Mark 3 - Thursday 4th April

Today’s chapter is Mark 3

Tom writes:

Like trying to fit a post-Christmas stomach into a mid-November pair of trousers, I just can’t seem to cram Mark’s enormous vision of Jesus into my inherited understanding of faith. Jesus keeps on popping the button open… if you get what I mean. And, of everything that breaks my heart about my faith up to this point, my shrunken vision of Jesus is the thing that hurts the most. In Mark 3, crowds flock to Jesus, conspirators plots around him, dozens abandon all just to be with him and his family think he has gone stark raving mad. He was big news. He was The Divisive, Irritating, Astonishing, Big Thing. What is the Big Thing in my faith today? Whether we are recycling the coffee cups? How many people came this week? Whether the sermon was any good? Please God would we give Jesus his church back? Jesus will embarrass us - he will make us expose our withered parts in public. Jesus will give us strict orders about some things and will make others cry out in exasperation.

Jesus will lay claim to things we want him to leave alone and will give highly inappropriate levels of authority to the wrong people. Jesus will expose a spiritual world that we just don’t know what to think about and will ride roughshod over some of our closest affiliations. In short, if we give Jesus his church back then he will do what he wants without consulting us and it will be totally wonderful and totally baffling all at the same time. But I want that. I so much want that. Don’t you? Giving Jesus his church back starts with every one of us - will we simply do what God says he wants? Will we choose not to moan or be insecure or to leave it to others but simply to do what Jesus wants. Will we choose for our conversations to be about Jesus, our questions to be about Jesus, our obsession to be Jesus? Will Jesus become our Big Thing no matter how uncomfortable it gets?

Question for reflection

If you were honest, would you say you have a shrunken vision of Jesus?

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