Mark 9

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.

I love a good mountaintop experience. It’s a moment when everything changes. Insight flares up in the mind, illuminating the moment, the experience, the problem in a whole new way. You’re never quite the same again.  

One such moment for me happened in prayer when I was on a three-day silent retreat.

Let’s build shrines, Peter says. He doesn’t know how to respond to a mystical mountaintop experience, and he’s afraid.

The Transfiguration has a hundred sermons in it. But to me the most touching element is the subplot.

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.

If Moses is any example, the pastor’s yoke was never light. He wasn’t very far into his 40-year pastorate when he learned that his flock did not feel called to provide him with constant affirmation.

If the disciples hoped before that Jesus didn't know what he was saying, these hopes are now gone.

When Jesus' disciples imitate Joshua, the irony is delicious: they have just spectacularly failed to cast out the demon troubling a boy from childhood.

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

Perhaps Jesus is too hopeful, too optimistic about these outsiders to suit our temperament.

Do not look for this mountain on a Bible map. It juts out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of God.

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.