One of our goals throughout Mark Uncut has been to equip you to read your Bible better by exploring some of the passages of Mark’s Gospel.  Sometimes we’ve been didactic, giving you principles to apply.  Other times, we’ve tried to model such readings.

Today, we want to take the latter route, and to demonstrate the sort of insights that sometimes come when we place a passage in its surrounding literary context.  This is one of the most important things we can do when reading the Bible, as what happens in the surrounding passages can help us see what the writer is up to.

With that in mind, read through Mark 11:1-11 and the passages both before and after, and then proceed.

Throughout our reading and studying of the Gospel of Mark, we’ve seen Jesus heal people, challenge the teaching of the religious rulers, and instruct those who are closest to him.

His authority over, well, everything has clearly been on display.  But when it comes to revealing his identity as the Messiah, the one chosen to save Israel, he’s been pretty guarded.  Let’s zoom out again and take a quick look at some of the passages where this comes up:

• Mark 1:34:  Jesus won’t permit demons to say who he is.
• Mark 1:43-45:  Jesus tells someone he’s just healed not to say anything to anyone, but to go fulfill his religious rites.
• Mark 3:12:  Jesus instructs demons “not to make him known.”
• Mark 4:11:  Jesus says that “the secret to the kingdom of God” is only known by the disciples, but to everyone else he speaks in parables.
• Mark 8:27-30: Jesus recognizes that the general public is still confused about who exactly he is, and charges his disciples to continue their silence.

So it seems like something new is afoot in Mark 11:1-11.  Let’s recap exactly what’s happening in the passage.

• Jesus shows up to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious life and national identity.
• He arrives on a donkey, which is the only time we ever see him riding rather than walking.
• The people who are travelling with him spread palm trees and shout a selection of Psalm 118:25-26.
• The people hail the coming of David’s kingdom.

Each aspect is an indication that Jesus is publicly identifying himself as the Messiah, the chosen one, which is not a title he has avoided, but is one that he has kept guarded.  Consider the parallel to Zechariah 9:9, which reads:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Jesus entering Jerusalem in this way is a pretty clear parallel.

But if we look at the passages after it, it’s clear that Jesus has a mission in Jerusalem:  to subvert and undermine the existing religious establishment, which had led the people astray.  As we saw in the sermon, Jesus takes on the religious establishment directly in Mark 11:12-25, and whithers a fig tree as a sign of his judgment on their fruitlessness.  Jesus uses his authority as Messiah to cleans the temple of wrongdoing.

This increased clarity in our understanding of Jesus’s identity is also confirmed by the passage just before it.   In Mark 10:46-52, Jesus heals Bartimeus’ vision.  The timing of the event is not accidental:  like the whithered fig tree, which points to the barrenness of the Jewish leaders religiosity, the healing of the blindness suggests that the events that are about to come will take away the people’s spiritual blindness to the reality of Christ’s identity.

There are a few things to note:

1. This is the final healing in the Gospel of Mark.  Other than Jesus withering the barren fig tree, there will be no more miraculous activity outside of the resurrection.
2. Bartimeus calls Jesus “the Son of David,” which ties him to the Jewish people’s expectations for a Messiah.  This is the only time that Jesus is called that in the entire Gospel.  While it’s not clear how Bartimeus would have known to call Jesus that, Jesus does not repudiate it but welcomes and accepts his faith.
3. Jesus commends Bartimeus’s faith, which we have seen is important for Jesus to heal people.  In this context, however, the passage suggests that faith is a crucial ingredient for seeing Jesus’s identity as the Messiah.
4. Again, context.  Zoom out and we’ll see that the passage resembles Mark 8:22-26, in which Jesus heals another blind fellow, but there it (curiously) takes him two attempts to do it.  Immediately after, in 8:27-30, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah and is charged to keep a secret.  From that point on, however, Jesus points to his death as a necessary part of his Messiahship.  The disciples repeatedly misunderstand and are confused by this.  The juxtaposition of the two healings suggests that the time in between has been a season when they only imperfectly understood who Jesus is, and that Jesus is reaching Jerusalem everything will be made clear.

Concluding thoughts:

Context is crucial for helping us understand better what’s going on in any particular passage.  When we come across something that we don’t understand, looking at both the surrounding passages and through the thematic parallels in the same book can open up our eyes to see the passage in new ways.  

When we read the Gospel of Mark, we want to have our spiritual blindness transformed into vision by the grace of God, and learning to see what is happening in the text often begins with seeing where the text fits in its surroundings.