February 24, 2022: Day 42 – Deuteronomy 5 and Mark 3-7
February 25, 2022We find ourselves in Deuteronomy 5 where God gives to Moses the 10 Commandments. We find these commandments also given in Exodus 20 as well. In this chapter the people of Israel are an integral part of the story where they recognize the voice of God and understand their place before God. You don’t often see that.
From that we transition to the Gospel of Mark with a plethora of Bible stories that will be hard to cover all of them. In chapter 3 we see Jesus choosing the 12 disciples after he heals on the Sabbath and gets on the bad side of the Herodians. We also read about Jesus’ family pursuing him because they think he has lost his mind, but he says that those who do his will are really his family. It is here where we see the names of his brothers and understand that he had sisters as well. In 4 we see the parable of the seed which is classic and ought to be understood well because each of us has found ourselves walking on the path, or on the rocks, or on the weeks, and sometimes, sometimes I say, on the good soil.
Chapter 5 we find the man with the demon legion who was cast out and put into the pigs who ran into the sea and died. When we were in Egypt we saw the place where they think this took place. It is in the middle of what is now a mine field. A bit entertaining thinking of the pigs dodging, or not, the mines. We see the woman with an issue of blood healed as well as the Talitha, the daughter of the rabbi, raised from the dead.
Chapter 6 we see the death of John the Baptist because Herod, who was fascinated by John and liked to hear what he had to say, was seduced by the daughter of his wife. In this chapter we also see the feeding of the 5,000 without the little boy providing the fish and the loaves, they just seem to appear. Jesus is becoming quite a thing by the end of this chapter. Everyone wanted to have a piece of him.
Chapter 7 we see Jesus chastising the religious leaders for their insistence on tradition at the expense of mercy. We also see the healing of the daughter of the Phoenician woman, which contains a great back and forth dialogue with Jesus and her. I actually see this woman as a bit of a model for faith and dialogue. He finishes the chapter with the unorthodox, but effective, healing of a deaf and mute man.
M 5:17 “And they began to entreat Him to depart from their region.” Why?
There are a number of curious facts in this story about the pigherders. Keep in mind that the pig was unclean to the Jewish people according to the laws of the time. They were not allowed to eat it, they were not allowed to even touch it. So here you have a group of entrepreneurs involved in what would have been today a kind of black market of pigs. Their economic lives depended upon dealing in things that were “illegal”. Best if Jesus leaves this place so that they could continue in their business practices, even as unethical as they were.
Several times, Jesus gives orders that no one should know what he has done (the miracles). Why ?
This is also a great mystery to me. We see it all throughout Mark and even in other Gospels as well. A reason is given in Scripture where he tells people to not say anything because he was afraid that they would make him king. He had a process and a plan to which he needed to stick and a lot of it had to do with timing. When he was betrayed by Judas it was very much according to plan and very much according to the timing that Jesus has laid out beforehand. If people were fully aware of who he was then his popularity would have grown to the point where it would have been impossible for the religious leaders to crucify him. As it turned out, the people clamored for him as he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but then just a few days later clamored to have him crucified.