I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 14-16.

    I see a connection between the actions of the woman who anointed Jesus’ head with perfume and with the establishment of the breaking of bread and sharing of wine. Both contain an aspect of ceremony and of ritual. We, as human beings, need ceremony and ritual in our lives. I have long tried to determine what we were supposed to learn from the woman who anointed Jesus. Today I came to the conclusion that the lesson is that it is OK to conduct ceremonies which show our love for Jesus and for God. However, they should be ceremonies which have personal meaning to us, not ceremonies we take part in to impress others. There are some ceremonies which are established for every generation (i.e., the breaking of bread and sharing of wine) and there are ceremonies which each individual must develop for themselves. But even in the established ceremonies, each generation needs to look closely at how the ceremony is conducted to determine if it still conveys the meaning it was designed to convey. I, also, want to point out that our ceremonies may offend some. I have always suspected that Mark is trying to tell us that Judas betrayed Jesus because of His acceptance of the anointing.

    When Peter bragged that he would never desert Jesus, it was not just bragging. Peter was trying to build himself up to make it true. When Jesus told Peter that he would deny Him three times, He was not putting Peter down. He was telling him that it takes more than human bravado to stand for God in the face of persecution. We can only do so with the help of the Holy Spirit. The experience in the Garden of Gethsemane was a reinforcement of this same lesson. It is only by keeping watch and praying that we can receive the power from the Holy Spirit that we need to overcome temptation. If we cannot stay awake to pray with Jesus before the trial comes, how will we stand firm by His side in the face of persecution? But Jesus knows that our failing is because our body is weak, not because our spirit is unwilling. Let each and every one of us pray for God’s Spirit to strengthen us so that we can face the troubles which will come.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 12-13.

    The parable of the evil farmers was directed at the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, at the ones in the audience when He told it. However, it contains a message for leaders of today as well. The message is that all leaders have been given their position of leadership by God and they owe Him for that position. However, there is also a message there for everyone. Those who have been given positions of leadership by God face a constant temptation to usurp God’s authority. It is a temptation that all too many of them give into.

    The various groups of Jewish leaders asked Jesus questions which were designed to have no right answer. In the question He asked in return, Jesus showed that trick questions do not lead to understanding. Jesus was asked three questions. Two were designed to trap Him, the third was asked out of a genuine desire to hear Jesus’ answer. In the first two Jesus answers in a manner to clearly show up the flaw in the thought process of the person asking the question. In the first question, the questioners are more concerned with the law of the land than with the Law of God. In Jesus’ answer He points out that while our money has the image of our government, we ourselves have the image of God. We should let the government have our money, but we should give ourselves completely to God. In this election season I find myself giving myself (by my engaging in the political debate) to the government. I should spend the time I spend worrying about politics serving God (or finding new ways to serve God). I find this lesson reinforced by Jesus’ answer to the question about the greatest commandment and by His commentary on the widow who gives all that she had. Are we giving all that we can to God’s service? Or are we expending our resources on other things?

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 10-11.

    Jesus’ teachings on marriage here tell us a lot about God’s intentions in creating human sexuality. A man leaves his father and mother and is joined, by God, to his wife. Husband and wife are not joined together by the government, nor are they joined together by the Church. They are joined together by God. I do not fully understand how that happens, but our sexuality plays a role in it. This is why sexual sins are such a problem, our sexuality is designed to bind us to one other person of the opposite sex. There is a connection between this and Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about lusting after someone and adultery. I think this gets put into that bucket of subjects I should revisit and do an blog study on at some point in the future.

    I see a unified theme from the children who come to Jesus through the healing of blind Bartimaeus. Let’s see if I can find the words to explain that theme. In some ways I think that this passage is central to Mark’s understanding of Jesus’ teaching just as the Sermon on the Mount is central to Matthew’s. First Jesus tells us that we must receive the Kingdom of Heaven like a child. I have seen lots of debate about what that means and I am not going to go into that right now. This is followed by the story of the rich young man who is not willing to give up his material wealth to gain eternal life. He is willing to do just about anything else (to the point that we do not know anything else he is not willing to do), but not that.
    Then Jesus tells the Twelve the sort of death He is about to die. Which is immediately followed by James and John asking for special privileges in Jesus’ coming kingdom. Even after the exchange with the rich young man and Jesus describing the terrible sufferings He was about to experience, they were looking for the perks of being a follower of Jesus. So Jesus explains to them that the leaders in His Kingdom will spend their time meeting the needs and wants of others, not in having their needs and wants met by others. Finally we have blind Bartimaeus. When Jesus asks him what he wants, he responds, “I want to see.” While Bartimaeus was asking for physical sight, Mark is telling us that we need to want spiritual sight. When Jesus asks us what we want, do we answer “I want to see?” Or are we looking for what is in it for us?

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 8-9.

    Once again Jesus is teaching a crowd in a remote area and He is concerned that they are hungry. This happens not that long after the feeding of the 5,000, yet the disciples are worried about where they would get the food to feed this many people. It is so easy to look at the disciples and think that they should have learned from the first time. Yet, we often do the same thing. Well, at least I do. God has miraculously provided for our, or someone else’s, needs, yet when the same, or similar, needs arise again, we worry about how we will meet those needs this time. No sooner had Jesus crossed over the Sea of Galilee after this feeding than some of the Pharisees asked Him for a miraculous sign of His authority. The driving out of demon’s, the curing of the sick, restoring hearing to the deaf, and the feeding of thousands on two occasions were not sufficient for them. They wanted a sign performed just for the sake of proving Jesus’ power. Just as our faith can act as yeast to change the world around us, so can such “skepticism” act to change the Church. The first makes a positive change, the latter a change for the worse.

    In this passage is a story of Jesus healing a blind man that I have always been slightly puzzled by. Why did Jesus have to place His hands on the man’s eyes a second time for the man to be able to see clearly? Today for some reason I thought of the story of the man born blind in the Gospel of John. In that story when the Pharisees were questioned the healed man, they told him, “We know that Jesus is a sinner, so what really happened?” To which the man replied, “I don’t know if He is a sinner or not. What I do know is that I was blind, but now I see.” By saying that the former blind man was telling the Pharisees, “I was blind and Jesus gave me sight. Since you cannot see that He is from God, you are clearly still blind.” Which brings me back to this story, sometimes it takes being touched by Jesus more than once for the spiritually blind to gain their sight. All of us were born spiritually blind. It is only when we are touched by God that we can gain our sight. Some of us need to be touched more than once. This is the lesson from the beginning of today’s passage as well. The disciples needed to see Jesus feed the masses twice before they understood. But some will choose to never understand, no matter how often Jesus touches their lives.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 6-7.

    I know I am not original in noting this, but there is a key lesson for us in the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. The disciples came to Jesus and asked Him to send the crowd away so that the crowd could go and get food. I believe that the disciples were genuinely concerned about the people in the crowd. They were all a long way from anywhere and if they went too long without eating, some of them might not be able to make it back home. They were expecting Jesus to hear their concern and concur with them. They were not expecting Jesus to tell them to address the issue:

“You feed them.”

There are lessons here about how God expects us to address the problems that He reveals to us. The first thing He asks is that we identify what resources we have to deal with the problem:

“How much bread do you have? Go and find out.”

Once they had returned with the information about what resources they had, then Jesus told them to act. He did this even though the resources were clearly insufficient to the task at hand. I just realized that this points out the two mistakes we make in the Church. Sometimes we believe that God is calling us to address a problem so we just get started working on it without taking the time to see what resources we have and what resources we need. The other mistake we make is that when we do take the time to marshal our resources and we find that they are insufficient, we give up and say that we cannot address this need because we don’t have what it takes. In this story, Jesus has the disciples gather their resources, get the people organized to be helped, and then Jesus blessed their resources. If God has called us to a task, He will see to it that our resources are more than adequate to the task He has assigned us.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 4-5.

    Several times when Jesus told parables He said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”(NIV) The NLT translates something He says a short time later as an expansion on that (in other Gospels, all of the translations have Him say something like this). Jesus tells us that those who listen and understand will gain more understanding, but those who do not pay attention will lose what understanding they had in the first place. Those who pay attention to Jesus’ teachings will continually gain greater understandings while those who don’t pay attention because they think they already know what He has to say will gradually drift further and further from understanding what Jesus taught. In some ways I have discovered that this applies to my Bible reading. Since I have been reading through the Bible every year so as to write this blog I have discovered new meaning in passages which I though I already fully understood. The other side of this is important as well. If we think we understand something and therefore stop working to understand it even better, we will gradually lose what understanding we have. This applies to many things in addition to what God teaches us.

    This passage ends with two stories about having faith in God’s healing power. The two stories are intertwined and both tell us a lot about having faith. In one a leader in the synagogue comes to Jesus because his daughter is sick. Jesus went with this distraught father. However, while they were on the way, a woman who had been suffering for years touches Jesus’ robe and is healed. I am going to look at that one first. The woman was sure that if she could just touch the merest hem of Jesus’ robe, she would be healed. She did not need His undivided attention, she did not believe she needed His attention at all. She thought that she could be healed without Jesus paying any attention to her. She was right, and she was wrong. Yes, she was healed when she touched Jesus’ robe without Him paying any attention to her, but Jesus would not leave it at that. He chose to turn His attention to her. He chose to let her know that the healing she received was not given impersonally by performing a ritual. She was healed because Jesus cared.
    Back to that distraught father, just as Jesus is back on track to heal his daughter messengers arrive telling him not to bother. His daughter has died. If only Jesus had not been delayed by that woman, his daughter might have been saved…but wait, Jesus ignores those who think it is too late. Jesus does not listen to the naysayers and, with a little encouragement from Jesus, neither does the distraught father. When they got to the house, Jesus sees all of the people putting on a show of mourning and asks what all the commotion is about because the little girl is not yet dead. The people laugh at Him (and by proxy at the father who dares to believe his little girl might yet be saved). Are we willing to face the mockery and scorn of those who do not believe as this father did? Are we willing to be singled out from the crowd, as the woman was?

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 1-3.

    Every time I read the opening to the Gospel of Mark I am reminded of the play “To Walk in the Way,” which is based on the Gospel of Mark. I was part of an acting group which performed this play. Our director re-imagined the play in a way which made this opening scene very powerful. Ever since then whenever I read the beginning of the Gospel of Mark it strikes me in a powerful way. Here we have John the Baptist, a strange man who eats insects and honey and who wears uncomfortable clothing. He preached a message of repentance and forgiveness. The key being the part about repentance. Repentance is one of those words which we Christians use that should not need to be defined for people, but probably does. Repentance is the act of having and expressing regret and remorse for something we have done. If you are planning to do it again, you are not repentant. If you are truly repentant you will take measures to avoid giving into the temptation to repeat the action, perhaps even extreme measures. So, are we truly repentant of our sins? What measures have you, have I, taken to avoid the temptation to repeat those sins?

    Perhaps I am missing something, but it seems to me that Mark tells us what his Gospel is about when he describes Jesus calling Simon Peter and Andrew. Mark is telling us that the rest of the book is about how we can “fish for men.” In a way, Mark is telling us that his Gospel is about how we can fulfill the Great Commission. So, how did Jesus attract followers? The answer is that He went to where people were seeking and preached to them. An important aspect of Jesus’ teaching was that He did not use the “appeal to authority” argument to support His teachings. He asked people to judge His teachings on the basis of what those teachings were, not on the basis of the authority figures who backed them up.

    However, Jesus did not stop with preaching. He also met their needs. He cast out demons, he healed the sick, he offered forgiveness. As I read it this way I see a gradually growing exposition about how to draw people to Christ. As we read on we see that Jesus was willing to confront assumptions about what it means to be a good person. He was willing to spend time with those who made no pretense of being good people. I am going to go away from my theme for a moment, because it takes us back to the idea of repentance. Those who think they are righteous will not, cannot repent, only those who know they are sinners will/can repent. Of course, there is a lesson related to the theme of attracting people to follow Jesus: those who think they are good people will not choose to follow Jesus because they do not think they need to, while those who know they are sinners may choose to follow Jesus because they know that they need His healing.