Mark & Luke

prophecy of one with a ‘winnowing-fork in his hand’ (3:17). John therefore sends two of his disciples to ask whether Jesus really is the one who fulfils the OT hopes and whether in him the final action of God is being realized. In v. 21 Luke points out the wonders that Jesus ‘at that time’ had been doing. The basis for his response to John is secure. So Jesus appeals to his actions in a list that freely quotes from Isa 35:5–6 and 61:1. For those who have eyes to see, they make his case. v. 23 contains a challenge to, and perhaps a criticism of John. The presence of Jesus demands a willingness to have established beliefs questioned. Jesus now talks to the crowds about John and

his relationship to himself. He begins with a compliment. When they went to hear John, they knew he was not one who would bend with the wind or be ensnared by the power or luxuries of the court. Luke has already told his readers that John had been wrongly put in prison by Herod because he had rebuked him for the evil he was doing (3:18–20). Had they gone out to see a prophet? Jesus gives John a higher status in God’s plans than that. He applies to him a mixed OT quotation from Ex 23:20 and Mal 3:1 which, by a slight adaptation of pronouns, makes John the immediate fore- runner of himself. He brings this to a climax with a further compliment which is, neverthe- less, something of a backhanded one. No one in the world has arisen greater than John, ‘yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he’. As it stands, this says that John is as yet outside the Kingdom. He still works from within the old expectations. He has not yet come to appreciate the radical challenge Jesus brings to these and the new perspectives from which they have to be viewed. However, this interpretation has been challenged ever since the time of Tertul- lian. Because the Greek in v. 28 uses compara- tives (‘lesser’, ‘greater’), the saying has been taken to refer only to Jesus and John and to their places in the Kingdom. Jesus is younger than John, perhaps originally a disciple of John, perhaps even a servant figure unlike John. He is nevertheless the greater in the Kingdom, though this interpretation would not suggest that John himself was not yet in the Kingdom. This, how- ever, is not the most likely interpretation of the usual NT usage. John has not embraced the outlook of the Kingdom and as yet remains outside it. Those who have acknowledged it are already living within its embrace, out of its grace. They await its future revelation. For John, that embrace awaits the future (13:28).

The part of John in God’s redemptive act, however, is emphasized in Luke’s comment (vv. 29–30). ‘All the people’, that is those true Jews who had come to respond to Jesus and so be included within God’s redeeming action, ‘acknowledged the justice of God’, his work of redemption that began through John’s baptism that prepared them for their acceptance of Jesus. Those who were to reject Jesus were also the ones who rejected John.

Jesus acknowledges John’s part by comparing his contemporaries to children at play. They are like those who fail to respond to all efforts to entice them to take part, whether it be a call to mourn or dance. John challenged them with the demands of God and they accused him of mis- anthropy. Jesus, on the other hand, presented them with the freeing grace of God and they cast him as a libertine. They will not respond to the challenge found in either proclamation. The section finishes with v. 35 which acts as a coun- terbalance to the rejection of which vv. 31–4 speak. ‘Wisdom’ in the OT came (alongside Spirit and Word) to be personified as the ex- pression of God’s outreach to humankind in which he made himself known and united them to himself (Prov 8; Wis 7). This verse takes up this thought. God’s way is ‘vindicated’ (the same Gk. verb is used in v. 29), that is acknowledged and praised by all those who through the ministries of John and Jesus have experienced God’s embrace and so have recog- nized his work both in them and in themselves.

(7:36–50) Jesus and the Woman Who Was a Sinner All four gospels tell of Jesus’ anointing by a woman (Mt 26:6–13; Mk 14:3–9; Jn 12:1–8) though all three others link the anointing to Jesus’ passion and record a complaint about the waste of money. Whereas Matthew and Mark have an anointing of Jesus’ head, Luke, like John, tells of the anointing of his feet. Only Luke speaks of the woman as a ‘sinner’. The significance Luke sees in the story depends on the actual meaning of a number of verses which are not easily interpreted. Simon, a Phari- see, invites Jesus to a meal; a woman comes into the room, as was possible on semi-public occa- sions, bathes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. She publicly kisses his feet and anoints them with ointment in an extrava- gant display of affection. Simon feels that Jesus’ acceptance of such affection from one who was a sinner was not consistent with a prophet come from God. Jesus replies by telling a par- able of two debtors which makes the point that

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C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 0 . O U P O x f o r d .

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