Read It

By the time I realized I hadn't posted a reflection on Mark last week, it was Thursday. Oops - so much for Mondays. At any rate, I'm actually glad it worked out this way - I was struggling with this passage anyway, and now that I think I have a sense of what's going on here, it seems to be a perfect reflection for the week in which we will celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ.

Mark is not what I would consider a frivolous writer. His gospel is the most concise, and he is often a bit skimpy with the details. He likes action and does not appear to have any real sense that he cares about time - everything is sequential and immediate, giving the reader the feeling of being on a roller coaster if he or she reads large enough. Having said that, this particular narrative relating the death of John the Baptist is odd, quite odd indeed. Mark breaks the flow of his narrative for the first time here, shifting from Jesus to John and jumping out of sequence. It's almost jarring if you're paying attention to what he's doing - it's as if he wants to bring you up short, to startle you and make you ask what he's thinking, writing like this.

The subject, of course, is John, and specifically his awful death at the hands of Herod by the manipulations of Herod's wife/sister-in-law. No doubt this incident was on Jesus' mind as he ministered in Herod's territory - John was his cousin, and the details of his demise were apparently at least public enough for his disciples to have claimed his body for burial. More significant, perhaps, was the fact that some of the people began to say that Jesus was actually John raised from the dead. Herod, it seems, believed at least enough in the possibility to get a bit worried; after all, John probably wasn't too pleased with the hospitality he had received during his last stay.

Make no mistake, however. This interlude serves one purpose in Mark. It hints at an answer to the implied question of the narrative; namely, who is this man Jesus? Is he John, returned from the dead? Is he Elijah, or another prophet? The answer, of course, to all of these is no. But Mark causes us to stop short and recognize that, although he is not John, he will share John's fate - execution at the hands of corrupt political and religious leaders. We already know from chapter 3 that the Herodians planned to kill Jesus. Now we see that Herod himself has already killed John, and the comparisons to Jesus couldn't be more obvious.

So why here, why now? Why would Mark make such an unusual break in the narrative simply to remind his readers of what is coming? I think that there is no coincidence that this passage comes immediately after the sending of the disciples and immediately before the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus' public ministry couldn't be going any better. He is enjoying a wave of popularity, performing amazing signs and wonders, and his followers appear to be starting to understand. But Mark reminds us here, forcefully, that nobody really understands. The path of Jesus will follow John's footsteps, and he will suffer death at the hands of the government. The dogs are barking up the wrong tree. The Messianic secret is still safe.