When I was in seminary, one of my professors said that if a story seemed odd or unusual it was because either there was some deep symbolism involved or it just plain happened that way. Mark may have told this story, simply because that’s what happened. From the perspective of the storyteller, it provides an…
Now, you may wonder why God sent people like Ezekiel to talk to the Israelites. Why didn’t God just speak to them directly, and the reason is pretty simple.
Today’s gospel is one of those stories. I can remember hearing this story as a girl and thinking how wonderful it was that Jesus was concerned about Jairus’ daughter. The man was so sad about his little girl dying, and Jesus wanted to help her. It seemed like a family story. A children’s story.
It’s like the seed planting experiments you did in elementary school. You put dirt in a paper cup. You plant your bean seed. You water the bean. You talk to the bean. You make sure the bean gets sunshine and everything goes just like it was planned. The bean sprouts and begins to grow.
Today, we are still in Chapter three of Mark, but the people who put the lectionary together- the ones who decided what to read and when- they skipped a good part of this chapter. They probably did it because the two paragraphs that they left out are a bit dry and full of lists, but…
It’s the time of the year when our gospel texts turn away from the narrative of Jesus’ life and look to the teachings of Jesus from a particular gospel.
If you search through the Bible you won’t find the word “Trinity” in any part of the book. Today’s gospel is a rarity in that it shows Jesus talking about all three persons of the Trinity in a single story. Yet, it’s not a theological discussion on how it is that one God is in…
So what is God like? If you ask children and even some adults, they might tell you that God is an old man with a long white beard in a long white robe, sitting in a big chair somewhere up in the clouds.
It may feel rather backwards chronologically, but our gospel for today doesn’t come from one of the post-resurrection Easter appearances of Jesus, but from his final conversation with the disciples on Maundy Thursday. It was written however, for a community that was surely in need of Jesus’ good words.