Growing up in southern California it was common to hear friends talk about “star sightings” they had experienced. I had my own. One day as my mother drove us slowly down the Pacific Coast Highway in a traffic jam, I looked over at the car next to us, a red convertible, and saw David McCallum who played Illya Kuryakin on one my favorite shows, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
Because of all this attention, most of us understand that celebrities of all sorts will dress down, wear dark glasses, and go to other lengths to avoid recognition in public places. Many of them don’t want the attention and the mob scene which can result if numbers of people see them waiting for a plane or eating at restaurant.
Something like that restraint about public appearance seemed to characterize Jesus, especially as Mark shows Him to us. Over and over, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus commands silence about Himself and especially about His identity as the Messiah. We’ve already seen in 1:25 and 1:34 how Jesus silenced the demons He was casting out, “because they knew him.”
In our text this week, Mark 1:40-45, Jesus forbids the healed leper to speak publicly about Him, but the command is disobeyed and Jesus’ entrance into cities is hindered by the recognition generated.
There’s also a little theme of private, even secret instruction of the disciples around the parables in Mark 4:10ff, and in Mark 8:30, Peter’s brilliant confession of Jesus as the Messiah is followed by a stern warning for the disciples not to talk about Him.
In the early twentieth century, William Wrede coined the term “messianic secret” for this theme of Jesus’ hiddeness in Mark. He believed that the idea of Jesus ordering people not to reveal His identity as Messiah was fiction, invented by Mark in order to explain why there was not more recognition of Jesus during His lifetime. Wrede’s theory has been almost wholly discredited by later scholarship, but the secrecy theme remains there in Mark’s Gospel.
Jesus’ secrecy certainly has some of the same motives as the celebrity secrecy I noted above. His ministry was hindered by thronging crowds. But there were other reasons. Jesus’ actual ministry would show that the expectations of the Messiah current in His day–as a great military leader–were way off base. To be widely identified as the Messiah would only result in wide confusion when Jesus did not mount a military campaign.
Moreover, there was a sense in which all characterizations of Jesus would be incomplete and premature until the completion of His mission in His death and resurrection. So while Matthew has Peter declaring that Jesus is both Messiah and Son of God, Mark reserves that revelation for a moment while Jesus is on the Cross, when the Roman centurion makes the awestruck observation that “surely this man was the Son of God.”
Jesus will remain somewhat hidden from us as well, until we willingly see Him in the light of His whole accomplishment, which including suffering and death. Any messiah who does not connect us with suffering is a false messiah. The secret of the identity of Jesus is an open secret which can be known by anyone who cares to pay attention and who is willing to be united with Him in His death, so as to be united with Him in His resurrection (Romans 6:5).