Mark 1:12-13

The Cosmic Struggle of Good and Evil

Mark continued his apocalyptic imagery.

Mark 1:12-13  Jesus is Tested in the Wilderness

The encounters in the wilderness with Satan and angels were also understandable within contemporary Jewish religious culture.  Satan had figured in the Book of Job where he was envisaged as a servant of God, a kind of “public prosecutor” whose purpose was to test (or “tempt” – the same Greek word can be translated both ways) people to determine their genuineness (Job 1:1-2:10).  

Satan was the source of Jesus’ testing.  Elsewhere in the Christian literature, the Epistle to the Hebrews referred to Jesus as having been 'tested in every way that that we are, but without sinning'.

The wilderness was an ambivalent milieu in Jewish consciousness.  In the wilderness of Sinai the Hebrews were first formed into a people under Moses.  It was the place where God spoke to their hearts. It was also the place where they were tempted and sinned.

The Hebrews had wandered through the wilderness of Sinai for forty years.  “Forty” in apocalyptic language referred to “an undefined, but significant, length of time”.  Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness probably referred, then, in Mark’s mind to the time of his future ministry, a time when he would be tested by events, when his disciples would be formed into a community and when God’s face would be more and more clearly revealed.

In the wilderness Jesus was with the wild beasts.  In apocalyptic literature, particularly in the writings of Daniel, wild beasts were secret symbols of political power and the Kingdoms that oppressed Israel.  They were an earthly embodiment of evil.  As Jesus’ mission developed, he would encounter the opposition and oppression of both the Jewish and Roman political, social and military establishments.  Their combined power would crush him, yet through it all, he would be supported by God’s power. 

Angels (and devils) had also become familiar concepts within Judaism in the previous couple of centuries. Not all Jews believed in them, however.  Sadducees, for example, who accepted only the first five books of the bible, did not believe in them at all. The angels of Mark’s apocalyptic passage were the messengers through whom God’s power took shape in the life and the struggles of Jesus.

Did Jesus Know that He was God?

Though the words put by Mark on the lips of the “voice from heaven” were very probably Mark’s own composition, they do raise the interesting issue of Jesus’ own experience of his relationship to the Father.

Note: Catholic theology has no doubt about proclaiming that Jesus is God.  The wording of this core doctrine of the Church was hammered out as accurately as possible, and reached definitive form, at the Council of Chalcedon in the middle of the fifth century.  In essence it stated that the one person, the Word of God made flesh in Jesus, had a divine nature and a human nature.  These two natures were each complete and perfect in themselves: Jesus was fully divine and also fully human, without the divinity or the humanity in any way being fused together.  The separate humanity and divinity were united by some real underlying (“hypostatic” or “personal”) factor beyond human comprehension.

The two separate natures of God and man, the two minds of the Godhead and the man Jesus, were held together without mixture or confusion in the “person/hypostasis” of the Word made flesh.

The English word “person” derives from a Latin word that originally meant a theatrical mask that identified the particular role of an actor, but had come to refer to someone in his/her uniqueness.  It became the equivalent of the Greek word “hypostasis” that seemed to have been specially defined for the purpose of the dogma.  It was distinguished from nature but had no really clear meaning.  Its purpose was to protect the fact that the Word of God made flesh in Jesus was both divine and human, and somehow held both in unity, but that he was not a composite mixture that was neither quite one nor the other.

The modern issue of Jesus’ self-awareness was addressed, though quite obliquely, at the Third Council of Constantinople more than two centuries later.  That Council addressed directly whether the Word of God made flesh in Jesus had two distinct wills.  It agreed that there were indeed two distinct wills, the divine will shared with the other two persons of the Trinity, and the human will of the human Jesus.  Without expressly saying so, the Council would seem to have assumed that the man Jesus who could say “I choose”, did so with an awareness distinct and different from that of the Godhead.

In current English, the word person has become closely associated with the idea of psychological consciousness.  This association was not considered at the time of the early Councils when hypostasis (or person) was understood philosophically as a metaphysical reality.  If it were possible to apply contemporary connotations to ancient terms, it would be more accurate to associate the contemporary sense of consciousness with what was then defined as nature.  To claim that Jesus is one person with its current English psychological overtones is to go beyond what the Council of Chalcedon intended.

Our human minds can in no way have any sense of what it would be like to be divine.  Similarly our human minds can have no sense of what it would be like to be both fully divine and fully human.  We do know, however, what it is like to be human (even if not yet perfectly human).  In thinking and speaking about the Word of God made flesh in Jesus it would make more sense for us to speak from the basis of what we humbly do know, that is, of our common humanity, and not to presume that we know anything at all about the experience of being divine.

Taking up themes of the Epistle to the Hebrews (3:17-18; 4:15), the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer speaks of Jesus as “like us in all things but sin”. The Epistle spoke of his human development as a process of moving towards perfection that was reached only in his moment of dying on the cross (becoming perfect through suffering [5:8-9]).  It would make more sense for us to be clear about Jesus’ consciousness of being human (which we know something about), than about his divine consciousness (of which we know nothing).  It would make more sense if we could accept that Jesus grew in wisdom, as well as in age and in grace, and that therefore at any one moment in his life he was not perfectly wise and did not know everything, including the details of his own future nor the hearts of his own disciples.  In these matters Chalcedon does not help us.

Whatever about the historicity and interpretation of the heavens opening, we may safely assume that the baptism was a profound “foundational” experience for Jesus.  Before it he had lived quietly in Nazareth and apparently no one had noticed anything particularly different about him, even his own close relatives.  We do not know what questions were stirring within him.  After his baptism he seemed a changed man: his identity was clear, his sense of mission strong, his critique of the surrounding culture uncompromising.

Next >> Mark 1:14-15