Day 246

You will notice that Mark goes from one event into the next event, often with a reference to how much time has passed. The Gospel would work well with Facebook time lines. The events would stack right on top of each other without much space for additional Likes, or Follows, or Comments. I wonder if anyone has thought of making a FB account for Mark and posting the whole Gospel to the wall, one post at a time? If all the characters had FB accounts that would be awesome to see the interactions. There is an idea for one of you. My brain is frying as I think about the possibilities.

The crowds continue to gather after they hear about the things Jesus is doing. People are getting desperate to get help, resorting to destruction of personal property. Remember, these are houses with flat roofs, often made from a few logs, covered with smaller sticks and filled in with mud, then coated with more mud. In a climate that rarely got much rain, they worked well. It must have been quite a sight as the dust began to fall inside the room as the continued to dig. I don’t imagine Jesus could continue what He was doing as they closer to their goal.

And Jesus never avoided a controversy when the Truth was at stake. He had the power to heal physical illnesses, but He could handle the bigger issues like forgiveness as well. He knew it was God’s domain and never backed away from the claim. He was affirming His Deity by doing the physical healing. He was saying, “I am God and I know it.” We hear people say this, but they do nothing to prove it. Jesus said it and proved it. But that is not all. He then confronts the leaders on their own hypocrisy.

Jesus also put new meaning on old practices, making them fuller and deeper. He takes fasting and expands it from a ritual used to show God you were serious and makes it into something completely different. He says that the fasting His disciples will do in the future will burst the old ways of thinking and acting. In fact, if you insist on trying to smash the new understanding of relating to God into the old habits, everything gets destroyed in the process.

It is not just fasting that gets a new makeover, it is the most foundational aspect of Judaism that gets hit: the Sabbath. The Sabbath had gotten so shoved into a man-made box that its original meaning and intent were destroyed. Jesus says the Sabbath was supposed to serves man’s needs, not man serve the Sabbath’s needs. They had it all backwards.

But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He will go to demonstrate that He has the authority to rule over even the Sabbath’s meaning and application. He can “change the rules” if He wanted to. But He instead brings the meaning back to the original through what He does. The Sabbath was meant to provide us rest and refreshment as we demonstrate our trust and reliance on the Lord to meet our physical and spiritual needs. It serves us.