Loading...As often happens in this blog, I started down one path and have found myself on another. I began this thread by talking about the story of the leper in Papyrus Egerton 2. That made me want to say something about the healing of a leper in Mark 1:40-44. But to make my point I had to talk about a textual problem in v. 41. And that has gotten me to talk about Jesus’ getting angry. He does appear to get angry before healing the leper (as found in some of our ancient manuscripts). But what is he angry about? To answer *that* question one needs to consider what Mark says otherwise about Jesus getting angry – something that never happens in Matthew or Luke.
But Jesus does get angry on several occasions in Mark’s Gospel. What is most interesting is that each account involves Jesus’ ability to perform miraculous deeds of healing.
In Mark 9 we find the account of a man pleading with Jesus to cast an evil demon from his son, since the disciples have proved unable to do so: “Often,” he tells Jesus, “it casts him into the fire and into water to destroy him; but if you are able, show us compassion and help us” (9:21-22). The man, in other words, asks for compassion. Strikingly enough, Jesus replies not with compassion but a rebuke: “If you are able?! All things are possible to the one who believes.” (9:23). The man then continues to plead: “I do believe; help my unbelief!” (9:24).
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I like your blogs when you start down one path and then go down another. Keep going. It is hard for me to understand the anger of Jesus in some of these healing situations. I look forward to the explanation. There is also the similar account (Matthew 15:22-28) where Jesus initially refuses to heal a sick child until the mother pressures him which is also difficult to understand.
About the “Kingdom of God” supposedly belonging to those children… I’ve wondered what Jesus and other apocalypticists thought (if they anticipated these concerns at all) about questions such as what would happen to those who *were* still children when the Kingdom arrived. And other related questions…
If the “good” people who were alive when the Kingdom arrived, and the “good” dead restored to life, were expected to enjoy something like an earthly paradise, would they all be given bodies of an unchanging, “ideal” physical age? (About thirty?) Would children remain children forever? Would they suddenly become (physically) adults? Or would they be alllowed to mature, with maturation stopped at the “ideal” age?
I assume we can say the apocalypticists expected no *more* children ever to be born (since there would be no marriage, and no sex).
And millions of people today believe Jesus is an omniscient deity who knew, even in his lifetime, all about *them*, and now has a “personal relationship” with them!
Good questions! I’m not sure there are any answers!
I love the title and the (for members) after it: “Jesus getting angry for members.” I can just imagine the scenario. We members don’t have the proper insight to become angry, so Jesus does it for us. He seriously gets angry on our behalf. I seriously blaspheming here, but I have to believe Jesus understands and is laughing out loud right now. Either that or he is getting angry for all of you because I just wrote with such irreverence.
This is not a very satisfying solution if we want to understand the sort of person Mark conveys Jesus to be, because it is baffling that mere lack of presumptuousness about Jesus’s preparedness to heal could be grounds for anger.
Presumably the author of Mark intended the reader to understand why Jesus was angry, yet evidently, the recipients of Mark’s gospel from earliest times were puzzled much as we are. Perhaps Mark was abbreviating an even earlier account which would help us make sense of this, perhaps by elaborating on exactly what the leper’s begging and kneeling entailed. It seems clear that a vital piece of the puzzle has been lost to history.
I had more thoughts, but they are purely speculative; in the end I just don’t know. But I don’t think we should be quick to discount the possibility that Jesus is angry at something bigger than the individual leper in front of him. We only have to look at our personal experiences of anger to see that it is very often *triggered* by a specific scenario but *directed* at larger systemic issues. This might not be the correct solution, but it is not inherently unreasonable or desperate.