NOTES for Mar 9:10-16

Jesus’ disciples do not understand what He tells them about His resurrection. Traditional ideas about resurrection envisaged only the general resurrection on the day of Judgment, which in the minds of Jews in the Gospel era had most likely already come to coincide with the day of the Messiah’s coming and the triumph of the messianic Kingdom.

The apostles could not understand how the Messiah could rise before everyone else, any more than they could understand why He had to die at all: the messianic expectations traditional at that time envisaged nothing of the kind. According to those same traditional messianic expectations, shortly before the day of Judgment and the Messiah’s coming, the prophet Elijah was to descend from heaven. A tradition based on the testimony of Holy Scripture held that he had not died but had been taken alive into heaven. These traditional ideas were the reason for the apostles’ questions and bewilderment.

Jesus answers them rather unexpectedly. He does not reject the tradition about Elijah, but reinterprets it from a quite unexpected perspective. Jesus says that Elijah has already come but was not recognized, alluding to John the Baptist. This would seem to be an obvious allegory. Yet matters are not so simple, for in this case the allegory rests on a reality connected with the spiritual integrity and continuity of Tradition. Of course, Elijah could not be expected to return in the way the people expected him.

John the Baptist did precisely what the people expected the returning Elijah to do: he prepared them, as far as possible, for the Messiah’s coming. Of course, the Messiah and the Kingdom to which he bore witness were not those that corresponded to popular expectations.

Jesus Himself corresponded so little to those expectations that for quite a long time He even had to conceal His messiahship. The main purpose of His ministry was to bring as many people as possible into the Kingdom He had brought into the world: a Kingdom that, contrary to popular expectations, proved, in His own words, to be “a Kingdom not of this world.”