danger, for the sick people did not even wait for him to touch them; they rushed to touch him.
At this time he was faced with one special problem, the problem of those who were possessed by demons. Let us remember that, whatever our belief about demons may be, these people were convinced they were possessed by an alien and evil power external to themselves. They called Jesus the Son of God. What did they mean by that? They certainly did not use the term in what we might call a philosophical or a theological sense. In the ancient world, son of God was by no means an uncommon title. The kings of Egypt were said to be the sons of Ra, their god. From Augustus onwards, many of the Roman emperors were described on inscriptions as sons of God.
The Old Testament has four ways in which it uses this term. (1) The angels are the sons of God. The story in Genesis 6:2 says that the sons of God saw the daughters of mortals and were fatally attracted to them. Job 1:6 tells of the day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord. It was a regular title for the angels. (2) The nation of Israel is the son of God. God called his son out of Egypt (Hosea 11:1). In Exodus 4:22, God says of the nation, ‘Israel is my firstborn son’. (3) The king of the nation is the son of God. In 2 Samuel 7:14, the promise to the king is, ‘I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. (4) In the later books, which were written between the Testaments, the good man is the son of God. In Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 4:10, the promise to the man who is kind to the fatherless is:
You will then be like a son of the Most High,
and he will love you more than does your mother.
In all these cases, the term son describes someone who is specially near and close to God. We get a parallel to this which shows something of its meaning in the New Testament. Paul calls Timothy his son (1 Timothy 1:2, 18). Timothy was no blood relation to Paul at all, but there was no one, as Paul says (Philippians 2:19–22), who knew his mind so well. Peter calls Mark his son (1 Peter 5:13), because there was no one who could interpret his mind so well. When we meet this title in the simplicity of the gospel story, we are not to think in terms of philosophy or theology or of the doctrine of the Trinity; we are to think of it as expressing the fact that Jesus’ relationship to God was so close that no other word could describe it. Now those who were demon-possessed felt that in them there was an independent evil spirit; they somehow felt that Jesus was closely related to God; they felt that in the presence of this nearness to God the demons could not live and therefore they were afraid.
We must ask, ‘Why did Jesus so sternly bid them to remain silent?’ The reason was very simple and very compelling. Jesus was the Messiah, God’s anointed king; but his idea of Messiahship was quite different from the popular idea. He saw in Messiahship a way of service, of sacrifice and of love with a cross at the end of it. The popular idea of the Messiah was of a conquering king who, with his mighty armies, would blast the Romans and lead the Jews to world power. Therefore, if a rumour were to go out that the Messiah had arrived, the inevitable consequence would be rebellions and uprisings, especially in Galilee, where the people were always ready to follow a nationalist leader.
Jesus thought of Messiahship in terms of love; the people thought of Messiahship in terms of Jewish nationalism. Therefore, before there could be any proclamation of his Messiahship, Jesus had to educate the people into the true idea of what it meant. At this stage, nothing but harm and trouble and disaster could come from the proclamation that the Messiah had arrived. It would have issued in nothing but useless war and bloodshed. First of all, the true conception of what the Messiah was had to be learned; a premature announcement such as this could have wrecked Jesus’ whole mission.
THE CHOSEN COMPANY
Mark 3:13–19
Jesus went up into the mountain and invited to his service the men of his choice; and he appointed twelve that they might be with him, and that he might send them out to act as his heralds, and to have power to cast out demons. He chose Simon, and to him he gave the name of Peter; he chose James, Zebedee’s son, and John, James’ brother, and to them he gave the name Boanerges, which means Sons of Thunder; he chose Andrew and Philip and Bartholomew and Matthew and Thomas, and James, Alphaeus’ son, and Thaddaeus and Simon, the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.
JESUS had come to a very important moment in his life and work. He had emerged with his message; he had chosen his method; he had gone throughout Galilee preaching and healing. By this time he had made a very considerable impact on the public mind. Now he had to face two very practical problems. First, he had to find some way of making his message permanent if anything happened to him – and that something would happen he did not doubt. Second, he had to find some way of disseminating his message, and in an age when there was no such thing as a printed book or newspaper, and no way of reaching large numbers of people at the one time, that was no easy task. There was only one way to solve these two problems: he had to choose those on whose hearts and lives he could write his message and who would go out from his presence to carry that message abroad. Here we see him doing exactly that.
It is significant that Christianity began with a group. The Christian faith is something which from the beginning had to be discovered and lived out in a fellowship. The whole essence of the way of the Pharisees was that it separated them from their fellows; the very name Pharisee means the separated one; the whole essence of Christianity was that it bound men and women to their fellows, and presented them with the task of living with each other and for each other.
Further, Christianity began with a very mixed group. In it the two extremes met. Matthew was a tax-collector and, therefore, an outcast; he was a renegade and a traitor to his fellow countrymen. Simon the Cananaean is correctly called by Luke ‘Simon the Zealot’; and the Zealots were a band of fiery, violent nationalists who were pledged even to murder and assassination to clear their country of the foreign yoke. The man who was lost to patriotism and the fanatical patriot came together in that group, and no doubt between them there were all kinds of backgrounds and opinions. Christianity began by insisting that the most diverse people should live together and by enabling them to do so, because they were all living with Jesus.
Judging them by worldly standards, the men whom Jesus chose had no special qualifications at all. They were not wealthy; they had no special social position; they had no special education; they were not trained theologians; they were not high-ranking religious leaders; they were twelve ordinary men. But they had two special qualifications. First, they had felt the magnetic attraction of Jesus. There was something about him that made them wish to take him as their Master. And second, they had the courage to show that they were on his side. Make no mistake, that did require courage. Here was Jesus calmly crashing through the rules and regulations; here was Jesus heading for an inevitable collision with the orthodox leaders; here was Jesus already branded as a sinner and labelled as a heretic; and yet they had the courage to attach themselves to him. No band of men ever staked everything on such a forlorn hope as these Galilaeans, and no band of men ever did it with more open eyes. These twelve had all kinds of faults, but whatever else could be said about them, they loved Jesus and they were not afraid to tell the world that they loved him – and that is being a Christian.
Jesus called them to him for two purposes. First, he called them to be with him. He called them to be his steady and consistent companions. Others might come and go; the crowd might be there one day and gone the next; others might be fluctuating and spasmodic in their attachment to him, but these twelve were to identify their lives with his life and live with him all the time. Second, he called them to send them out. He wanted them to be his representatives. He wanted them to tell others about him. They themselves had been won in order to win others.
For their task, Jesus equipped them with two things. First, he gave them a message. They were to be his heralds. A wise man said that no one has any right to be a teacher unless he has a teaching of his own to offer, or the teaching of another that with all the passion of his heart he wishes to propagate. People will always listen to the man or woman with a message. Jesus gave these friends of his something to say. Second, he gave them a power. They were also to cast out demons.