Fresh from his baptism, still waterlogged from the Jordan, Jesus is thrust into the wilderness for a time of preparation and testing. Mark doesn’t give us many details—there is no biblical repartee between Jesus and Satan here as in Matthew and Luke—but what we do get is vivid. Angels tend to Jesus. And he is “with the wild beasts.”
The distinctions between how we love God, neighbor, and self are not terribly thick.
On the night before his sudden and unexpected death, my father decided to show us some old family slides. An amateur photographer, he would make a pest of himself setting up shots: endless fiddling with light meters and mysterious f-stops and the placement of the scene just so. He wanted to capture me in all the glorious wonder of my fourth year, but all of his fussing to get the perfect shot would send me into a royal snit and meltdown. Nowadays, one of my fondest memories of Dad is of that night and his narrating our lives through a series of one-inch squares of celluloid.
The Bible shows us what to do with our frustration, outrage, and complicity.
Mark wastes no time in his Gospel on niceties like the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke or the highly nuanced hymn in John. Mark’s Jesus has been on the move with alacrity since verse 14 of this first chapter. This is no gradual or tentative inching into ministry but a leap into the fray. In Mark’s characteristic eagerness to get on with the Good News, he punctuates the onset of this ministry with an adverbial “and immediately” eight times in this chapter and twice in our little story alone.
The ancient wisdom text urges us to find joy in the limits of the present moment.
In last week’s text, Jesus made his initial impression by preaching. In this week’s, he drives that impression home by teaching. As preaching was Jesus’ first action on reaching Galilee, so teaching is his first action now that he’s arrived in Capernaum. Mark’s emphasis on Jesus’ teaching overwhelms even his emphasis on Jesus’ preaching. Mark mentions Jesus’ teaching, or records him being referred to as teacher, more than 30 times in his short Gospel.