Tag: Mark

Jesus wants worthless people (Mark 7:24–30)

To be healed, first you must be sick. To be set free, first you must be a slave. To be rescued, first you must be in peril. To be saved, first you must be a sinner. To be resurrected, first you must be dead.

And to be a child of God, first you must be a dog.

For the second time in Mark’s account, Jesus travels outside of Jewish territory into a Gentile region. He’s apparently taking a sort of “vacation” with his disciples, trying to get away from the chaos and crowds so he can devote his time to his immediate followers. However, as a result of his spectacular ministry, his reputation precedes him. He can’t stay hidden even in the region of Tyre and Sidon, two cities to the north of Galilee. Before long, he is approached by a woman whose daughter is possessed by an unclean spirit. She falls down at his feet and begs him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

Now, this story comes right on the heels of Jesus’ confrontation with the Pharisees, a group of nationalistic Jewish religious leaders. They are very concerned about the national identity of Israel, and they devote themselves to staying ceremonially clean, even inventing their own laws to stay safe. If they were in Jesus’ shoes, they would shrink back from this helpless wretch: she is an unclean Gentile, a woman, and her daughter is possessed by an unclean spirit. She is not a part of God’s chosen people, the people of Israel. She has no claim to the kindness of God. That’s what a “good Jew” would have thought about this woman.

So Jesus responds to her request with a proverb. He says to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Yes, he is referring to the Jews as God’s “children” and to the Gentiles as mere “dogs.” If your concept of Jesus is limited to Flannelgraph Jesus from Sunday School or Hippie Jesus from American culture, this statement seems appalling. But a Jew of the time wouldn’t have blinked an eye. That’s how they thought about their pagan Gentile neighbors. Jesus is asking the woman, “My priority is to minister to the people of Israel. You’re not a part of God’s chosen nation; why should I help you?” He’s challenging her the way a Pharisee would; he’s playing “devil’s advocate.”

It becomes clear right away that this woman understands the meaning of grace. The Pharisees thought of themselves as earning God’s favor through their merits, but she admits that she has no merits to speak of. “Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

There are a lot of ways she could have responded. If it were me, I might complain that I am a valuable person created in the image of God. I might plead my self-worth. I probably wouldn’t say out loud that I deserve Jesus’ help because I’m a good guy, but I would probably think it. This Gentile woman, though, doesn’t miss a beat. She embraces her status as a “dog.” She doesn’t think there is anything special about her that should convince Jesus to help her. Instead, she finds an opening in Jesus’ proverb and seizes it. He had said, “Let the children be fed first.” She admits that the power of God is “to the Jew first” (Romans 1:16). But she believes that Jesus’ power is more than enough, that it can overflow to her as well. Jesus had fed 5,000 men with five loaves of bread, and there had been twelve baskets of leftovers; she is convinced that there will be leftovers for her as well.

In other words, this woman does not plead her own merit. She pleads the unlimited power of Jesus. She pleads his compassion that overflows from his love for Israel and splashes down on wretched Gentiles like herself. She has nothing to offer him, but she believes that he has the authority, power, and compassion to rescue her daughter.

Jesus is delighted with her answer. She has wrestled with him and prevailed. “For this statement you may go your way,” he tells her. “The demon has left your daughter.” Sure enough, when she gets home, her daughter is lying asleep in bed, and the demon is gone.

The contrast is sharp between this woman and the Jewish religious leaders. They are clean; she is unclean. They are “good people”; she is not. They are in a position of privilege; she has no rights to claim. She is a loser, and she knows it. That’s what makes her an insider and the religious leaders outsiders. She doesn’t plead her own goodness. She pleads only the goodness of Jesus.

If you and I want to see the power of Jesus at work, in us and around us, we must abandon our merits and our rights. We are morally bankrupt, powerless, helpless. We don’t deserve to be rescued by God. All we can plead is the compassion of Jesus and his superabundant power to save. So don’t try to be accepted by God on the basis of your performance. Come to him, filthy and broken, and plead Jesus Christ, because Jesus wants worthless people.

Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to the cross I cling
Naked, come to thee for dress
Helpless, look to thee for grace
Foul, I to the fountain fly
Wash me, Savior, or I die!
—Augustus Toplady

Posted on by Dave 0

Jesus knows the law won’t help you (Mark 7:14–23)

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
—Ephesians 6:4

If you’re the father or mother of a teenager, then you’ve probably had to face the implications of this verse. When children are younger, you can develop a whole system of rules to keep them in line. Often, this helps give them the structure they need to develop and learn right from wrong. By the time they’re teenagers, however, they chafe against these rules. What’s sad is that sometimes parents respond by clamping down even harder, binding their children with rule upon rule to keep them under control. The parents’ intentions are good; they want to keep their children safe from harmful external influences. But they don’t realize that the problem is not something outside of their children but something inside their children’s hearts.

Jesus has just finished lambasting the Pharisees for supplementing God’s law about keeping ceremonially clean with their own man-made rules for washing before eating. He’s told them that when we make our own laws like this, we’re setting ourselves up as moral lawgivers, which is God’s place, not ours. Not only that, but we’re trying to dethrone God by pushing his rules aside to make room for our own. Replacing God’s law with human tradition is an act of insurrection against God. Ironically enough, the usual culprits of this crime are religious people. They think they’re worshiping God by supplementing his law with their own, proving their great dedication to him, but in reality they are hypocrites. They’re actors; they’re worshiping themselves and their tradition rather than God.

Now Jesus delivers the coup de grace. Not only are such legalists replacing God’s law with they’re own, they’re also making a fundamental mistake about the purpose of the law. Jesus gathers a crowd together to hear a short message. “Hear me, all of you, and understand,” he says. “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” Now, apparently this “parable” wasn’t clear enough for his disciples, because they approach him afterward to ask about it. Jesus gets a little frustrated here and exclaims, “Then are you also without understanding?” His disciples may not be inventing their own laws like the Pharisees are doing, but they’re still thinking about the purpose of God’s law in the same way as the Pharisees.

Jesus explains that food can’t make a person ceremonially unclean, since it simply passes through the body and is expelled. It doesn’t affect the core of who a person is—the heart. So Mark observes, “Thus he declared all foods clean.” This is very significant, because Jesus isn’t just condemning the Pharisees’ man-made laws. He’s also canceling the ceremonial regulations in the law of Moses that identified many foods as unclean. Jesus is nullifying the law, exactly as the Pharisees just did! How can he not be a hypocrite as well? The only way he can declare that all foods are clean is if he has divine authority, as the Author of the law, to rewrite it. If this comes as a surprise to you, you obviously haven’t been paying attention as we’ve been working our way through Mark’s gospel!

After this, Jesus says, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.” He lists a litany of wicked attitudes and behaviors—sexual sins, violent sins, sins of speech, sinful habits of thinking. He says that these sins come “from within, out of the heart of man.” And when they do, they defile the person who commits them.

The Pharisees thought that the primary problem was outside of a person. They believed that if you could put him or her in the right environment, free from evil influences, then he or she would turn out a good person. All you need is to separate people from the corrupt Greco-Roman culture. To the Pharisees, the law was a tool to make people holy. And apparently, the disciples bought into that way of thinking, because Jesus’ perspective is completely foreign to them.

We can’t come down too hard on the disciples. From birth, we’re raised to think just like Pharisees. We’re told that people are basically good deep down, and that if children are raised in the right environment and surrounded by the right people and given the right education, then they’ll turn out okay. And of course, these things do help. However, they don’t change the reality that the human heart is a fountain of evil desires. Our culture’s presuppositions are wrong: people are corrupt and depraved, down to the very core of their being. Trying to make people holy by tying them down with rules—even God’s law!—just won’t work. The cancer is within us; it’s genetic, and we can’t cure it. Our own good behavior won’t help. There is no hope.

We’ve seen that Jesus is the only one who knows how to interpret and use God’s law with wisdom. He knows that the law is a reflection of God’s character. It tells us who he is—that he is holy—and it commands us to be like him (Leviticus 19:2). And Jesus knows that this is a lost cause; we can’t do it.

If there’s any possible way to be accepted by God, that way is going to have to be through Jesus. It’s obvious that he is a singular piercing light in a dark and hopeless world. If there’s any way out of our slavery to sin, it will have to come through the gospel—the good news that Jesus brings.

Run, John, run, the law commands,
But gives us neither feet nor hands;
Far better news the gospel brings:
It bids us fly and gives us wings.
—John Bunyan

Posted on by Dave 2

Jesus is not impressed with your rules (Mark 7:1–13)

Ah, legalism.

We’ve faced this issue before as we’ve worked our way through Mark. We’re facing it today, as we reach chapter 7. And we’ll face it again if we keep going as we have. It’s the sinister old enemy of Jesus; it’s the brainchild of the devil. Oddly enough, it’s perpetuated by the most well-meaning people.

Jesus has been working miracles left and right, proving that he is more than a man. Mark has been threading subtle hints of deity into his account of Jesus’ life. Now, Jesus is about to remind the religious leaders who oppose him that they have no right to claim divine authority, as he has done.

The Pharisees of Galilee have once again called up some teachers of the law from Jerusalem. They’re calling in the big guns to take down Jesus. They soon find a reason to criticize him—he doesn’t seem to care that his disciples never wash their hands before they eat! Now, the religious leaders aren’t concerned about their hygiene, bad as it is. Ceremonial washing is very important to the Pharisees because it’s one of the ways in which the Jews can set themselves apart from the corrupt and godless Gentiles. In the law of Moses, given by God at Sinai, washing was commanded for the priests to ceremonially cleanse themselves from defilement. The Pharisees, zealous to preserve the identity of God’s people, have decided to beef up God’s law a little by adding a few safeguards to it. If everybody washes their hands all the time, then there’s no danger of being defiled. The Pharisees’ motives seem to be pretty good—they want to keep God’s people from being corrupted by the immoral influences of the surrounding culture.

Jesus, however, isn’t a fan. He calls them “hypocrites.” He says that there are two things wrong with people inventing their own moral laws which they expect others to follow. First, when people invent their own rules, they replace God’s law with their own. Jesus quotes from Isaiah 29:13 to make his point:

This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

The Pharisees think they’re worshiping God. They think they’re protecting his law by buttressing it with their own. But what they’re really doing is replacing his law with “the commandments of men.” They’re trying to worship God in a way which he has not authorized. In fact, their respect for tradition has mutated into idolatry. By insisting on following man-made moral rules, they have set up man in God’s place.

And that leads Jesus to the second reason why it’s wrong for people to invent their own moral laws. He offers this caustic remark: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!” He’s telling the Pharisees that not only are they replacing God’s law with their own, they’re also rejecting God’s law outright! Not only are they exalting human tradition, but they’re also trying to dethrone or “de-God” God. Jesus backs his statement with this evidence: the Pharisees allow grown children to ignore their parents’ needs by declaring their own possessions to be Corban, devoted to God. So then they can refuse to provide for their parents, which violates the commandment to “honor your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12). The man-made law nullifies God’s law. Nor is this an isolated incident; Jesus says to them, “Many such things you do.” He could rattle off a whole list of other examples if they’d ask him. Somehow, I have the feeling that they aren’t in the mood to hear more.

As I’ve considered what Jesus said, I’m shocked at how hard he comes down on the Pharisees. He absolutely rips into them. He calls them hypocrites; he beats them over the head with scripture; he pierces them with sarcasm; he accuses them of rejecting God. Jesus loathes what they are teaching—how they are undermining the moral authority of God himself. He spares them no mercy.

So be very afraid. Inside of you and me there is a little legalist, always scheming, always inventing new laws to make us look more righteous and usurp God’s authority. And these laws always seem to be invented for good reasons. The inner legalist might provoke a fundamentalist Christian to declare that drinking alcohol is a sin, or to castigate young women because hemlines of their skirts are above the knee. The inner legalist might provoke a progressive young believer to declare that anyone who doesn’t recycle is immoral or (ironically) to ridicule Christians who won’t drink alcohol. Legalism and the worship of human tradition is a problem for young and old, men and women, believer and unbeliever, across all human traditions and cultures. Deep down, all of us possess a sinful impulse to dethrone God and take his place.

Because Jesus came to establish God’s kingdom, he will not stand idly by as people try to destroy it. He is not impressed with your kingdom. He is not impressed with your rules. And he has the authority to put an end to your insurrection. So let’s abandon our attempt to be lawmakers and instead submit with joy to the only one who can save our rebel hearts.

Posted on by Dave 0

Jesus is God with us (Mark 6:45–56)

My favorite TV show this year is Fringe, and I love the tagline for this past season: “New cases. Endless impossibilities.” There’s something about it that resonates with me. Maybe it reminds me a little of Mark’s account of Jesus’ life. It seems that every day there is a new miracle, a new impossibility that actually happens. Today’s impossibility: Jesus walks on water.

This takes place the night following the miraculous dinner party he threw for 5,000 men, feeding the whole crowd in an afternoon with five loaves of bread and two fish. Afterward, Jesus hurries his disciples away in a boat, telling them to travel across the Sea of Galilee to the town of Bethsaida. He dismisses the crowd and goes up on a mountain to pray. As he spends time with God, he looks out over the lake and sees his disciples’ boat off in the distance. They’re not making good time. The wind against them is strong, they are weary after a long day without rest, and the act of rowing is torture to their exhausted bodies.

The disciples fight on, rowing late into the early morning, until sometime before sunrise they catch sight of something that sends a shiver down their spines. It appears to be a man, walking alongside them on the surface of the lake! All of them feel a horrible sensation in the pit of their stomach—no man can walk across water like that.

A ghost!

No doubt they’ve all heard ghost stories as kids and laughed about them as adults. But now the unimaginable is happening—some sort of spirit is coming closer to them, and there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. They panic, and some of them cry out in terror.

Then the phantom speaks to them, “Take courage! I am. Don’t be afraid.” They know that voice. This is no ghost; it’s Jesus! They’re safe after all. He walks toward them, climbs into the boat, and the wind dies down at once. Their night of torment and terror has ended.

Mark writes that the disciples are “utterly astounded” by the whole situation. My first instinct is to say that’s perfectly reasonable—wouldn’t we all be shocked? But that’s not the conclusion Mark draws. Instead, he tells us that the only reason the disciples are astounded is because they missed an important message when Jesus multiplied the loaves of bread the day before. Instead, “their hearts were hardened.” The last time Mark used that figure of speech, he was talking about the religious leaders who opposed Jesus despite his obvious miracles (3:5). Now he’s using it to describe Jesus’ disciples. They didn’t “get it” when Jesus supernaturally fed the crowd of 5,000 men.

So what did they miss? Why shouldn’t they have been surprised to see Jesus strolling across a lake? Well, there are a couple of clues in this story that tell us why Jesus did this. First, Mark says that “he meant to pass by them.” This seems odd on the face of it, but it should bring to mind a couple of incidents from the Old Testament. On two occasions, when God showed himself to Moses and Elijah, he “passed by” them, revealing his glory and especially his compassion (Exodus 34:6; 1 Kings 19:11). And also in the Old Testament, Job says that God “trampled the waves of the sea…he passes by me, and I see him not” (Job 9:8, 11). The wording is eerily similar to Mark’s, especially in the original languages. The point is that, by “passing by” them on the water, Jesus is offering his disciples a theophany—a glimpse of the glory of God. The second clue is that he assures his disciples, “I am.” It’s an unmistakable echo of Exodus 3:14, where God tells Moses that his name is “I Am.”

When he fed the crowd the day before, Jesus revealed himself to be the Good Shepherd of Psalm 23. And anyone who reads verse 1 of that psalm knows the identity of that Good Shepherd. But the disciples didn’t get it. They don’t understand that Jesus is more than a man. They don’t understand that when they see his compassion and his mighty works, they are seeing the compassion and mighty works of their God. Jesus is Immanuel—God with us (Isaiah 7:14).

Just to hammer the point home, Jesus embarks on a massive healing campaign once they reach the land. People come from the whole region to be healed. It is enough to touch “even the fringe of his garment”! There is no mistaking it: Jesus is telling the truth about who he is.

Here’s what seems to be holding back the disciples from understanding. It’s not that they think that God doesn’t exist. It’s not that they think he doesn’t have authority to do anything. They just don’t think that he has come to dwell with them and that he might actually exercise his authority on their behalf. They don’t understand that the inscrutable and enigmatic God of Job has now come to be with them, to reveal himself to them, and to help them. They’ve already decided that those sorts of things don’t happen. Five loaves of bread aren’t enough to feed five thousand men. Nobody can just walk across a lake.

Jesus absolutely baffles his disciples because he explodes their cynical worldview. He simply hands out five loaves and a whole crowd is fed. He wants to get to the other side of the lake, so he just walks across it. No big deal.

My prayer today is that you and I would consider Jesus and come to know him better. May God give us understanding to end our cynicism, so that we welcome and expect endless impossibilities.

Posted on by Dave 0

Jesus is a compassionate shepherd (Mark 6:31–44)

Suppose you’re having one of those days when you’ve been working hard all morning and all afternoon and have worn yourself out. Finally, the day is coming to a close; you collapse in a chair on your front porch. At least, that’s the plan…but you’re interrupted by your kids or the neighbor’s dog or someone else who quickly becomes a nuisance. Does this sound like anything you’ve gone through recently?

Welcome to Jesus’ world.

The thing is, Jesus doesn’t look at other people as nuisances. When his disciples return from their “missionary trip,” it’s important to him that they get some R&R.  He tells them, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” They get in a boat on the Sea of Galilee and try to escape the crowds that seem to surround Jesus perpetually. However, the crowd figures out what’s going on, and by the time Jesus and his disciples get to the other side of the lake, they find their vacation plans will have to be scrapped for now. There’s no escaping the crowds. How frustrating!

Well, that’s what I’d think, anyway. But not Jesus. Mark tells us his first gut feeling: compassion. He felt so sorry for them, “because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” These people are confused and helpless; they need someone to lead them and take care of them. Even though he’s worn out, Jesus simply can’t help himself—he can’t ignore their neediness. As he so often does in Mark, he begins “to teach them many things.” More than anything, they need to hear the good news about God’s coming kingdom.

Evening draws near, and Jesus’ disciples start getting antsy. They realize that hardly anyone has brought along food. Maybe it’s because it’s an all-male gathering (depending on how you translate Matthew 14:21), and we men aren’t real smart about packing our own lunches. So here they are, out in the middle of nowhere, and everyone is already tired and now they’re getting weak from hunger. It’s time to send people away so they can feed themselves—if there is any food to be had in the area.

When they offer their reasonable plan to Jesus, he responds with an irrational demand: “You give them something to eat.” Wow, great idea! Why didn’t we think of that before, Jesus? Oh yeah—because it would be ridiculously expensive, that’s why. Two hundred denarii—more than six months’ wages for a laborer! Who knows whether the disciples even have that kind of money. And Jesus wants them to feed this crowd they never asked to entertain. You’ll have to forgive them for being incredulous.

Still, Jesus hits on a pretty simple solution they seemed to have overlooked. “How many loaves do you have? Go and see.” It’s like he’s saying, “Guys, you’re making this way too complicated. There’s a simpler solution to this problem. Let’s just take the food we already have and distribute it.” Apparently, the disciples haven’t bothered to collect all the food they had available; they already know it won’t do any good. But Jesus is their rabbi, and he told them to do it, so they’ll jump through this silly hoop for his sake. All they find is five loaves of bread and two fish.

What happens next is pretty hilarious, the way Mark describes it, though it doesn’t come out too well in English translations. Jesus has the disciples organize the crowd into little banqueting parties on the grass. They are sorted into neat rows, as though this were Jesus’ garden plot, sprouting colorful people plants. Jesus has them sit down on the “green grass” as the Good Shepherd would do to feed his sheep (Psalm 23:2). Then he says grace, divides the loaves and fish among the disciples, and has them distribute the meager rations to the entire crowd. Mysteriously, everyone has something to eat and is satisfied. And when each of the twelve disciples picks up the leftovers, he fills his basket!

Then Mark hits us with the punchline: this was a crowd of 5,000 men. No way could this have been anything but a miracle. Most guys could down a whole pizza after running around a lake and going most of the day without food. But their hunger can’t match Jesus’ generosity, and his little picnic leaves everyone stuffed.

Now, at certain points in this story, there are little hints that this is not your typical Jesus flash mob. The many people “coming and going,” the fact that Mark emphasizes the number of males in the crowd, and the reference to “sheep without a shepherd”—often referring to a leaderless military in the Old Testament—indicates that there is a revolutionary undertone to this gathering. The people wanted Jesus to lead a revolt against the Roman oppressors. But while this is prominent in John’s account (John 6:15), Mark downplays it. He isn’t really interested in the politics of the situation. He wants us to see Jesus having compassion on his disciples and then on the crowd. He wants us to see Jesus solving a complex problem with a simple but impossible solution. He wants us to see Jesus taking care of the people God has entrusted to him.

Mark wants us to understand that Jesus is a leader, that he has authority. But he also wants us to understand what kind of leader he is and how he uses his authority. He is a shepherd who cares for his sheep. He doesn’t get annoyed at us but feels compassion for us. So we can say with confidence, “Only goodness and loyal love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will stay in the house of the LORD for the rest of my days” (Ps 23:6).

Posted on by Dave 1