Ash Wednesday (Year 2, NL)

Poor disciples. They rarely miss an opportunity to make a mess.

Rather than rebuke the disciples, Jesus takes a little child by the hand.

Child advocate R. L. Stollar seeks to help people read the Bible in ways that protect and honor children.

The monarchy, celebrity, and true greatness

Mystics experience the holy—an experience that enlarges their interest in their fellow humans.

Perhaps the disciples have been captivated by the kind of power embodied by Augustus and Herod.

Our proclivity for greatness is rather embarrassing, isn’t it? No wonder the disciples keep their mouths shut when Jesus inquires about the topic of their conversation on the road. We want it, and we want it big time—recognition, sway, importance—but we also get that we shouldn’t admit this out loud.

This week’s Gospel may be the second Passion prediction, but being told that Jesus will be killed is no easier on the second hearing. Maybe the disciples don’t ask questions because they’re afraid it could be true.

For there to be a heresy about the cross, there would have to be an orthodoxy about it. Michael Gorman argues that contentions over how Jesus saves lead to an inadequate grasp of what the Passion means and does.

Sometimes preaching in a lectionary church is like being Philip in Acts 8—the Spirit plucks us up and drops us where ever she darn well pleases. It is necessarily this way, certainly.  Between the thematic requirements of the seasons of the church year and the sheer length of the four Gospels spread out over 156 Sundays, there is no way we can read all four in their entirety in three years. So, we skip stuff. Especially in Year B, as we try to mash the shortest Gospel, Mark, together with the other Gospel, John, together in some supposedly coherent way.

The crucified and resurrected Christ becomes the standard against which to measure all accounts of wisdom.

"A man had two sons . . .” was a common way to begin a parable, especially one comparing good and bad sons. Matthew uses it to contrast one son, who promises to work in the vineyard but never shows up, with another, who at first adamantly refuses to go to the vineyard but later repents and goes (21:28-32). Which one did the will of his father, asks Jesus? Not the one who talked a good game, but the one who actually followed through with obedient actions.

Jesus sees something the disciples do not even know they are missing.

The Roman custom of lifting a newborn infant probably underlies Jesus’s symbolic action in Mark 9.