Churching Today

As we have move through the Gospel of Mark we have gone through many phases of Jesus teaching. Jesus has taught about his pending death, but not in detail. The disciples have not seemed to understand what the meaning of all of this is. They know and believe that Jesus is the Messiah that the Old Testament prophets have promised but they are still under the impression that Jesus is the Messiah that will overthrow the Romans and establish the new Davidic Kingdom. Jesus will again put that to the test using the disciple’s own pride. Mark 10:32 And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them. And they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, Mark 10:33 saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. Mark 10:34 An...

  Much of the person of Jesus Christ is found in the teachings that we see with individuals or groups. Our Roman reader has discovered much about Jesus, but maybe even more so about himself. One of the things that the Bible does quite well is shine a light onto how we think and live our lives. Last week, Jesus drove into a very personal element of life that of divorce, and that He did not consider the hap hazard method of discarding of one’s wife acceptable, nor did He approve of the numerous other methods that humans had employed as living arrangements. Jesus taught us that the ordained method of life was that a man would leave his family, and establish a new family with one woman, a wife, and that in this united pairing the two would become one. And that pairing would produce offspring, children, whom Jesus holds up to us as the model for a Christian life. It is through these teachings that we should examine our own lives, and that examination continues, with our lesson today. ...

  As we have seen Jesus has started to touch on some personal subjects, and these have come out during discussions with others and with His disciples. These open types of discussions are very normative in the Middle Eastern culture of the 1 st century and still very much today. As we stated before our Roman Reader would have also recognized such public debates and discussion, the practice was very much the norm. Sadly, this has become something that the modern American cannot seem to stomach. Either the person cannot defend their views, they just want to force those views onto others, and they do this by means of shaming to outright violence, because they believe that nonacceptance is violence towards them, hence they feel justified using violence against others. This is a form of not only intellectual terrorism, but it also becomes actual terrorism when those who are offended decide that they are justified in the use of violence to silence others. And because of this many Christi...

  We touch on last week what Jesus said was the greatest in the kingdom of God. Our Roman reader might have had problems connecting the dots on that concept. His world, like our world today, is based on power, wealth, status and being able to use those things to have others do your biding. So, when the disciples had been having a discussion among themselves of who is the one that holds that power and status within the groups, Jesus corrects their understanding of what it truly means to be great, which is sacrifice, sacrifice to God and sacrifice to others. And within that teaching, Jesus opens the door what is really happening in the hearts of the disciples, which is prideful sin, them wanting to put themselves at the forefront, rather than the ministry of God as the focus. This comes out in these next couple of verses. Mark 9:38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” John was usin...