Chapter four of Mark is taken up with seed parables: the parable of the sower (4:3-8), the seed growing secretly (4:26-29), and the mustard seed (4:30-32). They teach us that God's rule is "something hidden, indirect, surprising in its manifestation and not easily perceived." (Barton, 41-42)
“Humans see with the eyes and YHWH sees with the heart.” The traditional translation of this well-worn phrase “the Lord looks on the heart” is only one way to hear it. If my translation is chosen, then the claim is that YHWH uses God’s heart, God’s seat of understanding or insight, to make human choices.
In Mark’s Gospel, Satan is always behind the opposition to Jesus, no matter who or what the vehicle may be. In our scene from Mark 3, Jesus is hemmed in by critics, lobbing accusations at him.
This second Sunday after Pentecost begins a continuous narrative based on the books of Samuel and two chapters of 1 Kings that covers the next 12 weeks of texts. This is a rare and wonderful opportunity for any preacher to address a long series of sermons, rooted in the finest literature of the Hebrew Bible.
I would suggest that it is a crucial part of our call from God to preach. If we preach only what people want to hear, if we tickle their ears with pleasurable sounds of support and easy words of affirmation only, then our preaching is in vain and our words are empty. There has never been a generation that does not need the harder call of God, the call to take with the utmost seriousness the shortcomings of one’s people and one’s self.
Welcome to Must Reads Classics with Dr. Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School.
The new birth is a breaking free of unbelief into belief. It is a breaking free of darkness into light. It is a breaking free of restricted, judgmental life into abundant life.
We don’t have to huddle in a room for fear of our circumstances and wait for the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is not an event we wait for. It’s one in which we participate. Every moment is Pentecost.
Given the story of the ascension of Jesus in the sight of his closest followers, the reader might well expect that the great story of the Pentecost experience would ensue immediately. Instead, we get a detailed account of the destruction of the circle of the innermost community of Jesus’s disciples by the abhorrent actions of one of their members, one chosen and active in the ministry as they all were, but who “went to his own place” at the end, leaving them all for his own interests.
Have you ever seen a triptych (pronounced trip-tik)? It's a work of art divided into three sections or panels. Taken together the three panels tell one story. Our gospel text for Ascension Day is a triptych. I like the metaphor because it conveys that the three parts of our text are related and that the text can be folded up and made portable for easy transport wherever we go.
© SMU Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence
