Kindle Notes & Highlights
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October 28 - December 13, 2024
There are only two passages in the Gospel of Mark that are not about Jesus. Both are about John, and both foreshadow Jesus (see 9:11-13).
Mark’s first passion narrative, for here John is the forerunner of Jesus’ death.
Mark sandwiches the brutal and moving account of the martyrdom of the Baptist between the sending of the Twelve (6:7-13) and their return (6:30) in order to impress upon his readers the cost of discipleship.
The Herod of our story, Herod Antipas, was the second of the four, who ruled from the death of his father Herod (the Great) in 4 B.C. until A.D. 39. His official title was tetrarch of Galilee and Perea
The one whom Jesus called the greatest man born of woman (Matt 11:11) is sacrificed to a cocktail wager!
The sandwich structure draws mission and martyrdom, discipleship and death, into an inseparable relationship.
It is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels, and its significance is signaled by a sequel in 8:1-10, two subsequent reflections in 6:52 and 8:17-21, and a final banquet in the Last Supper, of which the feeding of the five thousand is a foreshadowing (cf. 6:41 with 14:22).
The Greek word for “compassion,” splangnizesthai, is used in the NT only of Jesus, and here his compassion is expressed in “teaching them many things.”
the early church saw a parallel between the feeding of the five thousand and the Last Supper, both accounts of which contain the sequence of “taking bread … blessing … breaking … giving to the disciples” (cf. 14:22).
The apparent sense is that Jesus must expeditiously remove them from the scene in order to persuade the crowd to disperse peaceably and thus avert a revolutionary groundswell (John 6:14-15).
Mark notes Jesus praying at only three points in his ministry (1:35; 6:45; 14:35-39). Each prayer is at night and in a lonely place, each finds the disciples removed from him and failing to understand his mission, and in each Jesus faces a formative decision or crisis.
Whenever the disciples are separated from Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, they fall into distress.
In their distress Jesus comes to them at “the fourth watch of the night,” that is, between 3 A.M. and 6 A.M. In dividing the night into four watches Mark follows the Roman custom rather than the threefold Jewish division, ostensibly for the benefit of his Roman readers.
Like Yahweh in the OT, Jesus comes to deliver his people in need, and the deliverance becomes a self-revelation.
There is no possibility of translating “walking on the lake” in any other way.
“He was about to pass by them”
At Mt. Sinai the transcendent Lord “passed by” Moses (Exod 33:22; also 33:19 and 34:6) in order to reveal his name and compassion.
the Lord revealed his presence to Elijah in “passing by” (1 Kgs 19:11).
Job 9:8, 11: [God] alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea. When he passes me, I cannot see him; whe...
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Mark’s Christology is no less sublime than is John’s, although John has Jesus declaring that he is the Son of God (John 10:36), whereas Mark has him showing that he is the Son of God.
“The edge of the cloak” again designates Jesus as an observant Jew (also 1:44; 5:28), for it refers to the tassels that Jews were commanded to sew on the four corners of their outer garments as reminders of the commandments of God
According to the OT, only priests were required to wash before entering the tabernacle (Exod 30:19; 40:13; Lev 22:1-6); otherwise the washing of hands—the point of contention in v. 2—was prescribed only if one had touched a bodily discharge
This list implicates both Jesus and the disciples of several earlier violations of ritual uncleanness, since they have been with lepers (1:40), tax collectors (2:13), Gentiles (5:1), menstruating women (5:25), and corpses (5:35).
The Mishnah, for instance, declared that the Aramaic sections of Daniel and Ezra rendered the hands of anyone who touched them unclean, as did the Holy Scriptures themselves if they were translated into Assyrian.
Mark labors to clarify that the essential purpose of the Torah, and hence the foundation of morality, is a matter of inward purity, motive, and intent rather than of external compliance to ritual and custom.
The controversy thus cannot be interpreted as a case for Christian antinomianism but rather for the recovery of the true intent of the Torah.
Mark profiles Jesus as the one who, in contrast to the oral tradition, is the true revealer of God, for Jesus can produce the inner transformation that the law requires but cannot effect.
these clues suggest that Jesus and the disciples quit Galilee to escape the harassment of the Pharisees and perhaps also of Herod, who ruled Galilee and Perea and who had killed John.1 This is only a hypothesis,
Among the Gentiles he does mighty works of exorcism (5:1-20; 7:24-30), healing (7:31-37), and feeding the hungry (8:1-10), but he does not teach and evangelize. According to 7:27, the witness to the Jews must take priority over the witness to the Gentiles.
Tyre probably represented the most extreme expression of paganism, both actually and symbolically, that a Jew could expect to encounter. According to Pss. Sol. 17:23-30, the Messiah would be ordained to expel and subdue the Gentiles, not to visit and embrace them.
Of all the people who approach Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, this individual has the most against her from a Jewish perspective.
Despite such obstacles, the woman’s “heart” (to refer back to 7:19) is true, even if her credentials are wrong.
It is reasonable to suspect Peter as the source of this story, whose later experience with Cornelius
the most offensive sayings of Jesus.
a small dog that could be kept in the house as a pet.
Whereas Jesus refers to Israel as teknōn (“biological children”), the woman refers to Israel as paidiōn, which is more inclusive, implying both children and servants in a household. The change in terminology suggests that the woman understands the mercies of God to extend beyond ethnic Israel.
she appears to understand the purpose of Israel’s Messiah better than Israel does.
the woman is the first person in Mark to hear and understand a parable of Jesus.
and the tongue of the dumb (mogilalos) shout for joy” (Isa 35:5-6). The presence of mogilalos in v. 32 links our story unmistakably to the Isaiah quotation.
The allusion to Isaiah 35 is of supreme significance for Mark’s presentation of Jesus, not only because the restoration of speech to a mogilalos signals the eschatological arrival of the Day of the Lord but also because the desert wastelands of Lebanon (Isa 35:2) will receive the joy of God.
physical contact is an expression of Jesus’ compassion.
The spittle of certain persons, however, was considered by the Jews to have healing power, especially when it was accompanied by conversation, applied to the area of sickness or injury, and accompanied by a formula or prayer.
This is the only instance in Mark of Jesus commanding Gentiles to silence.
The crowd has not been coincidentally present but intentionally with him.39 This is an unusually positive description of a crowd in Mark. Jesus again finds a reception among Gentiles that he has not found among Jews.
“‘I have compassion for these people’” expresses Jesus’ gut-wrenching emotion on behalf of the crowd. Equally importantly, in Mark this word is not used of people for whom one would naturally feel compassion (such as friends or compatriots), but for those far removed and even offensive: lepers (1:41), revolutionaries (6:34), Gentiles (8:2), and demon-possessed (9:22).
With but few exceptions in Mark, Jesus’ miraculous activity comes to people—and especially to the disciples—as wholly wondrous and unanticipated activity. Hankering for miracles is a sign of Jesus’ opponents, not of his followers, as the request for a sign by the Pharisees in the story immediately following evinces (8:11-13).
after Caesarea Philippi their fledgling understanding is expressed in their confession of his Messiahship, although they will struggle with the fact of a suffering Messiah rather than a royal Messiah.
Both halves of the Gospel conclude with christological confessions, and both confessions are associated with Roman Gentiles: the first is Peter’s tentative confession at the Roman stronghold of Caesarea Philippi that Jesus is the Christ (8:29); the second is the full confession of the Roman centurion at the cross that Jesus is the Son of God (15:39).
dismay or despair.
Matthew identifies the metaphor of the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod as the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matt 16:12), and Luke identifies it as the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (Luke 12:2).
