Medicine Hat Joe

Week 38 Mark

The Lord predicted the demolition of the biggest building in Jerusalem. It was hard to believe and Peter James John & Andrew asked the Lord when it would happen. Jesus’ answer turned into a forecast of his own return to earth at the end of days.
I got a sheet of paper to make a list of the clues. I found a dozen of them and that many hints gave me a feeling of being in the driver’s seat for forecasting the end of times. But some of the clues are a bit fuzzy. For example a lot of wars are going to precede the end of days – it’s an ok clue but not a decisive one. I wondered what would be decisive? Well, something like The Year 2048AD would be. But Mark doesn’t get anywhere near that degree of specificity.
One definitive clue Mark gives is that stars will fall. Mark says when that happens: everyone will see the Son of man arrive on the clouds. The only downside is that a forecast like that isn’t really a before-cast. It sounds like an actual part of the Lord’s reappearance.
The most decisive things I see in the chapter aren’t forecasts. They’re personal notifications:
Don’t be misled
Watch out
Endure
Pay attention
Don’t be fooled
Stay alert
Keep a sharp lookout
In the end the chapter sounds more like a Personal Preparedness Inventory and less like a Future-Events Checklist.

Note: quotes from Mark 13:26 & 5, 9, 13, 14, 21, 33, 35 (NLT)

Week 38 Mark

Mark says that a man asked Jesus: of all the commandments, which is the most important?
I read this story a couple of weeks ago in Matthew. The man was an expert in religious law and Matthew said that he: tried to trap (Jesus) with this question. Mark doesn’t say it was an entrapment question. He says the expert had been listening to the public Q&A and: he realized that Jesus had answered well. That doesn’t mean the guy wouldn’t have liked to trip-up Jesus. But at least he admitted that the Lord was pretty smart.
Anyway after the Lord answered the question Matthew’s story ended. But Mark added an extra note. He said the legal expert agreed with the Lord and added that loving God and loving others was very important…in fact more important than anything else. It sounds sincere and Mark says: realizing this man’s understanding, Jesus said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God”.
I tend to have a simple binary view of the kingdom of God. It’s an intangible destination and you’re either in or out – kind of like a light switch with On-Off settings. But the Lord adds this extra idea of proximity. You’re either nearer the kingdom or farther away. Closing the distance or increasing it.
Where the legal expert eventually ended up is anyone’s guess. But for a while he was getting pretty near.

Note: quotes from Matthew 22:35 Mark 12:28, 32, 34 (NLT)

Week 37 Mark

A couple of days ago I was thinking about the parables of the Lord. Simple homespun anecdotes disguising not-so-simple and not-so-homespun ideas. They come with a Reader Beware label.
So anyway then I read a couple of chapters later where the Lord was privately talking with his disciples. Mark says: then Jesus began to tell them that he…would suffer many terrible things and be rejected by the leaders…He would be killed, and three days later he would rise again.
Nothing about farmers or mustard seeds or like that. No crafty parabolic curveballs. Mark says Jesus: talked about this openly with his disciples. Plain talk. Plain enough that Peter a) definitely understood it, b) definitely disliked what he heard, and c) definitely – and idiotically – reprimanded the Lord for saying it.
Six days later Jesus told the disciples not to publicize seeing Moses & Elijah until…: he had risen from the dead. They were puzzled and left wondering: what he meant by “rising from the dead”.
The Lord mentioned it in Galilee: but they didn’t understand what he was saying, and they were afraid to ask him.
He spelled it out on the road to Jerusalem. The disciples’ response? Nothing.
So while the disciples were curious about the parables with their tricky metaphors and hidden meanings when it came to the plain talk of the Lord dying and coming back to life it seems like they didn’t know and maybe just didn’t want to know.

Note: quotes from Mark 8:31, 32, 9:10, 32, 10:33-34 (NLT)

Week 37 Mark

His daughter was dying so Jairus went to Jesus to plead with him to come and heal his girl.
But they arrived too late. People at the house told them the girl had died. Jesus disregarded them: the child isn’t dead; she is only asleep (the crowd hooted – they knew dead).
It made me wonder what the Lord thought about being-dead. Lots of modern people figure dead is dead. Talking about death-as-sleep is just softening the vocabulary. Death sleep is never-waking-up sleep. No emerging from unconscious rest to drowsy wakefulness. Just a non-stop forever incessant enduring permanency that stretches into the unending future. Sleep is a deceptive word because normal sleep ends when I wake up. Sleep without wake isn’t really sleep.
So I wonder if the Lord is using the word in a way that makes a different sense to him – an insider’s view of death. Maybe he’s saying that death really is like sleep. It’s the full cycle including: Step One) when I die and leave my current state of being – let’s say from consciousness-to-unconsciousness, and then Step Two) where I pass right on into a new state – let’s say unconsciousness-to-consciousness. Maybe that’s the norm: moving on from the sleep of death into a post-mortem state of wakeful awareness.
The miracle was miraculous because it halted the normal process. The girls’ sleep of death was interrupted & reversed when the Lord redirected her back into natural life in the material world.

Note: quote from Mark 5:39 (NLT)

Week 37 Mark

One of the Lord’s public teaching methods was to tell parables. He would tell a story about something that was pretty familiar and unmistakable. In chapter four he talks about a farmer planting seed and some of that seed grew and some didn’t. A simple story on the surface but also a two-level story. Mark says that: later, when Jesus was alone with the twelve disciples…they asked him, “What do your stories mean?” They knew that the simple farmer and his simple seed was a cover for a more complex farmer with his more complex bag of seed. They knew enough to know they didn’t really know.
Anyway the Lord goes on to spell out what the different elements of the parable meant (reading the explanation I know I wouldn’t be able to dope out the correct meaning in a hundred years).
Trying to understand what the Lord was teaching is a big job. Which means that reading-through is both a) simple, and b) difficult. Simple because anybody can read the words; difficult because not everyone will discover meanings.
Mark ends the paragraph with this tip from the Lord: anyone who is willing to hear should listen and understand! And be sure to pay attention to what you hear. The more you do this, the more you will understand…To those who are open to my teaching, more understanding will be given.
Willingness. Attentiveness. Openness. They’re all part of the understanding mix.

Note: quotes from Mark 4:10, 23-25 (NLT)

Week 37 Mark

The four gospel stories of the life of Jesus are told by four men who either knew the Lord personally or else knew people who did.
The Four Gospellers each came at the Lord from a different angle and I was reminded of that when I read Mark’s story of John the Baptist. John is the first person Mark talks about. About his preaching & baptizing. About baptizing Jesus. About being jailed by Herod – all in the first fourteen verses.
I flipped back to Matthew – he spent chapter three talking about John but waited ’til the next chapter to mention his arrest.
When I’m reading-through I almost never jump ahead but I did this time and looked at Luke’s story of John. Luke takes a big chunk of chapter three telling John’s story including his imprisonment (I saw that even though he talks about Jesus baptism he doesn’t say definitely that John baptized him).
John talks about John in chapter one – sixteen verses – and chapter three – fifteen verses.
Anyway based on my (ten minute) search it looks like Mark has the least to say about John.
But everyone seemed to agree John was a key player at the front-end of the Lord’s public work.
And I was reminded that the Four Gospellers all a) thought highly of John, but b) fitted him into their gospels in different ways. A kind of John the Baptist in four-part harmony. One person spotlighted in different ways. Which is about what you’d expect.

Week 37 Matthew

The Lord ran into quite a bit of opposition during his short life on earth and one of the groups that disagreed with him was the Sadducees. Matthew says that one day: some Sadducees stepped forward – a group of Jews who say there is no resurrection after death. They posed this question…
Matthew helps bible readers by telling us that the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife. Their question was a rambling one about a woman who married seven different men. All seven died. The question was who – in the afterlife – would be her husband? It seems weird for a group that didn’t believe in post-mortem existence to ask for details about it.
Anyway what caught my attention was the Lord’s reply: your problem is that you don’t know the Scriptures (another bible version said you don’t understand the scriptures). The Sadducees were religious guys who did read the OT. But the Lord distinguished reading and accurate knowledge. The Sadducees read. And they thought they understood. But – according to the Lord – didn’t.
My project this year is to read through the bible. But I get a reminder today that reading is the ground-level part of the exercise. Understanding is the next floor up.
So my quick refresher…
a) it’s probably better to read than not read the bible
b) it’s potentially better to read without understanding than not read at all
c) it’s definitely better to read with understanding than without.

Note: quotes from Matthew 22:23 & 29 (NLT & NASB)

Week 36 Matthew

The Lord repeats the phrase six times in chapter five: you have heard…but I say. He was referring to the OT. What he thought about it.
I’m kind of glad to see that the Lord didn’t say the OT was useless and should be dumped (after all…I spent eight months reading it).
The Lord wasn’t flip-flopping the rules either. He didn’t say: Moses says, ‘Don’t murder people’…but I’m saying that you can!
What it looks like is that the Lord accepted the OT. The OT was essentially okay. His point was that it had been misunderstood. Maybe even misapplied. Trivialized. Mismanaged.
Moses gave the basic don’t-murder-people rule. The Lord’s supplement was: if you are angry with someone, you are subject to judgment. It’s like the Lord got out a map and surveyed all the points along the road to Murder. There were places on that road that were technically legal – for instance Hating. But in the Lord’s view they were all legitimately judgeable.
The OT isn’t being devalued in chapter five. The Lord isn’t saying that I can trash the OT law. More like: keep the law in the way it was originally meant to be kept.
When you get right down to it the OT’s version of the law was simpler than the Lord’s. He was actually amplifying the law. Complicating it. Intensifying it. The OT legal regime was pretty clean & straightforward. Then the Lord got his hands on it.

Note: quote from Matthew 5:22 (NLT)

Week 36 Matthew

Sometimes when I’m reading-through I make up exercises to help keep my mind on track – I’ll find a topic that interests me and look for all the places a writer talks about it.
Matthew six gave me a good idea for an exercise – it was to look for things that the Lord taught (I could call it: What Lessons Did the Lord Teach?)
The Sermon on the Mount is a long teaching passage. Right away I saw eight kinds of people who would be blessed by the Lord. They are people:
who realize their need of the Lord
who mourn
who are gentle and lowly
who are hungry and thirsty for justice
who are merciful
whose hearts are pure
who work for peace
who are persecuted because they live for God
One good thing about putting together a list like this is that it helps focus my attention.
On the downside this list might be pretty demoralizing. For example I sat looking at these eight things and did a quick personal inventory. I didn’t check off too many boxes.
I’d be in way better shape if I could get away with just recording the list. But at the end of his sermon the Lord said: anyone who listens to my teaching and obeys me is wise…but anyone who hears my teaching and ignores it is foolish.

Note: quotes from Matthew 5:3-10 & 7:24-26 (NLT)

Week 36 Matthew

Back in the OT Isaiah had forecast that: the land of Zebulun and Naphtali will soon be humbled, but there will be a time in the future when Galilee of the Gentiles, which lies along the road that runs between the Jordan and the sea, will be filled with glory… (then Isaiah explained that promise).
Many years later Jesus moved to Capernaum. Matthew says that that relocation fulfilled Isaiah’s old prophecy: in the land of Zebulun and of Naphtali, beside the sea, beyond the Jordan River – in Galilee where so many Gentiles live – the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light…
I look at a map of the original land distribution in Joshua. Zebulun-Naphtali are up near the top of the map – west of the Sea of Chinnereth. I flip to a map of NT times. The Sea of Chinnereth is renamed the Sea of Galilee and there on the lakeshore is the town of Capernaum. This seems like a pretty decent prediction Isaiah made. The prophecy might be a little unfocussed around the edges but what are the odds of having someone he called wonderful-counselor mighty-God everlasting-father and prince-of-peace come north to live on the shores of Galilee?
I don’t know for sure. But it looks like some pretty great and luminous man from the family line of David has to show up in the region of the Sea of Galilee or else Isaiah is wrong.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 9:1-2, 6-7 & Matthew 4:15-16 (NLT)