3 S: Serving and Suffering Shepherd

[Joseph Park]

3 S: Serving and Suffering Shepherd

Mark’s Gospel is a brief but powerful story of the life and death of Jesus. Mark presents the true king of the Jews as the serving and suffering of messianic traditions. He also focuses on the development of the disciples’ understanding of this identity as they ‘follow’ him to the cross, are there ‘scattered’ and finally ‘led’ again in Galilee. The wilderness/desert is an important designation in Mark, clearly carrying symbolic freight from the Old Testament. Mark’s brief prologue carefully notes that Jesus similarly came through the waters, heard God’s word of affirmation as his Son, and was led by his Spirit and angels in the eremos, where he spent forty days. (P.175) Mark described the desert as the place to be a good shepherd. At there, Jesus prepared his leadership as the shepherd. The wilderness, from the perspective of Deuteronomy, was the place where YHWH taught his people that he could provide for them. Miraculously provided bread was daily evidence of God’s pastoral concern. But the provision pointed to something more than physical sustenance: “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers and known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth the Lord’ (Deut. 8:3) (P.177)
Similarly, Jesus brings a new Israel out into the wilderness to teach them to trust his authoritative word. The typology of the wilderness as a place of testing, provision (bread) and teaching has already been noted. Mark’s interest in the sea is present in the prologue and in the miracles of 4:35-41 (the rebuke of the winds), 5:13 (the swine sent into the sea) and 6:47-51 (walking on the water). References to ‘gathering’, ‘rest’, ‘green’ grass and the organization into companies are other likely allusions to exodus traditions. Through these facts, Mark tried to insist that Jesus represented as a New Moses, Shepherd, radiant with the glory of God on a high mountain. In the Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is the David, but the disciples are being prepared-encounter by encounter, teaching by teaching – understand their role as extensions of the Davidic shepherd’s current ministry.