
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


On this special Ash Wednesday episode BibleWorm reads Mark 9:30-37, the story of the disciples arguing about who is greatest. We talk about the specter of death that hangs over this text and the way that death anxiety may push the disciples—and us—toward cultural constructions of our their own value. Yet Jesus redirects them, first by insisting that the last will be first and the first last, and then by instructing them to embrace those with no status in the social hierarchy at all. We also wrestle with Jesus’s insistence on explaining his suffering and death to the disciples when they just can’t seem to get it. Sometimes we just need to hear the words even if we don’t have the life experience to understand them yet. Someday we’ll need those words, and what a gift it is to have received them.
By BibleWorm4.9
2626 ratings
On this special Ash Wednesday episode BibleWorm reads Mark 9:30-37, the story of the disciples arguing about who is greatest. We talk about the specter of death that hangs over this text and the way that death anxiety may push the disciples—and us—toward cultural constructions of our their own value. Yet Jesus redirects them, first by insisting that the last will be first and the first last, and then by instructing them to embrace those with no status in the social hierarchy at all. We also wrestle with Jesus’s insistence on explaining his suffering and death to the disciples when they just can’t seem to get it. Sometimes we just need to hear the words even if we don’t have the life experience to understand them yet. Someday we’ll need those words, and what a gift it is to have received them.

43,741 Listeners

38,668 Listeners

25,874 Listeners

11,594 Listeners

19,312 Listeners

9,182 Listeners

10,168 Listeners

2,290 Listeners

14,633 Listeners

4,408 Listeners

56,549 Listeners

5,445 Listeners

16,237 Listeners

16,095 Listeners

5,783 Listeners