The Gospel of Mark 1:1-8 - John the Baptist
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Mark opens up his great work with a statement of the focus of the book, this is a work of good news about Jesus the Messiah who is the Son of God. Mark connects the prophecy of Isaiah of the coming messenger to prepare the way for Yahweh to John the Baptist. John was focused on immersion in water for the forgiveness of sins. Jerusalem and the countryside of Judea was coming out to him to be baptized at the river Jordan. While being baptized they were confessing their sins. Although he saw success in ministry, John was extremely poor. He wore clothing made of camel’s hair, and wore a leather belt like the prophet Elijah. Being poor he ate locusts cooked in wild honey. He preached that there was one coming who was greater than him, so much so that he wasn’t even able to be His lowest servant, the one who unties the sandals and cleans the feet. Although the people were to John, he turned the focus to another, who would come and baptize with a baptism so much greater than water, the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Text
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,
“Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”
John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Mark 1:1-8 (ESV)
Discussion
Mark, desiring to make the point that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, shares the good news, the Gospel, by quoting from Isaiah’s promise of a messenger that would come. However, this messenger wasn’t just coming on behalf of the Messiah, he was coming to serve as a forerunning of Yahweh!
“A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD [Yahweh]; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
Isaiah 40:3-5 (ESV, information in brackets added by me to reflect the Hebrew word used)
Thus, Mark is connecting Jesus to Yahweh! By connecting the good news of the Messiah with Yahweh, Mark makes it clear that in order to hear the good news of the Messiah you must believe that He is Yahweh. Acceptance of Jesus as Yahweh is required to hear the message of the Kingdom because the work that He did could only be done by Yahweh! Those who reject the Messiah as Yahweh also reject the good news about Him and also the work of John the Baptist.
Who was this John the Baptist that Mark would start the good news of Jesus with him? We have already pointed out that John the Baptist was the messenger that would go before Yahweh. He was a Nazarite (Luke 1:15) and was also a prophet that would come in the spirit and power of the prophet Elijah.
“And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”
Luke 1:16-17 (ESV)
Besides Jesus, he was the greatest prophet ever born (Matthew 11:11) because he was paired with Jesus. Yet Jesus makes it clear that those who are born again are greater than John the Baptist.
“Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.”
Matthew 11:11-12 (ESV)
How can John be the greatest born of women, yet be less than those in the Kingdom of Heaven? As Craig S. Keener explains John is great because he is preparing the way for Jesus Himself, who is Yahweh, God (Keener 2009, 337-338).
“Second, what makes a servant of God great is the message that servant bears (11:9–10, 13–14). Unlike Elijah and unlike the disciples, John in the Gospel tradition reveals no signs (cf. Jn 10:41), but what made him the greatest prophet until that point was that he had the honor of introducing Jesus himself. The greatness of John thus implies something about the greatness of Jesus. At the least this made Jesus the Messiah (Jeremias 1966a: 130). Yet Matthew surely intends much more (1:23). Because the text Jesus cites to prove his case refers to preparing God’s way (Mal 3:1), and Jewish tradition usually viewed Elijah as preparing God’s rather than the Messiah’s way (cf. Edgar 1958: 48; Manson 1979: 69; Mal 4:5–6), Jesus dramatically implies his own divine status here (Gundry 1975: 214), although his first disciples probably would not have dared assume he meant that.”
To explain it further, those who are born again are born of the Holy Spirit and the work of Jesus. Thus, John was the forerunner of the Messiah but those who are in the Kingdom are the work of the Messiah! Just as John is great, not because of his works, but because he prepares the way for the Messiah, so too, we are not great because of our works but because we are born of the Messiah. We are the fruit of the Messiah! It is His work, the work of the cross, that brings us life and set us free.
John marked the dividing line between Scripture and what Scripture pointed to, Jesus the Messiah. His ministry marked the beginning of the fulfilment of the law and prophets.
“For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John,”
Matthew 11:13 (ESV)
Matthew, by reversing the normal phrase “Law and Prophets” to “Prophets and Law” is making a point, drawing attention, that the Prophets and Law prophesied until John about Jesus. They were leading to Jesus, looking forward to Him. R. T. France explains this (France 2007, 431).
“Another short saying underlines John’s pivotal place in the fulfillment of God’s purpose. This verse is partially parallel to the first clause of Luke 16:16 (the second part of which we have considered as parallel to v. 12) but in Matthew it takes a more developed form. In Luke it is a verbless clause which simply locates John at the end of the period of “the law and the prophets,” but Matthew’s special interest is shown by the addition of the verb “prophesy,” the mention of the prophets before the law (an inversion of the usual order which is so unusual as to compel attention), and the addition of “all.” Here then is a statement of Matthew’s overriding sense of the fulfillment of Scripture in the period of Jesus’ ministry. Until the time of John the Hebrew scriptures (with the prophets unusually placed in the foreground) were pointing forward to a time of fulfillment (“prophesying”); after John that fulfillment has come. We noted in the comments on 5:17 how this little statement helps to explain the “fulfillment of the law” as it is expounded in 5:17–48. It was not only the prophets who pointed forward to what was to come; the law too had this function, preparing the way for a fuller revelation of the will of God which was to come in the time of fulfillment, and which Matthew now finds present in the ministry of Jesus. Thus not only the prophets but even the law itself “prophesied.” With the coming of John, the last and greatest of the prophets, that forward-pointing role is complete.”
Craig S. Keener further points out that Jesus is breaking with the traditional Jewish view that the prophets prophesied until Malachi, instead saying that they prophesied until John (Keener 2009, 338).
“Jewish people usually viewed the era of the prophets as ending with Malachi (cf. Keener 1991b: 77–91); Jesus continues it until John, who becomes the pivotal first voice of the new order when those greater than the prophets (5:12; 10:41; 13:17; 23:34) will speak. Thus John’s movement represents “the dividing line between the old and the new age” (Dibelius 1949: 50), or at least the first stage of the new age. But Jesus’ concern here is hardly neat historical divisions to aid students memorizing time lines;13 instead he may allude to the Jewish recognition that the law and prophets pointed to the coming messianic era (b. Ber. 34b; Sanh. 99a; Shab. 63a; earlier attested in Acts 3:24), which had now confronted them in his own ministry (12:28).
The debate as to whether John belonged to the old or new order may owe more to the ambiguities of Greek grammar than to either Matthew’s or Luke’s peculiar constructions of salvation history. Both probably envisioned John as somewhat transitional and viewed the newness of God’s kingdom in terms of salvation-historical promise and fulfillment rather than a radical discontinuity with God’s past historical acts. One’s reading of the rest of the Gospel, rather than grammatical matters, will decide one’s reading of this passage: some see here the continuing validity of the law (Barth 1963: 64; Vermes 1993: 20), others its fulfillment and completion (Meier 1980: 123).”
Thus John was the last of the “Old Testament” prophets, the last one to prophecy about the coming of Jesus. John’s baptism for the forgiveness of sins was unique, this was not a normal Jewish usage of baptism. Robert A. Guelich explains this (Guelich 1989, 17-18).
“John’s surname connotes his trademark. Yet baptism was hardly distinctive of him. Apart from the OT ritual cleansings practiced and expanded by the Pharisees (Dahl, Interpretationes, 36–52) and the first-century practice of proselyte-baptism (Jeremias, TZ 5 [1949] 418–28; Rowley, Essays, 313–14; Cranfield, 43), the discovery of Qumran has provided another example of the rite as practiced in John’s day (Cullmann, Aufsätze, 18–32; Betz, RevQ 2 [1958] 213–34; Gnilka, RevQ 3 [1961] 185–207).
The Baptist’s distinctiveness lay in the form and significance of his baptism. In form, John himself (ὑπ̓ αὐτοῦ) immersed (1:5) those coming to him in an unrepeatable baptismal act. Whereas proselyte baptism, whose origins and dates are most obscure (Michaelis, Jud 7 [1951] 100–120; Vielhauer, RGG 3 [1959] 806), and the Qumran rite of initiation (Brownlee, Scrolls, 38–39; Betz, RevQ 2 [1958] 216–20; Scobie, Baptist, 104–6, assuming such a rite; cf. Rowley, Essays, 218–19; Gnilka, RevQ 3 [1961] 189–91) were also once for all, each was self-administered like the OT and Pharisaic lustrations. And in contrast to the respective initiatory character of proselyte and Qumran’s baptism by which a Gentile became a part of a Jewish community or a novitiate entered into full standing within the Essene community, John’s baptism had no initiatory significance. His was a “repentance-baptism” for the “forgiveness of sins” in view of the imminent eschatological day of the Lord. Thus John was called “the Baptist” because the specific form and meaning of his baptism was his own “original creation” (Vielhauer, RGG 3 [1959] 806; cf. Taylor, 154–55; Bruce, NTS 2 [1955–56] 176–90).”
But what does it mean that he baptized for “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”? It was John’s task to prepare the hearts of Israel for the coming of the Messiah. He was to turn the hearts of the fathers to the sons, and the sons to the fathers (Luke 1:17). The fathers and sons were first separated during the forty years of wondering of Israel in the wilderness. Whereas with Moses the fathers died and the sons lived, here John is to prepare Israel to receive the Messiah, not just the sons, but also the fathers. Thus, the fathers and sons would be united in repentance and obedience. This is why he baptized in the wilderness, for it was the wilderness where Israel first met God during the Exodus. Mark L. Strauss draws out the theme of the wilderness here (Strauss 2014, 63).
“The precise location where John baptized is unknown. The term “desert” or “wilderness” (ἔρημος) could refer to any uninhabited place (see 1:35; 6:35). From verse 5 we know that it was somewhere along the Jordan River and that the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judea were coming out to him. This suggests a southern location, perhaps just north of where the Jordan enters the Dead Sea.
It is not the specific place that interests Mark, but its desert location, since the wilderness plays an important role in Israel’s history. It was the place of God’s deliverance in the exodus, as well as a place of testing and failure for the nation.”
R. T. France explains that John’s clothing was supposed to paint a picture of a prophet, but more than that, of Elijah (France 2002, 69).
“The description of John’s clothing and diet serves further to reinforce his prophetic image.47 ζώνην δερματίνην περὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν αὐτοῦ is virtually an exact quotation from 4 Kgdms. 1:8, describing the distinctive garb of Elijah, while the preceding phrase, ἐνδεδυμένος τρίχας καμήλου, while not echoing the LXX of that verse, represents a likely meaning of the Hebrew ʾîš baʿal śēʿār (‘a man characterised by hair’) as one wearing a cloak of animal hair.48 John is therefore presented (and intended to present himself?) at least as a prophet (Zc. 13:4), and most likely as the returning Elijah.49 This is the more likely in Mark’s mind in the light of 1:2, with its quotation of Mal. 3:1, since that text was regularly read in conjunction with Mal. 3:23–24 (EVV 4:5–6), the prophecy of the eschatological coming of Elijah.50 It will not be until 9:13 that Mark will get close to an explicit identification of John with Elijah (though cf. their linking in 8:28), but already there is a broad hint of this understanding of his role.”
Adela Yarbro Collins and Harold W. Attridge explain that there are several possible meanings to the diet of John (Adela Yarbro Collins and Harold W. Attridge 2007, 145-146).
“The significance of John’s diet, grasshoppers and wild honey, may be explained in various ways. The simplicity of the food may indicate asceticism. Another possibility is that the motivating factor was the maintenance of purity, since the grasshoppers and honey would not have been handled by anyone else, and wild honey would not be subject to tithing. Wild honey, “honey from the rock,” was not only pure, but evoked traditions of God’s care for Israel.”
However, I have also read that this food is eaten by the poorest of poor, and thus, Mark may be reflecting on the poverty of John. It is also possible that Mark is referring to John’s poverty but also his rejection of meat and wine.
Summary
It is clear that John lived a life of discipline, poverty, and called those around him to repentance through the act of baptism. He did this to prepare the way of Yahweh, that is, Jesus the Messiah. He was the greatest prophet ever born, but even with this He is not greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. He served to prepare Israel to receive the Messiah and thus, closed out the work of the prophets and torah which pointed to Him.
Life Application
How does this apply to us today? We are not called to live in the wilderness eating grass hoppers are we? No. However, we can look at two specific applications of this text.
Repentance.
John called Israel to repent of their sins. We too must walk in this repentance, not just at salvation but also daily. The Apostle John explained that we all sin (1 John 1:8), and thus we all need repentance. By seeing the great example of John, we can apply this to our lives daily. As we walk with Him, when we see our sin, we can turn to God and repent of it and find forgiveness.
Humility.
John clearly walked in great humility. When it was brought to his attention that Jesus was growing in honor, more than him, instead of acting to protect his name and honor he instead took the position of a servant saying that Jesus had to increase but John had to decrease.
“And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness—look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease.” He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all.”
John 3:26-31 (ESV)
Thus, we can let this fruit of John, repentance and humility grow in us as we come closer to the Messiah.
Questions to Consider
In my family, do I promote Christ as the greatest part of our family? Do my spouse and children see me repenting?
In any ministry I do, am I viewing Christ as the greatest part of that ministry? Do I work to promote Christ and His kingdom or do I focus on my ideas and passions?
Connections
Isaiah 40:3-5
Matthew 3:1-12
Luke 3:2-18
Outline
The beginning of the good news of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.
Isaiah gave a prophecy of the messenger to come to prepare the way for Yahweh.
John taught forgiveness of sins through baptism.
The people in the countryside of Judea and in Jerusalem at the river Jordan to be baptized and confess their sins.
John was extremely poor, wearing clothing made of camel’s hair and a leather belt. He ate food that the poorest ate, locusts cooked in wild honey.
John preaches that there was one coming who was so much greater than John that he wasn’t worthy to be His lowest slave.
John promises that his water baptism will be replaced with baptism of the Holy Spirit.
References-
Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 337–338.
R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publication Co., 2007), 431.
Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 338.
Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1–8:26, vol. 34A, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1989), 17–18.
Mark L. Strauss, Mark, ed. Clinton E. Arnold, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 63.
R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press, 2002), 69.
Adela Yarbro Collins and Harold W. Attridge, Mark: A Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 145–146.
