September 27, 2024

The Beginning of the Gospel of Mark

In the opening paragraphs of Mark we are introduced to the two main characters of the Gospel, at least the main characters for the first part of things.  John is this strange and yet amazing character who appears in the wilderness around the Jordan River.  We don’t hear any preaching about repentance, like we do in Matthew and Luke, but people confess their sins, which would seem to be a response to John’s message.  He baptizes those who desire it, and announces that someone greater than him is coming.  This provides the opening for the entrance of Jesus into the moment, and Mark tells of Jesus’s own baptism.

If you were baptized, as a youth or adult, what was it like for you? 

If you were baptized as an infant, were you told anything about it?

How significant is baptism for you?

In Matthew and Luke, the temptations that Jesus experiences are described in greater detail – three temptations.  Here, Mark is brief  -  Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, and he was tempted.  That’s it.  This description is characteristic of Mark, the brevity of it, the sparse description.

Do you see temptations as a negative thing, or do they serve to give us opportunities to hold strong in our faith and to adhere to our values?

More next time…

September 20, 2024

Where to begin…

When people ask me how they should go about reading the Bible, where they should start, I most often suggest that they begin with the Gospel of Mark.  I offer this for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it is the shortest of the gospels, and therefore provides an easier entry into the reading than the other gospels might offer.  The second reason is that Mark is believed to have been the first gospel written, and therefore it will be somewhat instructive when people read another gospel.

Although one will always find debates about the dating of biblical books, and certainly too about their content, it is generally believed that the Gospel of Mark was written around the year 70 CE.  (A quick aside:  in scholarly literature the designation “AD,” which stands for “anno Domini” translated as “in the year of the Lord,” and which thus refers to things just in relation to the birth of Jesus, is replaced with the more inclusive designation of “CE,” which refers to the “common era,” meaning that span of time that is shared by Jews and Christians alike.)

There are a number of reasons that Mark is believed to have been written around 70 CE.  There are references in the text that refer to the Temple in Jerusalem, and these are connected by scholars with the destruction of that Temple in 70 CE by the Romans.  Mark, as I mentioned, is also the shortest of the gospels, and it is generally accepted that when the other gospel writers did their work, that they had Mark as a source of information, and that they expanded his accounts to include stories such as those about the birth of Jesus, as well as adding details to some of Mark’s stories.  It seems most likely that one would expand the telling of a story along the way, rather than leaving out details that might be helpful to understanding the account.  One could always argue that Mark simply chose to tell things in a simpler way.  But how often, as we tell our own stories to people, do we shorten the tale as opposed to adding details that we left out the first time?  As with many things on this journey, you are encouraged to make your own decisions about such things.  I will present you with my opinions and thoughts, but these blogs should serve to spur on your own thoughts and exploration.  After all, none of the biblical books come with an exact publication date attached to them.  We use mentions of other biblical figures, and activities of certain individuals, to help narrow down the range of dates for individual books, and that is the best that we can do.

With this brief background, we will begin to make our way through the Gospel of Mark starting next time.  This will not be a verse-by-verse reading, but I will lift up activities and teachings that I find interesting or intriguing, and hopefully you will discover a richness to this story that I find to be inspiring.

September 13, 2024

Reading the Bible

When people ask me about reading the Bible, what they are usually seeking is a starting place.  Often they have tried it before, mainly starting at the beginning in Genesis, as we would with most books that we read.  Alternatively, they have started with the Gospel of Matthew, narrowing it down to reading just the New Testament. 

If they tried the former approach, they may have made it through Genesis, and even part of Exodus, but then they got bogged down with reading the various laws that are listed and they quit reading.  If they started with Matthew, they may have persisted, but then got to Mark and wondered why they were reading many of the same things again.

The challenge for us in reading the Bible is that it emerged from cultural and historical settings that most of us know little about except in very general ways.  If we take the New Testament alone, we are reading texts that came out of experiences of living under the domination of the Roman Empire, in the midst of the Judaism of the first century, and within the historical context of that Judaism as shaped by the preceding couple of centuries, as well as the long history that dates back to Abraham.

Very few of us, when we ask about reading the Bible, are desiring to become experts in these various fields so as to fully understand the words and stories that we are reading.  Usually, we are seeking to discover answers to some of the questions of our lives, and are seeking guidance that might help us in our daily walk.  And, one can easily find lists of suggested scripture passages which offer comfort, guidance or hope in a variety of life situations.

But the Bible is so much richer in scope than just a set of selected passages.  In fact, it is often true that those selected passages offer greater meaning as we understand, at least on a basic level, the context in which those words were written.  In addition, the stories and the people of the Bible offer us amazing insights into human nature and they present us with choices of how we might live our lives.

So, in the weeks to come, I am going to offer suggestions for approaching the Bible, as well as my own thoughts on the words and stories that we will encounter.  If you just can’t wait to start reading, my suggestion is going to be that the Gospel of Mark provides a good way into the biblical story.  I will say more about that next time.