Signs of a Believer

My students used to always tell me crazy things, and when I believed them, they'd say, "Man, such a believer!" That's not the same kind of believe we're talking about here, though...

"These miraculous signs will accompany those who believe: They will cast out demons in my name, and they will speak in new languages. They will be able to handle snakes with safety, and if they drink anything poisonous, it won't hurt them. They will be able to place their hands on the sick, and they will be healed." Mark 16:17-18

Well, geez, if these are the signs, maybe I don't believe, maybe I've never believed. According to Mark, these are Jesus' words. Jesus says if we believe we'll be drinking poison unharmed, handling snakes, casting out demons, and healing the sick. When I've heard about big gatherings where this is done, it generally makes me pretty uncomfortable. I've tended to think those sorts of gathers were for strange fanatics. I don't know if my mind has changed about that, but if Jesus really said these are the signs of a believer, well, maybe I need a bit of a paradigm shift. 

The Greatest Commandment

When one of the teacher of religious law asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, he replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. The second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:30-31). This is the God I worship. Again, so starkly different from what I read in the Old Testament. Jesus tells us to love God and love our neighbor; that is what is most important. He doesn't qualify who our neighbor is. I assume he's exactly that, our neighbor, the person on the street whom we may not know, or maybe only know by acquaintance. I'd say it's selfless, but it's more than that, because we're to love them as ourselves, so it's not exactly selfless. It puts us all on the same level, all deserving of the same treatment, care, and love. That's how I want to love people.

As for the first half of those verses- the part about loving God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength- that's a big charge. What does that look like? Mother Theresa? The pios hermit hidden in the mountains? To love God with all our heart... my heart so often feels divided between many different loves, how can those loves be reconciled with a heart completely devoted to God? To love God with all my soul... how is this different from the heart? To love God with all my mind... how, when I don't even understand who God is? To love God with all my strength... in order to love God with all those other things, I think it'll take all my strength. Maybe this is just a rhetorical device used by Jesus- the message is clear: we are to love God with everything in our being.

God of the Living

I'm not sure if anyone is reading these posts, and that's okay. It's helpful to write things out, and it forces me to read and be thoughtful. I do hope, though, that if you're reading and you've got thoughts, PLEASE share them!

I came across a pretty familiar passage in Mark today that made me think. The story is the one where the Sadducees are asking Jesus about the woman whose husband dies before they have children, so his brother marries her, then he dies and the next brother marries her and so on until she's married all seven brothers. They ask him whose wife will she be in the resurrection.

At the end of his answer (which is the part that made me think), Jesus says "Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, God said to Moses, 'I am the God of Abraham, The God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' So he is the God of the living, not the dead." (Mark 12:26-27)

So my question is- what does this mean? Those three guys rose from the dead already? Like we die and are resurrected soon after? Are they up in heaven, hanging out with the Most Holy? That what this seems to be saying, they are no longer dead because God is only the God of the Living.

Interesting to say the least...

Strange Healing

Jesus walks on water and calms the it with the wave of his hand, he heals people who simply touch his cloak, and with mere words he tells the lame to walk, the demons to leave, and dead to rise. So if he can perform miracles with such little effort, why does he have to stick a couple fingers in the ears of a deaf man with a speech impediment and another couple of spit-covered fingers on his tongue to heal him? It seems so convoluted compared to the rest of his miracles.  (Mark 7:32-35)

I suppose he may have just wanted to do something different that day. Or maybe this man didn't have the same faith as the others Jesus had performed miracles on. I don't know, but it was an interesting contrast.

Ouch

Imagine if Jesus compared you to a dog. I think I'd be pretty offended. I certainly wouldn't care to hear anything he had to say after that. When the Gentile woman in Tyre asked him to cast out the demon in his daughter, that's exactly what he said to her. "'First I should feed the children- my own family, the Jews. It isn't right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs'" (Mark 7:27) Ouch!

The woman doesn't react as I would have. Instead she replies, "That's true, Lord, but even the dogs under the table are allowed to eat the scraps from the children's plates."

It seems so harsh, to compare her to the dogs. Right? I forget who Mark was written for, who the original audience was. I wonder if that would have something to do with this degrading comment made to the woman. Or maybe I'm just taking this too personally…

Jesus- A Little More Like It

Mark 2:22 "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the win and the skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins."  --in response to the Pharisee's question why the disciples don't fast like John's disciples and the Pharisees

Mark 3:5 "He looked around at them angrily and was deeply saddened by their hard hearts."

Switching back and forth between the Old and the New Testament has highlighted things I might have missed otherwise. I've been spending the last week or so immersed in the rules and laws of Leviticus. It's exhausting (not to mention nauseating) reading all the laws regarding sin and sacrifice.  The law was incredibly rigid. So when we jump forward 8,000 (or so?) years to the time that Jesus walked and taught, how surprising is it that the teachers of the law have hardened hearts, they've been teaching and following these rigid laws for thousands of generations. 

I wrote a couple posts ago about the God of the Old Testament not being the God I thought I knew. The Jesus we see here in Mark, though, comes closed to who I thought God was. (I'd like to say, of course, that I don't claim to know exactly who God is, but what I've come to believe about God is what I am referring to.) He's taken the old law and thrown it out? He's come to replace it, right? He's the new wine. And though the hardened hearts of the Pharisees make him angry, it also saddens him. There's compassion in the sadness. This is the God I believe in.

Could they possibly be the same? How can there be such a rigid dichotomy between the two if they are one and the same?