Mark 1

Division 1. (Mark 1:1-45; Mark 2:1-28; Mark 3:1-35; Mark 4:1-41; Mark 5:1-43.)The Lord’s personal ministry. The three divisions are in very simple connection with one another. The first gives us the Lord’s ministry in itself, its character, the needs met and the way of meeting them, with the results that became apparent. The second shows the opposition of the enemy in whose hand the world is, the conflict between the evil and the good, and the meaning of discipleship to a rejected Master. The third shows us the Lord’s service perfected in the sacrifice of the Cross, the need met before God, and God glorified in it, resurrection its outcome, with what is implied in this, which only the epistles, however, develop in its fulness for us.

Mark 1:1-13

Subdivision 1. (Mark 1:1-13.)The Person who comes to serve. We begin now, with the second of the synoptists, the fruitful work of comparison between them. To this the remarkable similarity in much, the very words being as if copied from one to the other, with the equally apparent differences, which to many often seem to amount to contradictions, on either side invite us. These differences are, for the most part, such as none can claim the merit of having discovered, - they do not need a great deal of searching out: they lie on the surface, and appeal to every reader to inquire as to their meaning. If we have the happiness of being among the number of those who still accredit Scripture as inspired of God, we shall not be surprised to find that not only will this inquiry assure us that there is no contradiction but that God has awakened it in order to reward our search in His own abundant way. We shall do well to give attention to the differences. Our sense of the reality and value of verbal inspiration will assuredly deepen as the result of this, and the truth of God will acquire fresh distinctness, certainty, and power over us. (1) In both Matthew and Mark, nay, in all the Gospels, the Person of the Lord is necessarily the first thing put before us; but in very different ways. Matthew, presenting to us the Son of David, gives as the foundation of all His legal title in His genealogy. Mark, as we see, has nothing of the sort. And yet His title to the place He takes is as much affirmed in Mark as in Matthew. But title to serve, what will give that? If there be power for it, and heart, nothing else is needed. Serving is love’s prerogative, wherever power and need are found together. Thus that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is for Mark the explanation of his Gospel. Power cannot fail the Son of God; and love is demonstrated in the fact that the Son of God is become the Man Christ Jesus. To this is added that He comes in the foretold way: the Shepherd comes through the door into the sheepfold, which the Lord speaks of to the Jews as the sign that He is the Shepherd. Here, therefore, the testimony of two prophets is brought forward: Malachi of a messenger divinely sent to prepare the way of Christ; Isaiah giving the voice of that messenger addressed to Israel to prepare His way: the way of the Lord (or Jehovah), Messiah being Himself Jehovah. To make His paths straight, how much was involved in that! (2) Mark passes on to the testimony of the forerunner: not even pausing for a moment to record the birth of Jesus, as both Matthew and Luke do, he begins his history with the account of the Baptist. Even here he is briefer than either of the others. He shows you the man himself in his rough and independent garb, as Matthew does. He tells you with both the others of his baptism of repentance, and with Luke that it is for the remission of sins. He shows you the people flocking to his baptism from all the country round; but he does not give, as Matthew and Luke do, any details of his address to them, but simply his testimony to Christ Himself, to the glory of His Person and His better baptism, with the Holy Spirit. Thus it is plain, if Mark abridges, it is an abridgment with a purpose. He is taking our eyes as much as possible off other things, to fix them upon the Person who is coming forth to minister, so glorious in Himself, so wondrous in the gift He brings: the Son of God, and baptizing with the Holy Spirit! (3) But He has higher witness than that of John; and now we see Him coming forth from Nazareth of Galilee, and Himself baptized of John in Jordan. This is indeed the pledge in which He devotes Himself, as we have seen in Matthew, to the path of service which lies before Him. It is His “Lo, I am come,” and Jordan prefigures the death which is “written of Him in the volume of the book,” in its law of sacrifice. His vows are now upon Him; and immediately as He comes up out of the water, the heavens are opened, and the Spirit like a dove descends upon Him - the bird of heaven; the bird of love, the bird of sorrow, the bird of sacrifice, - and the Father’s voice owns the object of His delight, His well-beloved Son. There is little variation as to all this in the three Gospels: it is plainly fundamental to them all. (See Notes on Matthew 3:13-17). (4) Now once again; Mark hastens over what Matthew and Luke detail with equal care, the temptation in the wilderness. We are merely told of the fact of it, and Mark adds that “He was with the wild beasts.” This is in no wise as if they threatened Him. He was the Lord of nature, - the Creator; and as the Second Man; all was in His hand. The angels, ministry was not at all, as Meyer thinks, “a sustaining support against Satan and the beasts,” which in the first case would have been only a dishonor to Him, and in the second would have involved a breach between nature and Himself. They came, as Matthew shows, when the temptation was ended, and to minister to His bodily need. Thus the Lord is put before us, however briefly, in all His relations, not only to the world, in which now we are to see Him serving. The world is already marked out as a world in departure from God, wherein the people specially the object of God’s love and care have to be called to make straight His paths before Him by taking themselves their place in the baptism of repentance as those rightly under death because of sin. Into this death He who would serve them effectually must come, and to this His baptism pledges Him. Thus He can minister to all lesser needs which result from this condition.

Mark 1:14-3

Subdivision 2. (Mark 1:14-45; Mark 2:1-28; Mark 3:1-35.)His ministry. That ministry itself is now to be put before us, and the various characters of evil, hopeless to any other, present themselves in rapid succession, the spiritual root of it being first of all emphasized; while even the bodily diseases become the pictures of more distressing and fatal maladies, - the visible being made to manifest the invisible, after the manner of Scripture indeed everywhere, and after the manner of nature also: for one is based upon the other. Thus too the divine dealings with these acquire an interest for us they could not otherwise possess. The Gospel narratives are seen to be not simply histories of the past, but depict for us the present also, and appeal to us with fuller, more pervasive and personal claim. That we may know that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins, He saith to the sick of the palsy, Rise and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house. The word of God is characterized in this way by its tender concern for the soul of man; and everywhere, “Scripture inspired of God is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”

1. The Lord’s public ministry in Galilee begins from the imprisonment of John His forerunner. He takes up the testimony which the world has done its best to silence, and, more definitely than even John; declares the time to be fulfilled and the Kingdom of God to be come near. Herod might have been thought to have proved his own kingdom to be the more substantial reality, with the herald of the divine one languishing in prison; but now it is that the announcement is made afresh with new power and evidence. A gospel indeed in a world so bruised in Satan’s fetters; but yet with its claim of repentance which John had so earnestly enforced. These are the first words of the great Healer, and His words precede His deeds.

Before all other deliverances, and that these may be truly such, the Word must be spoken by which man lives. For death is but the shadow of sin; and the true life alone can banish it. The Kingdom of God is at hand. As a Kingdom of truth, it is to be established by the truth in the hearts of men; it must have its heralds. The Lord begins, therefore, now to call the men who are to proclaim it, - who are to be as He terms it, in words derived from that which they give up to follow Him, the “fishers of men.” The account given is almost exactly the same as what we find in Matthew, and as brief as can be. There is none of the personal work done in their souls: that is supplied by John and Luke (John 1:35-42; Luke 5:4-11). 2. There is omitted also the first preaching in Nazareth (Luke 4:1-44), which in the decisive rejection which follows it, causes Him to leave the place in which He had grown up. Capernaum, “the village of consolation,” became now “His own city” (Matthew 9:1), and in this for a time fulfilled its name. The first act of His power here, as given by Mark, is one that is fundamental for the blessing of the earth, the casting of Satan out of it. When He shall come in power, to take all things into His hand, the dragon will be shut up in the bottomless pit. Similarly, the first sign given to Moses, whereby he is to prove his divine call as the deliverer of Israel, is the return of the rod of power, which, cast out of his hand, is become a serpent, once more to be the shepherd’s rod of protection for the flock. Here in Capernaum the demon is in the synagogue, in the midst of the professing people of God, and as gathered before God; introduced in the person of a man whom he has possessed. The Word, in the mouth of Christ, manifests him, and he cries out in words which show his conviction; and are demoniac in their suggestion still. Gripping his poor victim to him, “he cries out, saying, Let us alone: what have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth? art Thou come to destroy us? I know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God.” The change of pronoun is very suggestive here. The knowledge of the Holy One is that of the demon alone; he would join with him in the dread which it inspires, and the desire to escape from Him as a destroyer, the one to whom He is to be a Saviour! The devil is always that - the “false accuser”; and the dread of coming doom (which he has - for “the demons believe and tremble”) cannot alter his nature. Hell will make no change in this way, though doubtless it will be, and is meant to be, a restraint upon the manifestation of it. But the word of Christ casts out the demon: in one last convulsion; permitted to show the reality of his malign power, ere he leaves unwillingly his prey. The people, amazed, accredit it as the testimony of a “new teaching,” a fresh interposition of God in the affairs of men, as in truth it was. “Signs” were for the confirmation of the Word, wherever this was new, or where, perhaps, as in Elijah’s time, it had been practically lost, and needed recovery. Where it had been received, among disciples of Christ even; where the workers of miracles had a distinct place, and signs originally followed those that believed, (Mark 16:17), they yet were given in conformity with the divine purpose as to them. The people, therefore, rightly inferred a new teaching from the power accompanying the Lord’s word. And the manifestations of that power were completely in accordance with the grace that characterized the message that was being given. They were works of power in deliverance and blessing. The New Testament Elijah “wrought no miracle” (John 10:41); grace in the One that followed John lavished its wonders to attract the needy ones it sought. Here then the field of service opens out: God in His overflow of goodness amid the sin and sorrow of the world finds in Christ the means of manifestation. In the gospel, for the first time, He is adequately manifested; and the miracles are a visible gospel, “powers of the age to come” (Hebrews 6:5, Gk.), in which the earth’s salvation is anticipated and the Kingdom of God seen as redemption from all the effects of sin. Thus, the power of Satan broken, Simon’s mother-in-law is raised up from her sick bed with ability at once to minister. And then a multitude of these two classes, the diseased and those possessed with demons, carefully and twice over distinguished from one another, gather around Him, to find unfailingly deliverance at His hands. But with this we are given a glimpse also of that abiding intercourse with God in which He lived. “Rising early a great while before day, He went out and went away into a desert place, and there prayed.” The picture of service would not be complete without this - the root of it. But how instructive to find such seasons of retirement and prayer observed by the Son of God! Our natural thoughts as to such a Person would be against it. We should be inclined to think it too formal, too artificial, and ignoring too much of His divine nature; we should imagine it as implying too much an effort to get near or to keep near His Father. The evangelist does not in the least stop to apologize for it or explain it, however; but leaves it to have its due effect upon us, a needed feature in the picture of the glorious Worker here. How necessary then for us must be such hours of retirement, such seasons of devotion! which, alas, some would consider it “legal” to insist upon; whether for ourselves or others, and which the intrusion of things without, the demands of daily life, the very occupation with service itself, are apt to trench upon so much.

Noticeable it is, then; that the apostles, upon making the proposition for the choice of the Seven; gave as their own occupation, -“we will give ourselves unto prayer and to the ministry of the Word”: - “to prayer,” as the first requisite, not an appendage to their work, but an essential part of the work itself. For here the vessel is put afresh under the fountain, - the instrument into the Hand that is really to handle it. Nor is it forgotten in saying this that the spring is really in the vessel, - that our Lord has said, “The water that I shall give him shall be in him, a fountain of water, springing up unto eternal life.” None the less must there be for overflow the practical acknowledgment of dependence which, giving God His place, gives man also his. No spiritual working is independent of moral order; and divine power works so as to give place to human responsibility for this. That the Son of God should be found in such conformity to human conditions shows us how truly He is Man; and we are meant, as is plain, to realize this. Scripture does not hide but brings fully before us the truth of His manhood, and that in ways which writers not speaking as “moved by the Holy Ghost” would surely not have ventured. The disciples follow the Lord with the announcement that all men are seeking Him. They are evidently under the impress of the popular feeling, and have no discernment of its character. The Lord meets it quietly with the purpose of God which He is fulfilling. The crowd might rather hinder His access to souls, or misrepresent the grace which was seeking men to bring them with their personal needs before God. Not in the crowd but in isolation could this best be done, and the seed of the Word must be scattered widely to find the good ground that would receive it. “Let us go elsewhere,” He says, “into the neighboring country-towns, that I may preach there also: for therefore came I forth.” He passes over the wonders which have attracted the masses, to emphasize the preaching of the Word as His true object. And He went into the synagogues and preached throughout all Galilee, and cast out demons." Mark, as the Gospel of service, shows us everywhere the power of the enemy on the alert to frustrate it. In the presence of Christ the enemy has no power; but there is in man himself what is of deeper significance, and this it is to which the evangelist now points our attention. 3. Mark and Luke join together the story of the leper and that of the palsied man. Leprosy was in Israel so connected with banishment from the presence of God, and in itself so virulent and incurable an evil, as readily to suggest the corruption and malignity of sin as that of which it was a type (see Leviticus 13:1-59 notes). With sin also the Lord links the case of the palsied man: first of all pronouncing him forgiven before healing him. The two together thus naturally remind us of the corruption and impotence of fallen men, the “ungodly” and “without strength” of the apostle (Romans 5:6). Here is the double witness to the ruin of man; in their healing, therefore, the witness of the full provision for his need in Christ. The story of the leper is given in very similar terms in the three synoptists. Mark is slightly the fullest; Matthew the least full. Mark alone speaks of the Lord’s compassion moving the hand that touched the unclean and cleansed him. Thus an authority higher than that of law was confirmed by the law: and for this the leper is sent to the priest. He had to certify that One not under its restrictions had done what it was not possible for law to do. No more could it deal with the corruption of heart which the touch of Christ alone can remedy. “He that sinneth hath not seen Him neither known Him,” says the disciple nearest to Him. Surely he knows Him, who has felt the thrill of that life-giving touch which brings out of the otherwise unending banishment into the sweet relationships of a new life with God for ever. “Immediately the leprosy departed from him.” So that a robber, from his well-earned cross of shame, is ready for Paradise and the company of Christ. So that the apostle can say of us all, that the Father “hath made us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light” (Colossians 1:12). The blotches and disfigurements of our practical life may seem to gainsay this; and we must not deny or belittle them: alas, there is in us still that which is not Christian; but there is, too, a new man; “created in Christ Jesus unto good works,” and who can say of all this, “It is not I that do it;” and it still remains true, whether or not we have learned to reconcile it with our experience, that “whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin: for His seed remaineth in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” Into all this it is not here the place to enter. Mark emphasizes the prohibition to the healed man not to publish the miracle, and notes the effect of this being violated, the reason for the Lord’s withdrawing from the crowds being, no doubt, what it was before. Follow Him, however, they will, for their needs are imperative, and the omnipotent mercy of God is with Him, flowing freely for them. 4. The healing of the paralytic follows that of the leper; and here the crowd is a manifest hindrance to drawing near the Lord. His own condition also forbids it on his own part, but the faith of others bears him up, and through all obstacles, into the presence of Christ. How good to see the ready answer that faith in this way here receives. The Lord goes to the root of the matter: He deals with what underlies the whole condition; “Son,” He says, “thy sins be forgiven thee.” “It was a wondrous utterance, and must have sounded still more strangely, when thus first heard, than to us who have been familiar with it from childhood. No one had ever heard Him admit, even by a passing word, His own sinfulness; He showed no humility before God as a sinner; never sought pardon at His hands. Yet no Rabbi approached Him in opposition to all that was wrong, for He went even beyond the act to the sinful desire. The standard He demanded was no less than the awful perfection of God. But those round Him heard Him now rise above any mere tacit assumption of this sinless purity by His setting Himself in open contrast with sinners, in His claim, not only to announce the forgiveness of sins by God, but Himself to dispense it. He pardons the sins of the repentant creature before Him on His own authority as a King, which it would be contradictory to have done, had He Himself been conscious of having any sin and guilt of His own.

It is clear that He could have ventured on no such assumption of the prerogative of God, had He not felt in Himself an absolute harmony of spiritual nature with Him, so that He only uttered what He knew was the divine will. It was at once a proclamation of His own sinlessness, and of His kingly dignity as the Messiah, in whose hands had been placed the rule over the new theocracy.”*
Such an answer to faith was a challenge, no less, to unbelief; and the scribes sitting watchful there among the rest, could not but be roused. It shows how they felt yet the power of His presence, or that for the time, “the world had gone after Him,” that they keep it in their hearts without utterance; but there in their hearts it ferments: “Why doth this man speak thus? he blasphemeth: who can forgive sins but God alone?” But He pursues even the unspoken thought with His divine knowledge: “Why reason ye these things in your hearts? Which is easier” - a beautiful word that “easier”: for with Him words must have their full worth, nothing less; so that the word carries all the weight of the deed: - “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Rise and take up thy couch, and walk?” Yet now His deeds shall vouch for His words, if only it may conquer them to faith: - “But, that ye may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins, - He saith unto the paralytic - Arise, take up thy couch, and go unto thy house.” And so it is: the glorious announcement is convincingly sealed. Forgiveness of sins, not possible under stringent conditions, or to be known when called to meet God, but now, “on earth,” positively assured and made his own, and the new life flowing through him the seal of it: this is what becomes the possession of the rejoicing man. This is also the good news that is published in him to the multitude around. “The Son of man has” this “authority:” One in the reality of man’s nature, yet exceptional in that very title; having to emphasize in His own case, as strange to it, what need not be affirmed of another; - well might they be amazed, and glorify God for it! Not to them only: to earth, hell, heaven; it was the marvel of marvels. Angels were saying adoringly, with this company of earth’s fallen creatures, objects in their misery of the love that brought Him down: “We never saw it on this fashion.” 5. All this intimates the change that was coming in. Already there was among them One who was greater than the law and stood in a very different relation to it than men as sinners. Doubtless there was, incorporated with the law itself, a ritualistic system which in contrast with the rigor of the moral requirement, addressed itself to sinners as a provision of mercy which pointed the eye of faith also to the better thing to come. But, just as doing this, it revealed its own incapacity for deliverance from the condemnation which the law to which it was wedded preached, and was designed to preach. Only in preaching this could it act as the “handmaid” of the grace for which it was preparing the way; and to find hope in law was just to defeat the very end for which it was given; and thus the Lord had to tell the people led away by their blind Pharisaic teachers: “There is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust.” The ministry of Christ showed clearly that all was on the point of change. Divine love, now manifesting itself in Him, could be satisfied with nothing short of the fullest expression; and this is what He now affirms. The call of Matthew or Levi, and that which is connected with it here, is found in almost identical words in the three synoptists. The teaching as to the Sabbath with which it is followed in Mark and Luke, is found in Matthew, in a different connection. (1) While the matter of the Lord’s teaching is more fully given in any other of the Gospels than in Mark, the fact and constancy of it are as much insisted on as in any, and the miracles, as we have seen; follow and confirm it. His going forth again by the sea and teaching may have significance akin to what we find in Matthew 13:1-58 : for the grace now to display itself so fully, apart from law, suggests ever that going forth to the nations in which it was so soon to issue. Mark alone gives this as the preface to the calling of Levi, as Matthew is called in Luke also; Mark only speaks of him as the son of Alphaeus: what is signified for us by the difference of name? The meaning of Levi we already know. Leah says at his birth: “Now will my husband be joined to me. . . . Therefore was his name called Levi” (joined). Alphaeus is more difficult. Some give it, with Young, as “leader, chief.” Others would identify it with Clopas (the Cleophas of our common version, John 19:25), and then it may* mean “passing on” or “beyond,” in a bad sense, “transgressing.” In this way the two names have a relation to each other and to the context here, so striking that it is hard not to accept it as giving that divine thought which assuredly there is somewhere to be found. They would thus speak of “joining together” as the result of “passing beyond” law, and so does grace bring God and man; Gentile and Jew together.
In this way Levi, the tax-gatherer, called from his tax-office to be an apostle of Christ, from a legal exactor to be a minister of the divine bounty, comes to fulfil his name. We have abundance of similar cases in the word of God; and if absence of meaning could be proved in Levi’s case, this would be indeed the strange thing to be accounted for. Grace has its way, and Levi follows Jesus; and this becomes an initiative of work of a like pattern. For to Levi’s house many come of those whom the Jews put together as of one kind - “tax-gatherers and sinners” - and take their places at table with Jesus and His disciples; and it is added as an explanatory note upon this, “for there were many, and they followed Him.” This is only what the Lord Himself told the Pharisees as to John; and they that had ear for John’s stern insistence on repentance had ear also on this very account for the “piping” of grace. But the Pharisees and scribes find fault with this laxity, as they conceive it. “Why is it,” they ask, “that He eateth and drinketh with tax-gatherers and sinners?” His answer is conclusive: He is the Physician of souls: will He surround Himself, then. with the healthy or diseased? He does not come on the vain quest for righteousness, which the law had already proved vain: then indeed He would have been; as they thought Him, in a wrong place; but He had made no such mistake. Were they making none? “I came not to call the righteous but sinners.” And sinners are they who have always heard that call. (2) But this involved a far-reaching change of method. The old must give place to the new, the rigid forms be exchanged for the expansive freedom of the Spirit. How could the prescribed fasts go on; with the Bridegroom in their midst? By and by, indeed, He would be taken away; and then they would fast. But how could their rags of legal righteousness be patched with the so different righteousness of faith? or the new wine of spiritual power be shut up in the forms of ceremonial Judaism? (3) Mark and Luke append to this the Lord’s settlement of the Sabbath question, which for the Jew had such great importance as involving their whole covenant-relation to God. This we have very similarly in Matthew (Matthew 12:1-13, see notes), though in a different connection. The example of David, is given here as there; but instead of the appeal to the priests in the temple, and the quotation from Hosea, Mark substitutes Christ’s own affirmation that “the Sabbath was made for man; and not man for the Sabbath: so that the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” The tender solicitude for man, which appeared in such an institution, and which the Pharisees had gone far to obliterate by the harshness of their additions, was itself the convincing proof of the authority of the Son of man over it. It was for man that He had become the Son of man; and as such, all the blessing of man was in His hand to accomplish. Reject Him, and all this vanished. The rest of God, the real rest for all His creatures, He alone could bring in; and the sign was necessarily gone when that which it signified had no longer reality for any. (4) The need of man is enforced more strongly in the synagogue lesson which follows, the healing of the withered hand. Here they would have restrained with their interpretation of the Sabbath law the very going out of divine power itself in behalf of such misery as the world was full of. Was it, then, a law not to do good but to do evil? to let death have its way, rather than preserve life? But they remain obstinately silent. Then; the love within Him burning to anger at the hardness of their hearts, He summons divine power to witness against them in the healing of the man. They are confounded but unhumbled; and their wrath against Him unites Pharisees with Herodians henceforth to destroy Him.