A Fresh Perspective

The dominant theme in today’s Gospel text is about doing the works of God. And when it comes to the works of God everyone takes a side. Jesus says, “ Whoever is not against us is for us.” There is no place for neutrality. We are either doing the works of God or we are working against the works of God. This saying of Jesus is uttered in a context where someone, who does not know Jesus and is not a disciple of Jesus, is nevertheless, casting out demons in the name of Jesus. Now, the work of “casting out demons” has rich, symbolic meaning in the Gospel stories. This is the work of liberation. It is the work of delivering individuals and communities from the demonic – that is, from anything that is oppressive, demeaning, and life-diminishing. Deliverance from the demonic may involve deliverance from a personal addiction, or from personal greed or selfish ambition, or from some negative, harmful pattern of behavior. Or it may be deliverance from systemic, group idolatry or prejudic...

On his journey to Jerusalem with his disciples Jesus makes three announcements of how he will be rejected, suffer, and be killed by the powers that be. And all three times the disciples do not hear what Jesus is quite plainly telling them. Last week’s Gospel text dealt with the first announcement. Today's text deals with the second announcement. And once again, as with the first announcement, the disciples are preoccupied with position and power and personal greatness. When Jesus speaks of his suffering and death, Mark says of the disciples, “But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask.” The reason they didn’t understand is because they were not ready to hear. On the way to Capernaum in route to Jerusalem where Jesus would meet his fate, the disciples argued with one another regarding who was the greatest among them. They were preoccupied with thoughts of greatness. So Jesus sits down, calls the twelve to gather round, and he says, “Whoever wants to b...

The beauty and power of sacred texts is that sacred texts can speak to us on different levels and have multiple meanings. I’m sure you have experienced this if you read the Bible devotionally. You may read a text today and find that a particular way of seeing (understanding, interpreting, appropriating) that text helps you in a particular way. Three years from now, you may read that text again, and discover something very different in the text that is a source of help to you at that point in your journey. On one level this is a text that demonstrates how easy it is for us to misunderstand God’s will because we are so influenced by “group think.” This is true of all of us in varying degrees, of course. We can be blinded to what is good and true by popular cultural, political, and religious influences. Just before this passage (a couple of paragraphs back) in the story Jesus warns the disciples, telling them to “Watch out – beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod...

Well, let’s go ahead and admit it. This is a hard passage to hear. It’s a hard passage to hear because Jesus treats this non-Jewish woman so harshly. Mark says she was of Syrophoenician origin. Matthew calls her a Canaanite. But what both agree on is that she is a Gentile, a non-Jew. The hard thing about this story is that in Jesus’ initial response to this Gentile woman, he treats her with a harshness and a disdain that is so unlike the Jesus we read about in so many of the other Gospel stories. In story after story Jesus extends welcome and hospitality to all people, tax collectors and prostitutes, poor and wealthy, unreligious and religious, Samaritans and Gentiles. In an attempt to lessen the impact of Jesus’ words it has been pointed out by some that “dogs” were pets and members of the family as they are today. And while that’s true, it’s fairly obvious Jesus does not use the word here in a positive sense. And the fact is, most often when this word in used in ancient Jewish ...

It is clear, I think, that this Gospel text is a denouncement by Jesus of the way many Jewish religious leaders in his day used their religious faith in harmful, life-diminishing ways. That much is obvious. However, this is a text, in my judgment, that has been too often misread and misapplied. Some Christians use this text to draw, in my opinion, an inappropriate distinction between scripture and tradition. They generally lock on to verse 8 where Jesus is purported as saying, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” They argue that human tradition is bad, while the commandment of God, which they tend to identify as scripture as a whole is good.  So they make this rigid distinction between tradition and scripture The problem with that explanation is that the mention of “human tradition” in verse 8 is not a reference to all tradition. It’s a reference to the particular way these Jewish leaders were interpreting and applying that tradition. Scriptur...