Mark 1:10-11

God Initiates the Mission of Jesus

Before engaging with the narrative in detail, Mark included two “incidents” by means of which he attempted to forewarn his readers of the mystery about to be fulfilled in the life and death of Jesus.

Jesus is Anointed from Above

Mark moved the reader into a whole new way of understanding Jesus. The task is to interpret what Mark was doing.

Discerning Mark’s Literary Style

Literal Understanding. We can take the event at its literal face value. But this immediately presents the contemporary reader with insuperable problems. The passage presumed a view of the universe that no longer makes sense. To Jesus’ contemporaries, the earth was basically flat. The sky was a solid blue dome above, and around the inner surface of this dome moved the sun, the moon, the stars and the clouds. Since rain fell from the sky, and since springs of water came up through the surface of the earth, they presumed that there were oceans of water above the dome of the sky and beneath the surface of the earth. The Jewish people believed that God was above the dome of the sky and the waters beyond it. The dome of the sky, and the residence of God above the dome and the waters, were both referred to as “the heavens”.

With a cosmology such as this there would be little difficulty in imagining the dome of heaven being split open and the Spirit, “the invisible power” of God, descending on Jesus. A voice echoing from the heavens, the voice of God, was also comprehensible.

Our present knowledge of cosmology makes such a literal interpretation meaningless.

Mystical Experience. Another explanation accepts the reality of some core event: Jesus may have had a mystical vision and heard a mystical voice.

Apocalyptic Explanation. A further explanation is perhaps more probable. Mark was adopting a genre of writing that was quite common among his contemporaries and that scholars refer to as “apocalyptic”. “Apocalypse” derives from a Greek word that means “removing the veil”. In this literary style, an author metaphorically removes the veil that prevents people from seeing the inner meaning of a situation. Apocalyptic writing tended to see reality at two levels: the level of historical experience, and the deeper level of the hidden working of God’s plan in history. It allowed the viewer to see the deeper level of reality, what in fact was really happening in and through historical events. This deeper reality was known only by faith and was commonly revealed in the form of visions. Both levels were described in highly symbolic language and imagery.

In the Jewish Bible apocalyptic was used extensively in the Book of Daniel, and in the Christian Bible it was the style adopted in the book of Revelation (the Apocalypse). It was extensively used in literature of the period.

If this interpretation is correct, right at the start of his narrative, Mark was alerting the reader to the deeper significance of the events that would follow. 

(Mark used this same probable literary device on other occasions in his Gospel.)

The imagery of the heavens torn apart reflected a wonderful passage in the writings of Isaiah:

The Spirit descending like a dove perhaps echoed the spirit of God that “hovered over the waters” at the dawn of creation.

The voice from heaven, the voice of a Father that identified Jesus as my son in whom I am well pleased, echoed other passages in Isaiah, more immediately the first of the “Servant Songs”:

The reference to Jesus as my son reflected a passage from Psalm 2, which was seen by the early Church as a wonderful messianic Psalm:

Effectively Mark was telling the reader that this otherwise nondescript pilgrim from Nazareth in Galilee was really the Servant of God who would change the world through his life and death, the messianic king who would bring God’s reign to the world.

Next >> Mark 1:12-13