For the first eight chapters of Mark Jesus was shown as a messiah, who proved his messiah-ship by wandering healings and preachings. In the course of his healings he was shown as the acting agent over a passive agent, “but Jesus rebuked him, saying ‘be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit…came out of him,” (Mk. 1:25-27). Jesus was the acting agent in the numerous healing episodes in Mark. He does or pronounces something at the person who was sick became well. “Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and the told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her..,” (Mk. 1:30-32). Mark was establishing that Jesus had power over sickness and malevolent spirits (which caused sickness). The writer of Mark more explicitly expressed Jesus’s power in the following passage “But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first trying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered,” (Mk. 3:27). Not only had Jesus power over spirits, but also over the weather, “He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm,” (Mk. 4:39). Jesus did stuff to others, not others to Jesus. In the preaching or teaching episodes Jesus taught and his audience learned from him, “Again he began to teach beside the sea,” (Mk. 4:1). Not only was Jesus able to control or act on others, but doing so was effortless for him. The sea immediately calms down after he rebuked it (Mk. 4:39), the spirit inhabiting the man at Capernaum (Mk. 1:23-27) end his possession of the man, immediately following Jesus’s command to depart, no struggle is evident. Starting with 8:27 Mark’s expression of Jesus changed. “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priest, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again, “(Mk. 8:31). Here Jesus as the Son of God in contrast to earlier when he was solely the acting agent was now shown as being the passive agent. Something was to be done to him. Not only was an action was going  to be done to him, but that something would result in an undefined suffering that includes death.  This idea of suffering his repeated in several different subsequent places, a notable example was when “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became a dazzling white…,” (Mk. 9:2b-3a). The whiteness of his clothing symbolized martyrdom to the Jews of his time and in conjunction with God’s public proclamation of him as “my Son, the Beloved, listen to him,” that is Jesus special relationship to God, Jesus transfiguration emphasized the suffering and the necessity of the suffering that Jesus must go through in his role as the Son of God/Messiah.

Over all the image of the Kingdom of God in Mark was one that would take place among or at least be benefit towardst the peasant population living under oppression of Roman rule, as all of Jesus’s miracle healings involved the lower-class or have-nots of society. Further evidence of Mark’s belief that the Kingdom of God would be manifested among the have-nots of society was Mark’s marks expression of Jesus as the suffering messiah, who told his disciples that “whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom to many,” (Mk. 10:44-46). There is the possibility and perhaps even the probability that Mark was wanting to identify the Messiah with the oppressed Jewish peasant population or an other oppressed population group for whom he wrote for. This oppressed group would or at least could have had seen their own suffering and servile status would be sanctified by the sufferings and servile status of Jesus. Thus lifting their moral estimation of themselves above the physical reality of their everyday lives and the political reality of Roman domination.