Mark 9 - Introduction

Mark 8:27 to Mark 9:1. The Great Confession, and the First View of the Cross. Here opens a new section of the gospel. The tendency to seek retirement with the Twelve, pronounced from Mark 6:31 onwards, now dominates the story. Jesus devotes Himself to traming the Twelve in the shadow of the Cross. This concentration on His disciples becomes possible when they pierce His secret. The full significance of the confession is only apparent if Jesus has not previously revealed Himself or been recognised as Messiah (cf. HNT). It constitutes a decisive development. The scene is laid near Cæ sarea Philippi (p. 32), a largely Gentile town on the east side of Jordan, not to be confused with Cæ sarea on the coast. The praise bestowed on Peter in Matthew 16:17 f. is not recorded in Mk. If Mk.'s dependence on Peter is to be proved by his showing a special regard for Peter, the proof is wanting. But Eusebius rightly suggested that Mk.'s silence may reproduce the natural silence of Peter. A genuinely Petrine record might fail to praise Peter.

The charge to keep silence seems to be sufficiently explained by the intention of Jesus to await the Father's revelation (cf. Matthew 16:17) and by His unpopular expectation as to Messiah's task and end. Either from now on Jesus spoke much with the Twelve of the death He anticipated, or else the evangelist assumes that Jesus must have foreseen His fate and so boldly attributes such foresight to Him. The chief difficulty of the first alternative is found in the conduct of Jesus at Jerusalem, which makes the impression that He journeyed thither, not in order to die but to fight and conquer, and that in looking forward to the conflict His own death presented itself not as a certainty, but at the most as a possibility (Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity, ii. 34f.). This assumes that Jesus must have regarded His death either as certain or as possible. But why may He not have considered it overwhelmingly probable a judgment which would not exclude flashes of hope that even now Israel might repent? The difficulty of the second alternative is that it compels us to discard so much that looks like genuine tradition, e.g. the parable of the husbandmen, the answer to the sons of Zebedee, the lament over Jerusalem, and the upbraiding of the cities of Galilee, not to mention the whole development of the ministry from public evangelization to private communion with the Twelve, as Mk. conceives it. Such a surrender of material is not defensible. The note of necessity the Son of Man must suffer is best explained by the use of the same verb in Luke 24:26. Prophecy points this way and must be fulfilled.