Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 28 - September 11, 2017
It is curious that some think that Paul’s letters should be more like gospels and would have included more traditions about Jesus had he known them, while others think that the gospels are more like letters and are written to address the particular needs of the author’s community rather than passing on the traditions about Jesus.
only the God who created the sea can do (see Gen 8:1; Job 26:12; Pss 65:7; 74:13–14; 89:9; 93:3–4; 104:5–9; 106:9; 107:23–32; 114:3; Isa 50:2; Nah 1:4; cf. Isa 43:1–10).
His humiliating suffering and death are not incompatible with his divine glory. The parallels between the transfiguration and the crucifixion connect his glory and his inglorious death. In the transfiguration, Jesus is exalted, surrounded by saints and clothed with radiance. In the crucifixion, he is humiliated, ringed by sinners and “wrapped in a garment of darkness.”115 In both scenes he is identified as the Son of God. It means that to see Jesus in all his glory one must see how it merges with his suffering and powerlessness.
First, the best thing to do with money is to invest it in heavenly treasure by divesting oneself of it to aid the poor.
The opening of a needle is the smallest passage imaginable, and the camel was the largest animal in Palestine.130 The
God is Caesar’s Lord. Governments are not given a blank check to go their own way. Those that flout God’s law in the end will be destroyed.
Those who respond to Jesus wholeheartedly, however, as this woman does, love God and their neighbor wholeheartedly. Their care for the poor will not be a one-time charitable gift but a regular undertaking that will also address the structures of injustice that foster and perpetuate poverty.
In their extensive treatment of envy in the ancient world and in Mark, Hagedorn and Neyrey argue that the honor that Jesus has garnered prompted the leaders’ envy, which inevitably “ushers in conflict and hostility.”186 Their envy ironically concedes Jesus’ superiority. One does not envy someone who is pitiful.
If, as I have argued, Mark contains a high Christology and presents Jesus as a divine figure who also was fully human, the gospel offers little to help unpack the mystery of the incarnation and how it is that God is one and that Jesus is “the Lord” of the OT come in the flesh. Mark simply takes it for granted, but his Christology reveals that Christians have begun to redefine what it means to be a monotheist.63 This theology presents the believer with a great paradox, and Mark is filled with paradoxes. Sweat contends that paradox, with its ambiguity and contradictions, is “the only way to
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There is no resting place in the joy and triumph of the resurrection; we have always to return to the beginning in Galilee and advance forward again to the cross. It is a continual pilgrimage,
The baton has now been passed on to them.” Jesus is not simply “a step ahead” of his failing disciples but “a journey ahead.” “Now that he has completed the journey, they will be enabled to make it themselves.”93 And Mark intends, in my view, for the baton to be passed on to each generation of believers and readers of his gospel.
