In terse but densely packed phrases Mark tells of how Jesus embarked on his public ministry.
The way is prepared by his cousin John whose call to repentance and baptism signify that the time has come when God will execute a decisive judgment from which a new Israel will emerge. In his baptism Jesus identifies with his people and the judgment they face. His commitment is answered by God in the vision of the rending of the heavens, the descent of the Spirit and the testimony of the voice from heaven. A very local and time-specific event takes on universal and eternal significance.
This is underlined in an unexpected way when immediately after the affirmation which marked his baptism Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. The action of the Holy Spirit shows that we are concerned not only with human reality but also with divine initiative. The forty days of temptation recalls Moses’s stay on Mount Sinai and Elijah’s wandering through the wilderness to Mount Horeb. The adversity Jesus met in this concentrated period points to the confrontation which will mark his entire ministry and lead finally to its climax. Being with the wild beasts speaks of being far removed from the inhabited and cultivated land that the Bible associates with blessing. Despite the hostile environment, however, Jesus is sustained in his purpose by angels representing the presence of God.
When it comes to time, the Bible is concerned less with chronos – the passing of hours, days or years – and more with kairos – the moment of opportunity. Here we arrive at a point where the time is fulfilled – the moment has arrived for something decisive to happen. Picking up the note struck first by John the Baptist, Jesus introduces his message with this sense of urgency. What is arriving is nothing less than the reign of God – now present in Jesus to bring a radical challenge to human alienation and rebellion. The message brings an imperative – “repent and believe in the gospel”. How will we respond to this summons?
Typically the story of Jesus in the wilderness is used on the First Sunday in Lent to introduce the Lenten fast. But Mark, unlike Matthew and Luke, does not actually say anything about Jesus fasting during the forty days he spends in the wild. Instead, Mark comments that “angels waited on him”; this is a clear echo of the story in 1 Kings 19:5-8, in which Elijah is served by an angel who twice brings him bread, and that bread sustains Elijah for forty days and forty nights; and the Elijah story itself is an echo of the “bread of angels” (Psalm 78:25) which sustains the entire Israelite population in its forty-year sojourn in the wilderness.
The suggestion here is not so much that Jesus fasted as that he committed himself entirely to God’s care, like Elijah and the Israelites and Noah before him, and God sustained him in some not wholly understandable and yet undeniably factual way. Similarly, during his forty days Jesus was “with the wild beasts.” Noah was also “with the wild beasts” while the ark was adrift, and by a special providence of God the wild ones did not threaten or attack Noah or his family (or each other) during that entire time. We are invited to consider it a special providence of God that Jesus was safe “with the wild beasts” in his wilderness as well. Mark shows Jesus relying on the provision of God for his sustenance and safety, rather than anxiously attempting to serve himself in these needs; and, given that Mark never specifies how Satan tempts Jesus, as Matthew and Luke do, we may take it that such deep trust in God is in fact what overcomes the Enemy’s testing.
The personal experience of relying on God’s provision for him is what confirms for Jesus the divine words at his Baptism — “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” — and what gives Jesus the personal authenticity and authority to call people to “repent” (metanoeite, “transform your thinking”) and “believe” (pisteuete, “put your trust in”) the good news that the reign of God is at hand. Jesus’ figurative reenactment of the Noah story puts him in a position to re-announce the covenant of co-creative redemptive action God made with Noah, extending it now even further with his own proclamation of God’s reign for new life.