Week 32 Mark
Reading Mark this year I noticed the mixed reception that Jesus got when he moved into the public teaching & miracle-working period of his life.
One group of people took to Jesus right away.
A second group showed hard-to-disguise malice.
And a third group stood in the sceptical middle. The undecideds.
There’s the story of the freakishly strong & self-destructive demon-possessed man. He’d been driven out of town and ended-up living-rough in a cemetery. When the Lord exorcised his demons the man was fully on-board with Jesus. But the people in town were hyper-wary. They asked Jesus to leave. Not exactly hard-opposition. But not acceptance either.
There’s another time when Jesus told Jairus that his (dead) daughter was only sleeping and the people at the wake laughed at him. Scorn is a pretty soft kind of opposition. But it definitely showed coolness toward Jesus (the story goes on to say that the people changed-their-tune when the (dead) girl got up).
And there was the time Jesus went back to his own hometown. He’d grown up there and because people knew him they didn’t think he was anything special. Mark says that they took offense at him. Not exactly antipathy. But not hometown cordiality either.
Everybody got to make their own decision about what to do with Jesus. With the undecideds the decision was temporarily on-hold. Some might eventually come onside. Some would settle into animosity. Some would never get off-the-fence.
Note: quote from Mark 6:3 (NIV). Stories in Mark 5:15-20 5:22-43 & 6:1-6