Since my blog is about what's going through my head, I'd figure I'd write down my thoughts as I'm reading Mark 1-3 for Core. Feel free to put your own thoughts as a comment. Mine are as follows:
Jesus seemed to not want to accept his "identity." When he healed the leper (Mark 1:40-44), he told him not to tell anyone about what happened, but just go to the priests so that he would be included in the synagogue again. He wanted the leper to be able to participate in everyday life like the rest of the world, but he didn't want the rest of the world to know about him. Jesus wanted to be just like everyone else, to be an anonymous face in the crowd.
(Mark 1:25, 3:12) Whenever unclean spirits called him the "son of God," Jesus told them to be quiet, to stop. He did not want people to see him as the son, equal, or personification of God. This could be seen as Jesus trying not to piss off the priests in the area, but this would be to no avail since he questioned their lives, laws, and logic to their faces. What's a little blasphemy when you accuse a priest's lifestyle? Jesus constantly called himself the "son of man", in other words, human. It wasn't meant to be "I'm God as a person," but rather as a common term in Aramaic, a more poetic way of saying "human being." Unclean spirits loudly proclaiming Jesus as the son of God in their last words would make people think Jesus was indeed the son of God, resulting in the unclean spirits getting the last laugh.
The crowds didn't care about Jesus in Mark 1:35-39, 2:2-4, or 3:7-10. They only cared about themselves. They only flocked to Jesus to be healed. They didn't respect his privacy or personal life as seen in the first chapter, where Jesus would try to pray by himself only to be swarmed by crowds wanting to be healed. In the second chapter, they stuff his home without being invited, and some tear the roof off of his house just so a guy can be healed. They don't care about him, his property, his family, or how they're going to fix the roof once they leave. In the third chapter, they would have trampled Jesus to a pulp and rolled around in the blood-soaked dirt just to be healed if Jesus hadn't told the disciples to get a boat for him to distance himself from the crowd. The people were monsters and rarely listened to what he told them to do, like when he told the leper to keep quiet only to have him tell every person he met about what happened.
More are to come as more reading assignments are given.
And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder.
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1 comment:
Interesting. I can't wait to read now and see my perspective on the reading. :)
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