Mark 1:9

Jesus Accepts the Sin of the World

Jesus is Baptised

Against the background of stirring prophecies regarding the definitive intervention of God in the world, and with the words of John still ringing in the hearers’ ears, the stronger one who was to baptise with the very power of God was introduced onto the stage. 

This stage was not the seat of power envisaged by Isaiah, Zion/Jerusalem, but the wilderness.  Mark deliberately jolted the reader into the realisation that typical expectations of God were not to be trusted.  

The one who entered was Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee.  To come from Galilee was bad enough.  Galilee may well have been a hotbed of Jewish nationalism, but its orthodoxy was suspect.  Greek influence was strong there; Jewish roots were not.  That he came from Nazareth was even more confronting.  Nazareth was little more than an insignificant village.  

John’s message had touched a chord deep in the heart of Jesus and apparently had given shape and focus to what had been vaguely stirring there.  Jesus responded to John’s invitation.  He broke with his past. He asked for baptism.  His life was changed from that moment onwards. 

What Did Baptism Mean For Jesus?

Why did Jesus come to John? Why did he come when he did? Would he have moved if John had not appeared in the desert? Did he share John’s vision that the world had reached a stage where only God’s intervention could change things?  Had his own world vision been challenged? Was he beginning to see the world differently? 

Did Jesus see himself inextricably implicated in the social sin of the world, simply because of his shared humanity? Was he able thus to take on himself the sin of the world?

Mark remained silent

Playing a Role?  One answer is to see not only this incident but the whole life of Jesus as a deliberate acting out of a script already determined by God and clearly known to Jesus.  However, this view does not align well with the conviction expressed elsewhere in the New Testament that Jesus was like us in every way except sin.  It is our human experience that we do not clearly know our life’s trajectory, that we grow in wisdom gradually, that insights take time to become clear, that human formation happens through a combination of action and reflection in a continuing unfolding.

A Jesus who was simply acting out an already predetermined script would inevitably seem insincere, his actions merely play-acting, a kind of window-dressing engaged in for people’s edification. 

Being Real? Another approach is to take the Gospel passages at their face value and to allow Jesus to be like us in all things, save in the crucial difference that, despite being tempted in every way that we are and knowing his own vulnerability, he never knowingly lost focus, never allowed himself to be consciously side-tracked, never acted in ways destructive of genuine human dignity, his own or others’.  Unlike us, Jesus never chose sin. However, like every human person, he grew in maturity.  As a child he could not think and act as an adult, and even as an adult he kept on learning and seeing life, its possibilities and its choices, with an ever clearer insight. Viewed in this light, a strongly attractive, even if disconcerting, Jesus emerges from the pages of the Gospel.

Mark would continue to mention Jesus’ consistent concern for the marginalised, his compassion, and at times his anger at their plight.  It can be reasonably assumed that Jesus felt these same reactions before his public life began.  It was also possible, however, that his active involvement during his public life with the needs of the oppressed and those living “on the edges” brought him into new situations that heightened his social awareness and led him to an even firmer commitment to liberation.

Mark would also mention that Jesus’ townspeople knew him during his years in Nazareth as an ordinary and insignificant member of their community, not standing out from the crowd in any noticeable way (Mark 6:3-4).

We may credibly interpret his situation prior to John’s coming as one where Jesus was somewhat aware of the oppressive situation of many of his contemporaries and was sensitive to the need for social and personal change.  He may have seen the tight connection between religious attitudes and social customs in the theocratic culture of the time.  He may have dimly felt the impossibility, the paralysing hopelessness, of bringing about any significant social transformation.  He may simply have not yet become aware of any special call by God to take action.  It is impossible to know.  Yet, purely by being one of the community, he was surrounded by and immersed in the social sin of his time.  

However his life be viewed, it seems clear that while Jesus was still in Galilee, he was sufficiently struck by the message of John the Baptist (as it reached him either through the reports of others, or as he personally journeyed to Jerusalem for one of the many Jewish feasts) to move and to respond to it.

Next >> Mark 1:10-11