Pressed Toward the Water

Men have just started planning his death, so he pulls back to the sea. The crowd comes with him.

Mark stops the story to say where the people had walked from. Galilee, which is home. Judea and Jerusalem, the religious center to the south. Idumea, further south again. The land across the Jordan to the east. The country around Tyre and Sidon, up the coast to the northwest. Some of those places were Jewish and some were not, and some of them stood three or four days of walking away, which is what it cost people who had heard something and decided it was worth the trip.

The large crowd came to Him when they heard what great things He was doing.

Mark gives their reason and adds nothing to it. Not one person in that sentence is described as coming to find out who he was.

Jesus asked His disciples to have a boat ready for Him so that the crowd would not crush Him.

The boat is not for teaching from and not for traveling in. It is a way out. The next line gives the reason: Jesus had healed so many people that everyone with a disease was working forward through the bodies to touch him. Pressing, not asking. If touching the man was what worked, and you had carried a sick child for four days to get there, you would push too.

So this is not a congregation. It is a crowd with real physical weight to it, moving toward one man, and the arrangement his friends make is a boat waiting in the shallows in case the weight becomes too much for him.

And when the unclean spirits saw Him, they fell down before Him and cried out, “You are the Son of God!”

Said out loud, said accurately, in front of everybody who had walked from Idumea to get there. And he warns them sternly to keep it to themselves.

Crowds have come from beyond the Jordan and from up the coast to get near this man, and not one of them has said what those voices just said. The crowd wants what he can do. The spirits know what he is. The ones who have him right are the ones he silences.