THE PLAN
Every Monday I will post the reading for the week ahead. It will be about 10 chapters a week. You might want to read a chapter or two a day, and catch up at weekends. If there is a verse that especially spoke to you, a question that you have, or a thought that struck you, please share it with your fellow travellers by making a comment.
2 comments:
I love 7:35 and am reminded of a line in the joyful hymn ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing’ which goes “Hear him, you deaf! His praise, you dumb, your loosened tongues employ!”
Teaching and preaching is sometimes dismissed as an evangelical obsession, the comfort zone of tertiary-educated Christians and the particular emphasis of our ‘tribe'. But reading Mark 1-8 I have been unable to get away from how Jesus makes teaching and preaching his priority. It comes again and again. 1:14, 1:21, 1:38-39 (“let’s go…so that I can preach there also…that is why I have come”), 2:2, 2:13, 4:1-2, 6:2, 6:6b. This is particularly striking in 6:34 (Jesus had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, so he began… healing them? No. Hugging them? No. He began… teaching them! This is underlined by the lengthiest parable of this section, the parable of the sower. The seed is ‘the word’ (4:14). ‘Teaching and preaching’ is far from being a mandate for academic lectures, but at the very least, in responding to Jesus we cannot ignore this primary emphasis: we need primarily to listen to him (hence, “if anyone has ears to hear, let him hear” in 4:9, 4:23). Everything follows from that.
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