Daily Liturgy and Scripture

Lest we think that every Jewish leader uniformly opposed Jesus (there have been stories of a lot of them doing that in the past few weeks), we have this man Jairus, to show that God worked among the Jewish leaders as well. Jairus came to Jesus to save his daughter, which was of no small consequence. Jesus comes to the man's aid but is distracted on the way by the woman who has been labeled impure by her community. It's a great range of peopel in Jesus's path: both the temple leader who would have worked hard to keep himself ritually pure and the woman with no ability to make herself so. 

Jesus came to bring wholeness, and he came to bring peace. He showed the meaning peace by sleeping in the front of a boat during a storm, and he showed wholeness by giving it to the demon-possessed man. In. Both cases, the circumstances didn’t change Jesus, but he brought the spirit of God into the circumstances to change them. That same spirit is among us today.

Jesus is using several illustrations to talk about receiving the word, each with its own small nuance. Not all are ready to receive, and not all have the same reaction after receiving. Jesus's way is not an easy one, or it would be easy. God prepares the hearts of those who encounter the word, just as he delivers the word itself to them.

Two things were among the most important to the culture of Jesus's time: honor and family. Jesus was being accused of having an impure spirit (a goofy claim that he immediately debunked), but his family probably perceived that he was causing them shame by being subject to such a claim. To this Jesus made a pretty radical claim: his family was a new one, formed by God. How his earthly family would have taken this comment is unclear, but it probably wouldn't have made them very happy. For those around him, though, it was the early sign of a greater Kingdom: being part of the family of God.

God made the Sabbath as a day of rest, a gift to those made in God’s image. It’s meant to be a time of wholeness and healing, not anxiety. Jesus knew this, which is why he was happy to make people whole on the Sabbath by healing them. Perhaps if the religious leaders had been more concerned about wholeness, they might have been bending a few rules themselves.

Jesus's presence changes everything. He inspires people to break through literal barriers to get to him, and he goes out of his way to spend time with those who may have been barred from entering God's house before his arrival. His disciples had a front row seat for the new Kingdom he brought, and their walk with him daily was nothing less than practicing God's presence.

The passages from Maccabees and Mark are an excellent comparison of what the Jewish people might have been expecting, even hoping for, versus what Jesus delivered. The period of the Maccabees was not long before Jesus, so a military leader to bring back the old glory days (especially under the oppression of Rome, who was a military power) would have been a great hope of the people around Jesus. Of course, that's not what he did. He didn't want to draw too much attention, because he wanted to be able to move about the small villages freely. He did heal people, but it was almost as if the pleas for healing from the crowd interfered with the time he had for preaching. The news of the Kingdom of God was his real objective, because to understand God is to understand real wholeness.

Even the Son of God doesn’t do ministry alone. This should be a lesson to us. He went and found people who were willing to follow him — with abandon — and those would be the people he would use to change the world.

Many scholars believe Mark's gospel may have been the first one written, and he jumps directly into Jesus's ministry. In these first 13 verses, we have already been through John the Baptist's declaration, Jesus's baptism, and his time in the desert. While it was fast-tracked in Mark, these are formational events. God included a final prophet (John) to prepare the way (as many others had done before him), Jesus showed us that baptism is integral, and he went through the formation of the desert's emptiness before his ministry started.

The resurrection of Jesus means everything. It means that what Jesus said about himself was true, that he is trustworthy as a messenger of God, and that we will one day follow him into resurrection. It is a seal on the promise that God made to Abraham, and the promise is extended to all who believe. Because of the resurrection, everything is different.