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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
Mark 1:9 (TEV) says that Jesus went to the Jordan "not long" after John started baptizing. Mark 1:14 states that after John was imprisoned "Jesus went to Galilee and preached the Good News from God." Mark, we're going to find, has at best an obscure chronology. His sources, apparently, didn't tell the author much about Jesus' comings and goings. It could also be that he wasn't much interested in a precise chronology. But, Mark does imply that Jesus was with John for most of John's ministry, from close to the beginning until John was jailed. This is more circumstantial evidence suggesting a close relationship between Jesus and John, again leaving us with the possibility that Jesus was originally John's disciple.
Jesus' baptism was clearly a significant spiritual event for him. Mark states that Jesus had a profound experience with the Holy Spirit, one accompanied by visions. It seems, in fact, to be an entirely human pentecostal experience. If we set aside for a moment the later Christian belief in Jesus' full divinity, what we have is Jesus accepting John's call to confess his sins, repent of them, and be baptized. Jesus may have been in a state of some tension and agitation, for it's frequently in such a state that people have profound spiritual experiences. Note, also, that Jesus seems to have experienced God's forgiveness. What else could God's words, "I am pleased with you" mean in this context? Mark's Jesus was, thus, subordinate to God the Father and apparently felt himself in need of divine forgiveness.
We should also take note of Jesus' relationship to the Spirit. In 1:12, Mark states that the Spirit "made" Jesus go into the desert (TEV). Other translations (RSV, JB) use the word "drove" instead of "made". Language like this simply doesn't fit the later Christian dogma about Jesus being fully God-fully human and a co-equal Person of the Trinity. Jesus is clearly subordinate to the power of the Spirit.
2011 Notes:
[1] The point here is not that later Christian reflections on the divinity of Christ are "wrong." The church has continued right down to the present to reflect on and discover new understandings of its initial experience with Jesus. The point is, rather, that the Gospel of Mark stands very early in that process of discovery. It is based on the memories of people who knew Jesus and knew that he was "just" a person like the rest of us but also knew that he "something more" than the rest of us. The humanity of Jesus thus stands out most clearly while the struggle to understand that something more was still in its early stages.
[2] I'm not quite so sure today that Jesus felt himself in need of forgiveness, but it is clear that Jesus felt the need to submit himself to John's baptism and that in his submission he had a profound spiritual experience. For some that may be startling to think of Jesus as having such experiences, but if he was fully human, as we say he was, then he would have shared in the good things of being human, including having profound spiritual experiences.
