Mark 9:9

‘And as they were coming down from the mountain he charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen, except when the Son of Man should have risen again from the dead.’

Jesus now reminds them as they are coming down from the mountain of His coming death and resurrection and He charges them to tell no one what they have seen until after His resurrection from the dead has taken place. This should have brought home to them even more vividly that His death and resurrection were shortly to happen, and He will even back it up by re-emphasising it again in Mark 9:12. And we might think that if He could speak of His death and resurrection in such circumstances surely they would accept it and understand. But the fact is that there is no one so blind as a person who thinks that he understands and is satisfied with his own ideas, and the truth was that each of them was looking forward to his part in a physical kingdom on earth, and thinking those terms, and were prepared in the light of it to glide over the method by which it would be obtained. If Jesus was to die for the cause and then be brought back to life by God then so be it. But it was the kingdom that was important. They had dreams of glory, but it was mainly of glory for themselves. Thus they were unable to think prosaically. They just did not have an inkling that Jesus was talking about a simple arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection for the sins of the world. Their minds were filled with ‘kingdom’ ideas.

But this demonstrated how totally unable they were to get onto God’s wavelength. Indeed they must have wrestled in their own minds with how this new teaching about some form of ‘death and resurrection’ fitted in with what they had seen in the mountain and into their ideas. Did it mean that He was going to have an experience even more vivid and form-changing than the one that they had just seen, emerging from it with even more spectacular powers with which to defeat the Romans and establish Jerusalem as the centre of things? No wonder that they thought that they must secure their own positions early on. For if it was so it was clear from this that He would soon be establishing His kingdom with power, as He had just stated. And they wanted to make sure that they did not miss out. And the way to do this was to book their seats beforehand. Perhaps, indeed, they thought that that was why Jesus had let them see and hear what they had. Perhaps this was their commissioning for glory. But the last thing that they even considered was the truth, and that the reason why they had been given this experience was in order to strengthen an infant community of God’s new people after the shock of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. (It is salutary to think that one of these three witnesses would be obliterated by Satan (Acts 12:2), who would also make an attempt on a second (Acts 12:3-17). Only John would then have been left, and he would have been next).

‘He charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen.’ They themselves were confused and it was therefore wise that they said nothing until they understood it better. All kinds of wrong ideas might have been dreamed up, both by them and by others, if what had happened came out without the resurrection putting it in perspective.

‘Except when the Son of Man should have risen again from the dead.’ In this they again learned of His coming death and resurrection, although we learn here that they were still puzzled as to its meaning. They knew, of course, of the general resurrection taught by the Pharisees but this was clearly something different, an individual resurrection. But what did it mean? Perhaps they looked back to how Jesus had taken them in with Him to see the raising of Jairus’ daughter, and thought that He was indicating that the same was to happen to Him. They should have caught on, and of course later did, that the resurrection of the Son of Man was necessary in order for Him to come to the throne of the Father to receive everlasting dominion as in Daniel 7:0, (as Peter declares in Acts 2:0) and so that the Servant could share His spoils with the strong (Isaiah 53:10-12), and so that Israel might be revived (Hosea 12:1-2) through the death and coming alive again of the Servant (Isaiah 53:0).