Mark 1:35-39

The Kingdom Is Resourced

Mark 1:35-36 – Jesus Prays

Jesus’ relationship with the Father was the source of his strong sense of identity and of his respect for and responsibility towards others. It was the basis also of his deepening critique of the social and religious cultural institutions in which he was immersed. For Jesus there was no separation of action and contemplation. Each nourished the other.

Mark showed Jesus praying in a deserted place. The wilderness was where the Spirit had initially driven him. It was the place where he was tempted, confronting the decisions shaping his destiny. It was the place where he communed with God.

Jesus faced the choice of remaining where he had been warmly accepted or of moving beyond into the unknown. He went to prayer to discern the will of the Father, i.e., God’s will for life and for what Jesus had come to call “the Kingdom”. In the light of his prayer, he chose to move on.

Mark 1:37-39 – Mission in Galilee

Again Mark gave no clear indication of the content of the message that Jesus proclaimed. However, he consistently said that Jesus cast out demons. Presumably Jesus’ ministry did not focus exclusively on people whose symptoms of illness prompted the common diagnosis of possession. Jesus was exposing and confronting the evil embedded in the cultural, social, political and religious systems of the time. This evil had become integrated almost inevitably into the common psyche of everyone and led people to cooperate in the destruction of their own and each other’s God-given human dignity.

Mark referred to their synagogues, perhaps because, by the time he wrote his story, the synagogues had ostracised the followers of Jesus. Mark could no longer call them our synagogues.

Life in Galilee

Geography. The district of lower Galilee that Jesus took as his special area of endeavour was in fact a reasonably small region, roughly a square measuring about forty by forty kilometers, stretching westwards from the lake of Galilee towards the Mediterranean Sea. Most of it was fertile farming country. There were about 200 towns and villages within the region; so none of them was very far from its neighbour. Villages were generally small groupings of peasants, closely related to each other. Many of the peasants no longer owned the land they farmed. In fact, much of it constituted the estates of the priestly and aristocratic classes of Jerusalem. Towns were bigger than villages and were surrounded by defensive walls to which neighbouring villagers might flee in times of invasion or danger.

Herod and his courtiers generally lived in the few hellenised cities of Galilee, notably Tiberias, his normal seat of government on the southwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and Sepphoris close to Nazareth. Jesus seems to have pointedly avoided these hellenised cities. 

Taxation. As mentioned already, at the time of Jesus, Galilee was ruled by a king, Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. Herod was a vassal of Rome, and paid considerable levies to the Roman authorities. He met his financial debts to Rome by taxing the landholders and freehold fishermen. He was largely free, however, to administer his Kingdom as he wished. To collect his taxes, Herod farmed out the franchise to other Jews whom he protected by his police and military forces. As was to be expected, these tax-collectors were loathed by their fellow countrymen and branded as collaborators with the occupying Roman power. Given their powerful protection, they were often unjust in the demands they made on the poor.

Religious Taxes. As well as paying taxes to their Roman conquerors, they also paid tithes on all their produce to the Jerusalem Temple or to the local village priests. In addition to these regular taxes, they were required to pay in kind if they had broken the Jewish Law or in any way had incurred ritual “uncleanness”. The nature of their work meant that they frequently incurred such “uncleanness”, so they were either constantly paying to be cleansed, or they remained in their state of “uncleanness”. The privileged Jewish upper classes despised the “sinners” of Galilee. 

Poverty. The small landholders were often in debt. They lived in fear of bad harvests, because they would have to borrow to sow the following year’s crops, and if that crop failed, they would often have to sell their land to meet their debts. The landless peasants who had been forced off their land were invariably poor. They relied on day-to-day offers of employment, and would often face virtual starvation when there was no work.  The close family ties of the villagers sometimes meant that those who were able to help did in fact support those in need. The strong mutual dependence also served to reinforce a sometimes suffocating conservatism.

Temperament. Galileans as a group were not pureblood Jews, but had embraced the Jewish religion and culture about two centuries before Jesus. They were regarded as quite fanatical in their adherence to Judaism, even if not always in their observance of the Law. They had a reputation for volatility. They strongly resented the Roman occupation of their country, and during the childhood of Jesus many had in fact rebelled against Rome. Many Galileans involved in the revolt had been crucified along the roadways of Galilee and the growing Jesus may have seen their tortured bodies. (Crucifixion was the sentence imposed on anyone who questioned the Roman status quo. As a deterrent it very effectively conveyed the message that you do not “mess with Rome”.)

Such was the theatre of Jesus’ mission.

Next >> Mark 1:40-45