(Continued)
This segues into:
6.) Insiders vs. outsiders. Mark maintains the insider/outsider irony inherent in the genre: his readers have the ‘necessary knowledge’ from the start (“the gospel of Jesus Christ, son of God”), but this truth eludes most of the human characters in the narrative, who should most have had such ‘insider’ knowledge, namely, the disciples. This is where we go to:
7.) The messianic secret. Again and again in the gospel, when Jesus performs something miraculous He rather oddly tells the witnesses to keep quiet about it. The very first time Jesus tries to silence someone is in Mark 1:25, when He rebukes the unclean spirit possessing a man in Capharnaum in response to its claim to know who Jesus is: “Be muzzled shut, and come out of him.”
A little later Mark tells us: “And many demons he drove out, and was not permitting the demons to speak because they knew him.” (1:34) Jesus does not silence them because they were saying false things about Him; on the contrary, He did so “because they knew him.” We often get this pattern in Mark where Jesus heals or exorcises someone, or when someone reveals His true identity, Jesus tells them all to shut up about what just happened, but very often the people can’t seem to restrain themselves from blabbering about it for some reason and so fame about Jesus and His abilities spreads anyway. This also applies for Peter’s confession and the Transfiguration:
[INDENT]And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.
And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean.
The first person to notice and identify this theme was a man called William Wrede, who also applied the title of “messianic secret” to this phenomenon. Now Wrede advanced the theory that Jesus did not really proclaim Himself as the Messiah during His lifetime nor was He identified as one by anyone. It was only after Jesus’ death that the disciples eventually came to believe that He was indeed the Christ. Now what happened, according to Wrede, was that the early Christians then invented the literary motif of having Jesus keep His true identity secret throughout His ministry when they retold the story of His life, in effect (anachronistically) transposing their understanding of who Jesus is back to an earlier time. Wrede thought that the clue to this lies in Jesus’ admonition to the disciples after the Transfiguration, where the disciples are told to keep everything a secret “except when the son of man should rise from the dead.”
The problem with Wrede’s theory, however, is that first of all, while he argued that the messianic elements in the Jesus story were later insertions by the early Christians some of the ‘Jesus tradition’ do look rather messianic in nature (the entry to Jerusalem, for instance - which evokes the prophecy from Zechariah). Secondly, while Jesus does command silence, the people proclaim the news anyway - hence the theory doesn’t really make sense of the messianic-secret motif and its function in Mark’s gospel. Thirdly, there is one instance (5:19-20) where Jesus actually commands a healed person to tell the news.
8.) Misunderstanding/blindness. As mentioned earlier in number 6, the greatest irony in Mark’s gospel is that almost know one knows who Jesus is. Mark partly privileges the audience by saying right at the very beginning that Jesus is “son of God,” although he leaves it at that with no clarification. Time and again, supernatural entities appear in the course of the story revealing His true identity (usually using that key phrase “son of God”), sometimes in the ostensive hearing of everyone, but most of the time, either Jesus orders them to shut up, or the people around Him are just too blind and deaf.
And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
And immediately 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 silent, and come out of him!”
And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.
And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.” And he strictly ordered them not to make him known.
And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”
And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.
The disciples, of all people, prove to be the most dimwitted and ‘blind’ within the narrative. To his credit, heactually starts off his portrayal of the disciples pretty well: for instance, when Jesus calls His disciples, they obediently follow, leaving behind everything to follow Him (1:16-20; 2:13-17; 3:13-18). However, aside from a handful of places where the disciples shine, everything goes downhill from there, as we will soon see.[/INDENT]
