‘The large crowd enjoyed listening to Jesus teach.’ That is how the CEV renders Mark 12.37.
All clear, we say. Jesus was a great teacher. Yes, indeed. But look a little closer and the reader will see that Jesus has just been teasing his hearers. Teachers do that sometimes. They avoid the obvious. The danger lies in an acceptance of words at their face-value. Jesus is pointing up the nature of the Messiah, a person among the descendants of David or a person of greater weight and moment.
A teacher’s job is not just to tell people things. Anybody can do that just by reading an appropriate paragraph from a text-book. Sometimes that is necessary. Basic information (in this case about God’s Anointed) is needed when an audience has not covered the ground at all. But a teacher also has to provoke curiosity, to stimulate, to get listeners asking why or how.
Jesus had a very big agenda to cover in his short ministry Some items in that agenda were commonplace questions (or seemed to be such) that people had settled long ago. They knew all about red sky at night and red sky in the morning. They were a bit hazy about good news for non-Jews. (What did they make of the book of Jonah?) And when it came to the contest of arguments in the Temple Matthew 21 and 22), they could do nothing but watch the exports at work. Jesus composed stories (we call them parables) that did just that. He amused his pupils and enticed them into wrestling with hard issues.
SQUEAKY WHEEL
The parishes of Burton and Shotwick in the Wirral are without an incumbent and they are letting people know about it. The churchwardens clearly believe that it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, whatever the theory. I lost count of the number of times the vacancy appears in one way or another on the internet.
If you have a comment on this post please send an email to Revd John King at johnc.king@talktalk.net Edited extracts may be published. To forward this to a friend click on the chain icon below.