Mark's Gospel as Sequel: Understanding the Backstory, part V: Jeremiah

 

     To fully understand Mark’s “sequel” to the Scriptures of Israel, we need to look at 7 previous “episodes”, 7 OT characters who shed light on what Mark is saying about John the Baptist and Jesus in chapter 1.  The fifth character from the “original story” is Jeremiah.

     As we saw last time, Jesus’ message concerned the “kingdom of God” (Mk. 1.15).  In the Psalms, Yahweh is described as King of the world (Pss. 47, 93-99, etc.).  Yahweh, the King of the world, ruled the nations through his “son” enthroned in Zion (Ps. 2.6).  The dream of the Hebrew Scriptures is for Yahweh to establish his reign (kingdom) over the whole world, through his son/viceroy, the King of Israel – one world, one God.  The realization of this dream was guaranteed by the Davidic covenant recorded in 2 Sam. 7 – Yahweh’s promise that there would always be a descendant of David on the throne of Jerusalem.  However, at the time of Jesus, there was no one from David’s line ruling over Israel.  Herod the Great, who ruled Judea for Rome at the time of Jesus’ birth, had taken the title “King of the Jews”, despite his not being a descendant of David, let alone Jewish.  One way that Herod had attempted to legitimate his claim to the throne of Jerusalem was to undertake an immense project of enlarging/renovating the Temple (cf. Jn. 2.20) which had initially been rebuilt following the return from Babylon of a small minority of the exiles (cf. Ezra, Haggai), thus attaching his name to the Jerusalem shrine in the historical record.  Herod’s son, (Herod) Antipas, who ruled Galilee during Jesus’ lifetime, enjoyed much less prestige than his father, and shared a portion of his father’s former kingdom with some of his brothers (cf. Lk. 3.1).  Indeed, the last Davidic king – Zedekiah – had been deposed by the Babylonians some 6 centuries before Jesus.  Despite the ill-fated Hasmonean dynasty (ended by Rome in 63 B.C.) that had been established following the successful Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucids in the second century B.C. (=origins of Hannukah), the Davidic dynasty was never believed to have been properly restored.

     As Elijah had attempted to call the Kingdom of Israel back to Yahweh in advance of the Assyrian invasion and destruction of Samaria in 722 B.C., so another prophetic figure – Jeremiah – had undertaken a 40-year-long “career” of warning the Southern Kingdom of Judah of impending disaster at the hands of the Babylonian empire – disaster which struck with terrible finality in the year 587, when Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple were both destroyed and the people exiled to Babylon for 70 years, as Jeremiah had predicted.  Mark’s description of the people who went to be baptized by John in the Jordan River is intriguing – “people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem” (Mk. 1.5).  This echoes a frequent refrain in the book of Jeremiah (and that of Zechariah): the “people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem” (cf. Jer. 4.3-5, passim) were Jeremiah’s target audience during the lifespan of a generation (i.e., 40 years).

     As Elijah and Jeremiah had warned the people of God of impending disaster and called them to “return” to faithful obedience to the covenant, so John calls Israel to “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mk. 1.4) and baptizes (“anoints”) the “son of David/God”, designating Jesus as Yahweh’s “son/servant” who will reign over the nations (Ps. 2.7; Is. 42.1; cf. Mk. 1.11).

     There is an interesting parallel between the Gospel of Mark and the Books of 1-2 Kings (one book in the Hebrew Scriptures, i.e., “Tanakh”).  Kings opens with the original “son of David” (Solomon) building/dedicating the Jerusalem Temple and ends with the Temple’s destruction by the Babylonians (as Jeremiah had predicted for 40 years).  The Gospel of Mark begins with the baptism of the ultimate Son of David and ends with Israel’s king experiencing the fate he had predicted would befall Jerusalem and Herod’s Temple within one generation (cf. Mk. 13).

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