Christology and Discipleship in the Gospels and Acts, Part 2
Mark on "The Suffering Servant and the Way of Service"
(avg. read time: 3–7 mins.)
This overview of Christology and discipleship cannot sufficiently cover the many nuances of both in each Gospel.1 Nor can it provide sufficient space to articulate properly the many levels of meaning in Jesus’s preferred self-designation—attested frequently in all of the Gospels—as the Son of Man (though there will be more on this later this year). Instead, the focus is on where it seems the Gospel authors place their foci. While I do not want to dismiss the substantial commonalities between the Gospels and Acts—one cannot completely eliminate the commonalities anyway because of the commonality of the central person—it seems best to show the distinct illumination each document provides for a broader vision of discipleship.
Mark does not exactly have a unique contribution to make in the presence of the company of other articulations of the gospel since almost all of Mark appears in the other Synoptics. Mark’s distinctiveness is not so much a question of emphases in contrast to the other Gospels or what it includes that the other Gospels do not. Since Mark is the shortest of the Gospels and has by far the least amount of Jesus’s teaching, what relatively little is present illuminates what Mark aims to communicate most urgently to his audience.
What Mark wants to communicate about Jesus comes out in the first verse with identifying him as the Messiah/Christ and the Son of God. These identifiers do not appear all that frequently in Mark, but their appearances are in strategic places (see also Mark 1:11; 8:29; 9:7, 41; 14:61–62; 15:26, 32, 39). After the baptismal scene, in which God confirms Jesus’s identity as the Son, there are plenty of questions without answers from Jesus regarding his identity until the turning point of the book in chapter 8. There are two veiled references to Jesus as Son of Man (2:10, 28) and two instances in which Jesus silences demons when they declare him to be the Son of God (3:11–12; 5:7–8), but generally apart from the overarching interpretive grid the readers receive in the first chapter, nothing definite comes up until the midpoint of the book. In fact, even when Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus tells him not to tell anyone (8:29). According to the preface in 1:1, this declaration is partially correct, but as N. T. Wright observes, “once Jesus was thought of as a potential or would-be Messiah, the movement would swiftly attract attention of the wrong sort…. Jesus … had some redefinitions of ‘Messiahship’ in mind; but he accepted the title itself.”2 Peter has drawn out and exceeded what many people were declaring about Jesus—along with his implied vocational purpose—based on his signs and wonders up to this point, and Jesus is about to take the discussion of his identity and vocation in a different direction.
Expectations of a messianic figure varied at this time, but it was common to expect this figure to lead a revival of Israel, to overthrow corrupt and evil powers among Israel, to liberate Israel from pagan oppressors, and/or to establish the kingdom of God on earth (or at least a preliminary kingdom).3 In the OT, the Davidic Messiah figure was both the ultimate fulfillment of the Davidic covenant and the new actor on the stage of salvation history who served as the means of effectuating the grand promises of the Israelite covenant by purifying the nation of Israel, defeating its enemies, and unifying its scattered people (Ps 132; Isa 9:1–7; 11; 55:1–5; Jer 23:5–8; 30:1–3, 18–22; 33:14–26; Ezek 34:23–31; 37:19–28; Hos 3:4–5; Mic 5:2–15). Later works of the Second Temple period would similarly present this figure as one who would effectuate God’s faithfulness (T.Jud. 24; 4QcommGen A V, 1–4; 4QDibHama 1–2 IV, 5–8), deliver Israel from enemies and diaspora (T.Naph. 8:2–3), or as having both roles (T.Sim. 7:2–3; Pss. Sol. 17:21–46; 4QpIsaa III, 11–24; 4QFlor 1 I, 7–13).
Similarly, the term “Son of God” already had associations in place. It applied to Israel (Exod 4:22; Hos 11:1; Wis 9:7; 18:13; 4 Ezra 5:28; Jub 1:25–28), to the true Israelites/the righteous (Wis 2:13, 16, 18; 5:5; Sir 4:10; Pss. Sol. 13:9; 18:4), and to the representative of Israel: the king (2 Sam 7:14; Pss 2:7; 89:26–27). In these texts there are accompanying expectations of God’s power upholding the son and providing for deliverance.
In some ways, Jesus is in continuity with these expectations (the miracles and the resurrection are clear indicators that God’s delivering power is at work in Jesus). In 1:14–15 he defines his ministry as being about the proclamation of the fulfillment of times, the good news of the kingdom, and the attendant call to repentance. As other references to the “gospel” show, Jesus is at the center of this gospel; the kingdom is coming through him (8:35; 10:29; 13:10; 14:9). But it is not coming in the ways many expected because he is not inaugurating the kingdom in the ways people expected.
It is at this point that the reader meets the intersection with discipleship. Though Mark has provided hints of what constitutes discipleship to Jesus earlier, the weight of discipleship teaching is mainly in chs. 8–10 after Jesus announces the true nature of his vocation and begins his journey to Jerusalem to fulfill it.4 God vocally and preemptively confirms Jesus’s revelation as Son of God in his death and resurrection by stating that Jesus is his Son (9:7); Jesus affirms that this revelation will come through his death and exaltation (with an implied resurrection) in 14:61–62; and the climactic declaration of Jesus as Son of God comes from a centurion looking upon the crucified Jesus in 15:39. Anyone who wants to be his disciple must similarly follow this path and recapitulate his life, death, resurrection, and exaltation through denial of self, taking up of the cross, and following him, with the understanding that the story can only come to its conclusion through God’s action. At this point in the Gospel, he must perform a second call to discipleship (the first being a simple “follow me and I will make you fish for people” in 1:17–20) because he is so radically different from common expectation and discipleship to him is thus radically different.
Each time Jesus predicts his fate in this section (8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34) he must follow up with correcting the disciples’ misunderstanding of discipleship and citizenship in the kingdom of God. This connection between Jesus’s fate and what the disciples are to do in following Jesus indicates that discipleship is fundamentally identification with Jesus. It is complete dedication to the Lordship of Jesus and thus a self-definition by that same Lordship. Disciples must utterly deny themselves the pursuit of worldly power and glory contrary to Jesus (9:34–50). Because their lives are cruciform—and in the ancient Mediterranean region crucified people were especially shameful in the eyes of the world—they are to walk humbly in suffering service to all people and in welcome to even the ones who have the lowest status in the eyes of the world (9:35–37; 10:14–15). Disciples must deny the urge to be first, becoming last instead (10:31, 43–44). Denial now will lead to God giving much more at the consummation of the kingdom than disciples give up in the present age (10:17–31). But the path to resurrection and to exaltation from last to first can only run through the path to the cross, the path on which disciples follow Jesus. As Jesus was the suffering servant, so too disciples must be suffering servants for God and for each other (1:11; 10:45; 13:9-13, 33–37; cf. Isa 42:1–7; 49:1–6; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12).
For good surveys, especially of Christology, see Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 73–157; Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 177–213, 283–407; Witherington, Indelible Image, 1:465–624, 2:242–48, 256–88.
N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 529, 530.
For more on messianic expectations, see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 307–20.
In 2:15–28 and 7:5–23 it becomes clear that Jesus defines the act of following him as being different from following traditional boundary drawings and traditional Jewish interpretations of the law. In 3:13–15, 35 Jesus defines the Israel and his true family around himself rather than traditional notions.