300 words a day

When a little bad teaching gets in the bread.

Mark tells stories that don’t always finish. They end, of course. But there’s not always a summary of the lesson, or a sense that people understood. One example is the ending of the three stories we’ve looked at this week. Jesus feeds people because he has compassion. He walks away from people because he has […]

by Jon Swanson

Jesus did get annoyed.

Some people worry that they might annoy Jesus. They hesitate to ask questions. They try to get things exactly right. They point to a moment when Jesus rolled his eyes, climbed in a boat, and sailed away. And they want to be sure he’s not going to do that again. +++ Sometime after Jesus fed […]

by Jon Swanson

Construction

Rich Dixon on tearing down and building up. +++ Tearing down someone else’s building doesn’t make your building better. We don’t have to look far these days to find folks demolishing other people’s buildings. Seems to be a human instinct, believing that tearing down someone else makes me somehow bigger or stronger. It doesn’t. In […]

by Jon Swanson

The people ate and were satisfied.

“At once, the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days,” Mark writes. It was Jesus’ first mission after being baptized and blessed by God. He was with wild animals, he was tempted by Satan, and, eventually, he was fed by angels. He understood, from the inside, hunger. […]

by Jon Swanson

Do you still not understand?

“He said to them, ‘Do you still not understand?’” As Mark tells the story, this response of Jesus comes at the end of a three-part story. In the first part, Jesus has a conversation with his disciples about feeding the crowd of about 4000 people that has been with them for three days. And then […]