the flesh and acting in broad daylight, does not land the same way in every heart.

The seed is flawless. The soil is the variable.

So watch the text’s arc climb.
First the Kingdom erupted: it broke through. Then it disrupted: it acted, it crossed lines, it made enemies. Now it turns out to be contested: received here, refused there, choked somewhere else. That is the arc of the whole Gospel of Mark.

A word from Levine to keep us honest, because the parable form gets misread too. Parables are a Jewish teaching form, alive long before Jesus and long after him, and their job is to provoke, to unsettle, to refuse to hand you the meaning so that you have to climb in and wrestle for it. A parable is not a ‘secret code’ that hides the truth so the in-crowd can feel clever (despite what a lot of movies and junk theology will espouse). A parable is a hook. It encourages the hearer to do something. I want you to keep that in your pocket, because the very next lines are some of the hardest in all of the Gospel of Mark.

Jesus says something that, taken the wrong way, could sound terrible.

To the disciples, he says, ‘to you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God,’ but to those outside, everything stays in parables, so that they may look and not perceive, and listen and not understand. That could be taken to mean that God deliberately blinds people from the truth. But two things I want you to hold while pondering this.

1. Jesus is quoting. Those words come from Isaiah, the prophet sent to a people he is told from the very start will not listen, a commission soaked in heartbreak (not contempt for fellow Jews).

2. And second, and this is the part that detonates the whole “insiders versus outsiders” reading, look at what happens the moment Jesus finishes. He turns to the disciples, the supposed insiders, the ones just handed “the secret,” and he has to explain the parable to the disciples, because they don’t get it either! “Do you not understand this parable?” he asks. “Then how will you understand any of them?” The inner circle is bad soil, too. So, this dividing line is not the faithful insiders against the blind outsiders. In this Gospel, the insiders also keep missing it. Hold onto that one. It owns the whole of our next Sunday together.

This is where the late Marcus Borg comes to our aid. He explains this passage like this — it’s not hearing versus not hearing, but hearing versus understanding. People in this Gospel hear constantly. Understanding is the rare thing. From this parable forward, that gap becomes the engine of the whole gospel narrative — running all the way down to a blind beggar outside Jericho who, of everyone in the book, finally sees.

So, what does it look like when the Kingdom shows up in person? It looks like an irruption — a man walking out of the desert; not a nativity, but a torn-open sky behind him. It looks like an authority (exousia) who proves by doing. And it looks like a field of different soils, where the same seed meets a hundred grounds, and only some of them open. The Kingdom comes with awesome authority, and it still waits to be received.

The seed isn’t the problem in gMark. It is the ground that receives it.

In the beginning was an exodus, who proved his authority with acts of righteousness and the rejoining of families. And though it was good, the ground was not ready to receive him. On our next Sunday, we see where this all leads.

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The Gospel of Mark · 2nd of 5 Sundays: Wilderness, Baptism, Demons & Authority.
Next Sunday: “Bread, Boundaries, & the Way of the Cross.”

Part 2 of 5 • Wilderness, Baptism, & Authority
Mark 1:1–3:6; 4:1–20
12 July 2026 • ἐξουσία (exousia)

Part 3 of 5 • Bread & Boundaries: The Way of the Cross
Mark 6:30–10:52
19 July 2026 • βλέπω / ὁράω (blepō / horaō)

Part 4 of 5 • The Last Week: Jerusalem & Empire
Mark 11:1–15:39
2 August 2026 • λῃστής (lēstēs)

Part 5 of 5 • Terror & Amazement: The Ending of Mark
Mark 15:40–16:8
9 August 2026 • γάρ (gar)

This is the first entry in a five-Sunday reading of the Gospel of Mark. I’m drawing throughout on three scholars who would happily argue with one another all afternoon: Amy-Jill Levine, the Jewish New Testament scholar who keeps me honest to a first-century Jewish point of view; John Dominic Crossan, my old undergraduate mentor, who taught me to hear the Kingdom Jesus announced as present and immediate — here, now; and the late Marcus Borg, who taught a generation to take the gospel seriously without necessarily taking it literally. A Jew, a former Dominican monk, and a Protestant theologian. Every one of them has helped me read gMark more closely.

The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

εὐαγγέλιον
evangelion • from eu (good) and angelos (messenger)
Evangelion is the public announcement a herald carries home from a won war

Central Question for Part 1
What kind of Good News (evangelion) is this?

Lesson One · The Stolen Word

I’m a professor, so I’m professionally obligated to open with the following observation: the Gospel of Mark begins with an act of plagiarism.

Almost every important word in gMark’s first line, “good news,” “Son of God,” even the simple impulse to announce a new ruler to the world, had been written before. The author stole them. And I’m fairly sure he wanted you to know he stole it. Because the source he stole from was the Roman Empire itself.

That’s the puzzle I want to hand you. Why would a writer announcing what he believes is the most important news in human history reach deep into the mouth of his enemy, and lift the words from the empire to say it?

Let’s start with the world in which gMark is written. First-century Israel is a Jewish state under European occupation, and has been for generations. Pompey marched into Jerusalem sixty-three years before the common era, and after him came the client kings, the Roman governors, the soldiers, etc. Occupation was not a neutral arrangement. Taxes flowed outward to Rome and to a Temple aristocracy that often managed the relationship on Rome’s behalf. It meant a governor could nail you to a post by the roadside the moment you became politically inconvenient. And underneath all of this ran a Messianic hope: a deep and widespread Jewish conviction that God would not leave his people under the Roman boot forever. That God would act in history. That God would send an anointed one and set the world right.

Now the word itself. On its native soil, evangelion — the Greek that opens gMark, the word your Bible may render “good news,” or “gospel” — was not a religious word at all. It’s a battlefield word, and the Romans loved to hear themselves say it! When two armies met, and one broke the other, the victor sent a runner home: a herald, an evangelos. What he shouted as he came through the gate was the evangelion, the good news that the enemy was beaten, the war was won, and the victory was ours! That is the home address of the word. It announces imperial conquest as a gift to the conquered. We’ve beaten you. You’re Roman now. You’re welcome.

There is a stone that brings this to crystal clarity. Scholars call it the Priene Calendar Inscription, after the city in present-day Türkiye where it was found, and it was carved about 9 years before Jesus was born. It records a decision by a council of Greek cities so overcome with gratitude to the Roman emperor that they reorganized their entire calendar to make the year begin on his birthday! And they explained the change in writing. The birthday of the god Augustus, the stone says, “signaled the beginning of good news for the world.” The beginning of good news. In Greek, the beginning of evangelion — the same word that opens gMark.

Moreover, “Son of God” was no metaphor in the pre-Christian Roman world; it was a royal title with a paper trail. Augustus’ adoptive father, Julius Caesar, had been formally voted a god by the Roman Senate after his death, which made Augustus, officially, Divi Filius, Son of the Divine. Carried east and rendered into Greek, that became Theos Huios in Israel: a Son of God. Across the empire, and especially in the cities of Asia Minor, where the Priene stone was carved, there were temples to the divine Augustus: altars, sacrifices, and festivals on the imperial birthday. An entire civic religion of the emperor: stitched into the calendar, the marketplace, and the public square. You did not have to privately believe Caesar was divine to be swept up in it. In the Mediterranean world, there was simply no getting out of its way.

And this claim was not empty. Augustus really had ended a century of civil war; the Pax Romana was a visible daily fact, stamped on the statute in the town square and the coin in your hand. To the unwashed millions under the Roman eagle, it was the greatest story they had ever been told: a “good news” that stretched from Persia to Spain and stood on the twin pillars of civic religion and imperial power.

That is the “good news” gMark sets out to contradict.

So when the gospel writer lays those exact words: the victory word and the emperor’s title, at the feet of a crucified rabbi from Galilee, the audacity is almost hard to feel from this distance. As of the opening line of this Gospel, there are now two lords. One on a throne. The other on a cross.

But watch what gMark does next. Having stolen Rome’s vocabulary, the gospel writer turns immediately to the Jewish prophet Isaiah — a voice crying in the wilderness, prepare the way. The words are lifted from Rome, but the authority is claimed from Israel’s scripture. From the very first sentence, the text is fighting the empire in the empire’s own language, but on Israel’s home ground.

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight…’” MARK 1:1–3

Here is what I want you to carry out of this first lesson. The author of gMark did not invent a religious word. They repurposed a deeply political one. And that single choice, made before they’ve told you anything Jesus did, is already a treasonous argument.

We have the stolen words now. The stranger question comes next: not which words the writer took, but when he chose to walk out the door with them. Because of all the moments in history to announce the good news of God’s victory and the coming of peace on earth, gMark picks just about the worst one imaginable.

Lesson Two · The Year the Temple Burned

The gospel writer’s timing may be even stranger than his vocabulary.

Of all the moments in history to stand up and proclaim the good news of God’s victory and the arrival of peace on earth, gMark chooses one of the worst. It announces God’s triumph at the precise moment that Jerusalem is burning.

To see it, you need to hold onto a year: 70 CE. Roughly 40 years after the crucifixion.

Here is how we got there. In 66 CE, about a hundred and thirty years after Pompey first took the city, Jerusalem rose in open revolt against Rome. It went about as well as a provincial uprising could be expected to go against the most efficient war machine the ancient world ever built. By 70 CE, the legions had retaken Jerusalem and burned the Jewish Temple to the ground. And you have to understand what the Temple was to feel the size of that loss. Not merely a building that housed the Holy of Holies. It was the beating heart of God’s people. The one place on earth where heaven and earth were said to meet; where the pilgrim feasts gathered the tribes; where sacrifice and prayer and memory and identity all lived together in one house of stone. The House of God. And Rome burned it down.

gMark is written in the gravity well of that catastrophe. Not in a calm theological academy at a safe distance from Roman power, but in the smoke and ash of the Jewish capital. Once you see that, the opening line stops sounding like church and starts sounding like something far more dangerous.

Look at how the gospel writer describes the Temple’s fall, in the passage scholars call the “little apocalypse.” In Chapter 13, Jesus is preaching on the Mount of Olives, looking back at the great building and describing its ruin.

As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” … “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains.” MARK 13:1–2, 14

Not one stone left upon another. A desolating sacrilege standing where it ought not. People fleeing to the hills — pregnant women, nursing mothers, caught in it — the warning not even to go back inside for a coat. This is not vague, cosmic, end-of-the-world poetry. This is reportage. It reads like someone describing a fire they can still smell.

And in the middle of it, the writer does something telling: he breaks the fourth wall. At the most charged line — that “desolating sacrilege standing where it ought not” — he cuts in with an aside. Let the reader understand. Over the heads of the characters in the scene, directly at you. That little parenthesis makes the clearest sense if his readers are watching the very thing he’s pointing at happening in real time. You don’t elbow people to “understand” a prediction about the distant future. You elbow them about a headline they’re living through. Even the phrase is loaded: “desolating sacrilege” reaches back into the book of Daniel, where it once named an earlier defilement of the Temple centuries before. The author takes the oldest word Jewish memory had for the holy place violated and reactivates it for the Roman violence happening in their own time.

So here is where I plant my flag. The simplest and most honest explanation for why Mark 13 describes the fall of Jerusalem in such precise and terrified detail is that the author is writing inside it, or in the raw aftermath: right around that year we’re holding onto, 70 CE. The scholarly consensus is that this Gospel is a product of the Roman-Jewish war. So, gMark is not forecasting a distant future. It dates itself, with great precision, into a present and ongoing catastrophe.

And now something easy to miss, which changes the tone of the whole chapter...

The writer is not stoking the panic. They are managing it. Listen again to what Jesus says in the thick of the chaos: you will hear of wars and rumors of wars — but the end is not yet. Do not be alarmed. When someone runs up shouting the Messiah is here, the moment has come, do not follow them. This is a pastor talking a traumatized congregation down off a ledge. The Temple has fallen, false messiahs are multiplying, everyone is certain the world is ending, and gMark reaches for all this apocalyptic imagery for the express purpose of telling its people to keep their heads. It uses the language of the end to contain the fear of the end for third-generation Christians.

This opens the question that holds the whole Gospel together. If these words are being shaped inside the rubble of 70 CE, what was Jesus himself doing, forty years earlier, out in the Galilee?

Well, there are two levels in this Gospel working together. On the first level is what Jesus did — and what Jesus did, in the best historical reconstruction we have, was enact a kingdom that was already breaking through. Present tense. Here and now. Healing bodies, dining with the wrong people, tearing down the walls between who was in and who was out. That is the ground floor. On the second level is what the gospel writer, decades later, built — they took that present-tense proclamation and wrapped it, framed it, set it inside the trauma of a community watching the Temple burn. The urgency, the apocalyptic pitch, the sense that the cosmos itself was cracking apart: that is the editorial hand, writing for people who needed to know that God had not been defeated when Roman violence beat Judean courage.

This is why I refer to gMark as a “Crisis Gospel,” and in the same breath tell you the kingdom Jesus announced was and is present and immediate. These are two floors of one sacred house.

So here it is: Jesus enacted a kingdom that was already happening; gMark later wrapped that kingdom in the crisis of the Roman-Jewish war. See both floors at once, and this Gospel stops being a prediction and becomes something far more relevant: a word of hope, written in the dark, for people who were certain the monsters had won.

We have the stolen words, and now we have the strange timing of the Gospel of Mark. One piece is still missing, and it’s the most fascinating of all. A claim this size needs someone to say it out loud.

Lesson Three · The Witness

A claim this enormous needs a speaker. That an executed Galilean rabbi is the “Son of God,” the true Lord, the “good news” of the world. A claim that cosmic, that baffling, has to be said out loud by someone. So do something for me: cast the part in your mind. In a Gospel written to contradict the empire about who really rules the world, who would you choose to finally make the pronouncement? Who gets the line?

Hold your guess. I think the gospel writer may surprise you.

Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was a Son of God!” MARK 15:37–39

Did you catch that?

It’s not Peter. Back in Chapter 8, Peter gets the name right and then immediately gets everything else wrong (we’ll spend a whole lesson on Peter later in this series). It is not the disciples. By now, they’ve run off like cowards, leaving Jesus’s mother and a few brave others to weep before his bleeding body. It’s not the crowds, not the religious authorities, not a sympathetic bystander. The one person in the entire Gospel who looks at Jesus and says, aloud, Son of God is a Roman soldier. A professional centurion of the army occupying Israel. The empire’s own instrument, standing at the foot of a Roman torture device, looking at an insurrectionist Rome has just killed.

Yes, please remember what the Roman cross was: the slow death, the public one, the humiliating one. A man stripped and raised beside a road. This was the execution Rome reserved for slaves and insurgents. Rome was explicit about why this particular man was up there. The charge nailed over his head read King of the Judeans. A pretender, a would-be king, a political threat to Caesar. So the execution frames itself, by Rome’s own hand, as a contest of kingship: Caesar’s authority against this Galilean. This is precisely the fight gMark picks in its opening sentence.

Now sit in the irony, because the writer built it on purpose, and it gathers up everything we’ve traced so far. The title Augustus claimed, Son of God, is confessed, in this Gospel, by Rome’s own soldier. Here, the circuit is completed. The author takes the empire’s vocabulary, the words lifted in the very first verse, and sets them in the mouth of the empire’s man at the exact moment the empire believes it has won.

The criminal is dead.
The execution is complete.
Rome’s power looks total.
And that is precisely where, and precisely from whom, the truth is proclaimed.

The Greek is slipperier than English here. The centurion’s words carry no definite article: he says, literally, “this man was a son of god,” exactly the way a Roman soldier would have spoken of Caesar. For two thousand years, the church has read the centurion’s line as the first true confession: the hardened soldier broken open by what he has watched, the one man at the foot of the cross who finally sees. That reading is beautiful, and it may well be right, but I want to complicate it here. Scholars argue over what’s in the writer’s voice in this statement. Is it conversion, a hard man undone? Is it awe? Or is it one more sneer: the same mockery the soldiers had been spitting all afternoon: sure, there’s your “son of god,” nailed to a cross…

gMark doesn’t tell us. And I’ve come to think the ambiguity is not a gap in the story but is in fact part of its genius. Because, in the end, it does not matter which one the soldier means. Sincere, stunned, or sarcastic — the gospel writer presents the empire’s own man proclaiming the empire’s own word over the body of the crucified. The irony is built at the level of the storyteller. It does not need the centurion’s faith. It only needs his Roman voice.

Watch what that does to the shape of the whole Gospel. “Son of God” rings out at the very beginning: verse one, and again from the torn-open heavens at the baptism, and then it does not land on a single human pair of lips again until here, at the foot of the cross. The entirety of gMark is framed between two proclamations of this single stolen, Roman title.

One last bit of Greek here. gMark uses one particular verb at exactly two moments, and it is a violent word: schizō, to tear or rip open. The first time is at the baptism, where the heavens are torn open. The second and last time is here, at Jesus’ death, where the great curtain of the Temple, the veil screening the Holy of Holies, the place of God’s own presence, where only the high priest could go, and only on Yom Kippur, is torn in two, top to bottom. The same rare, brutal verb tears the sky at the start and tears the veil at the end. Torn open. Torn open.

What that means, I’m going to make you wait for. We’ll need it on the last Sunday of this series, and if I’ve done my work, it will braid the whole thing together.

So this is the kind of good news the Gospel of Mark means to share. Caesar’s word and Caesar’s title, announced by Caesar’s own man, over the body of an executed Jew. The plagiarism was never a scandal. The plagiarism is the message.

The Gospel of Mark · 1st of 5 Sundays: Mark & the Good News.
Next Sunday: “Wilderness, Baptism, Demons & Authority.”