Mark

According to Jesus, chances are good that there's not going to be much left of us once we've admitted to just how often stumbling blocks stand in our way. Whether others put them there or we find ways to place them ourselves, they trip us up, keep us from moving forward, get us off track.

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.

At this point in Mark, stumbling blocks seem a necessary point for conversation. We are good at placing them in others’ paths, and even better at setting them before ourselves.

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.

In the Talmud, there is a story of a group of rabbis arguing over the status of a particular clay oven. Is it clean or unclean? Rabbi Eliezer stands alone against the interpretation given by his fellow sages, and he begins to call upon nature to confirm him.

I have spent most of my Christian life in deep discomfort with Mark 7. I now read it as an early example of the priesthood of all believers.

We love to look at people and judge them on the basis of what we see. We looked at Lance Armstrong and saw a guy who beat cancer and won Tour de France titles. We saw Bill Cosby as a barrier-breaking comedian and father figure.

“Many were coming and going, and they had no leisure, even to eat.” I think of the many lunches spent at my computer with a sandwich.

As a young minister in my early 20s, I was often admonished by the senior ministers to keep a guarded distance from laypeople. To get too close, they would say, is to become too familiar with a resulting loss of one's ministerial authority. They thought authority was protected by distance and diminished by relationships.

My Presbyterian granddaughter hasn’t heard about 500 years of conflict over “the real presence.” At her cousins' Catholic church, she washed down the wafer with a large gulp from the cup—and then another.

I like Mark’s frequent mention of how people felt. In this week’s text, Herod is greatly perplexed about John the Baptist.

Not everything urgent is important. The difficulty is distinguishing between the two. In ministry, people's pressing needs seldom come before us in neat, conveniently timed packages. Instead, the minister is bombarded with legitimate requests and pleas from every side.

As Jesus prepares to send the Twelve, his experience of failure seems to color his instructions.

There is a puzzling and disturbing detail in Mark’s account of the storm at sea, one we often do not even notice. In verse 36, we are told that when Jesus heads across the sea with his disciples, “other boats were with him.”

Two people in great distress do what a third, the Gerasene demoniac, has already done: they interrupt and rearrange Jesus’ day.

On first reading, the two parables in today's Gospel text seem to make less and less sense. In the first, a sower seems to leave the seed to fend for itself. In the second, a tiny mustard seed becomes a bush large enough for its branches to provide shelter for birds. (In Matthew's telling, it's a full-size tree!) When we stop to think about it, both parables are preposterous.

Like the stories that come before it, the storm at sea is a parable of reversal.

Like the stories that come before it, the storm at sea is a parable of reversal.