Mark 12

Mark 12 by verse:

Mark 12:1-12

Bruce D. Chilton, A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible, p. 111-114
John Dominic Crossan, “Parables of Action,” In Parables, p. 86-96
John Dominic Crossan, “The Tenants,” The Historical Jesus, p. 351 f.
Richard Q. Ford, “Body Language,” Interpretation (July 2002), p. 303 f.

“Body Language”

What is unclear, however, is how the tenants cannot see this inexorable disaster coming. They are blinded, in part, because their stupitity is mirrored step for step by the stupidity of the landlord. … Unless one interprets this parable allegorically—and thereby relieves its tension by making the landlord a figure for God—one is in trouble. Naked of allegory, the behavior of both parties appears to make no sense.

… Because he has become so accustomed to cloaking his greed under the guise of law, the landlord actually believes his tenants will abide by law. Because they so need to be unaware of their own weakness, the tenants actually believe their landlord is weak. … Because the tenants have been seduced by the landlord’s inappropriate trust to believe in their illusory power, everything in this tragic narrative becomes short-circuited; the tenants bite the unintended bait, the trap falls, the father is bereaved, and the tenants are dead.

… Who is responsible for all the murders? Put another way, what in fact undermined the tender chances for justice?

Joachim Jeremias, Rediscovering the Parables, p. 57 ff.
Fadwa Tuquan, “To Christ,” Divine Inspiration, p. 266

Mark 12:13-17

Rita Nakashima Brock, And Blessed is She, p. 112-113
John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 352

The Historical Jesus

… a phrase that can be as absolutely superficial or as absolutely profound as one wishes to make it.

John Dominic Crossan, “Expository Article,” Interpretation (October 1983), p. 397-401

“Expository Article”

… there is a double dialectic at work in Mark’s version.  There is a dialectic of question and answer but also of entrapment and escape, within the story, and the narrative’s power concerns the skillful equation of question and entrapment from the questioners which is countered by an even better equation of answer and escape from Jesus.  …  (p. 397)

… Mark seldom says once what might be said twice, but here he outdoes himself: (1) Teacher/teach; (2) true/truly; (3) no/not; (4) pay or not/pay or not; and (5) … Pharisees and Herodians as questioners.  Everything here warns us to think twice about the opening question.  So also with Jesus’ first reply in 12:15bc:  “But knowing their hypocrisy … . (p. 398)

On the one hand, [“pronouncement story”] describes those texts where an independent saying has been given a narrative setting but where the saying can exist quite well by itself.  On the other, it describes those texts where setting and saying are in interactive relationship so that the saying loses either its force or even its meaning when it appears alone.  … dialectical stories.  …  The God and Caesar story  has moved from … the dialectical to the aphoristic tradition.  In effect, the narrative has become an isolated aphorism.  …  Those may be valid interpretations of the story, but one doubts them increasingly the more they are attained by the elimination of most of the text.  (p. 401)

John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus, p. 223

Excavating Jesus

The problem is not whether to pay Caesar’s taxes, but whether to carry Caesar’s coins. And Jesus has already decided on that point.

Thomas R. Haney, Today’s Spirituality, p. 155

Today’s Spirituality

I’ve been thinking about that English ecclesiastic Wolsey.
Remember the words Shakespearre put on his dying lips?
“Had I but served my God
with half the zeal I serv’d my king… .

Stanley Hauerwas, “Caesar Wants It All,” Minding the Web, p. 269-272

"Caesar Wants It All"

God and emperors just do not get along. They do not get along because they both want it all.  (p. 270)

Wealth just turns out to be another word for emperor.  …
Christian accommodation that results from playing the game called “Caesar’s coin” insures that the separation of church and state will make Christians faithful servants of states that allegedly give the church freedom.  (p. 272)

John L. McKenzie, The Civilization of Christianity, p. 138-142
Malcolm Muggeridge, “An Eye for Eternity,” The Plough Reader (Spring 2002), p. 34

“An Eye for Eternity”

Blake’s reputation for eccentricity, if not madness, was much promoted by the casual matter-of-fact way he spoke about his encounters with spirits from the past. Thus, he would say, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, that he had been chatting with Socrates or Milton. When Crabb Robinson asked him what language he talked with Voltaire, he answered: “To my sensations it was English. It was like the touch of a musical key; he touched it probably in French, but to my ear it became English.” It was a shrewd answer. It is an illusion to suppose that those who look into eternity are simpletons when the children of time seek to trip them up.

Virginia Stem Owens, “Herod and Caesar,” Looking for Jesus, p. 73-80
J. Barrie Shepherd, “Renderings,” The Moveable Feast, p. 45-46
Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 228
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, p. 53

The Politics of Jesus

It is hard to see how the denarius question could have been thought by those who put it to be a serious trap, unless Jesus’ repudiation of the Roman occupation were taken for granted, so that he could be expected to give an answer which would enable them to denounce him. … In the context of his answer “the things that are God’s” most normally would not mean “spiritual things”; the attribution “to Caesar Caesar’s things and to God God’s things” points rather to demands or prerogatives which somehow overlap or compete, needing to be disentangled. What is Caesar’s and what is God’s are not on different levels, so as never to clash; they are in the same arena.

Mark 12:18-27

Malcolm Muggeridge, “An Eye for Eternity,” The Plough Reader (Spring 2002), p. 34

“An Eye for Eternity”

Blake’s reputation for eccentricity, if not madness, was much promoted by the casual matter-of-fact way he spoke about his encounters with spirits from the past. Thus, he would say, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, that he had been chatting with Socrates or Milton. When Crabb Robinson asked him what language he talked with Voltaire, he answered: “To my sensations it was English. It was like the touch of a musical key; he touched it probably in French, but to my ear it became English.” It was a shrewd answer. It is an illusion to suppose that those who look into eternity are simpletons when the children of time seek to trip them up.

George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” Shooting an Elephant, p. 48

“Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”

Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next. And the enormous majority of human beings if they understood the issue, would choose this world.

Dallas Willard, “Jesus the Logician,” The Best Christian Writing 2000, p. 268 f.

“Jesus the Logician”

Jesus’ reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. … The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any “resurrection” must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by the resurrection. [Me: Resurrection has no need for babies—the resurrection itself is the birth and guarantees the continuation of life.]

… But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. … One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them. [Me: Could we imagine, when we all are dead, God no longer having anyone to commune with?]

Mark 12:28-34

Sermon, "Wholiness," August 20, 2017

“Wholiness”

Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., “Do This and You Shall Live,” Lovely in Eyes Not His, p. 128-133
Thomas R. Haney, Today’s Spirituality, p. 20 134
Jeff Hardin, “Prayer,” Poetry Daily (May 24, 2008)

“Prayer”

all of it prayer (again and again), answering and answering,
for the answer hears what the question wants to be,
and the wasp sates itself
in the breeze of the bloom’s lip, lip which is prayer,
praying its being,
being its prayer which is answering being.

Stanley Hauerwas, “Do You Love Me?” Minding the Web, p. 180

“Do You Love Me?”

For to love Jesus is to be so overwhelmed by his life that we no longer think we must choose between love of ourselves, love of others, and love of God.

Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 46

A Testament of Devotion

Douglas Steere wisely says that true religion often appears to be the enemy of the moralist. For religion cuts across the fine distinctions between the several virtues and gathers all virtues into the one supreme quality of love. The wholly obedient life is mastered and unified and simplified and gathered up into the love of God and it lives and walks among men in the perpetual flame of that radiant love. For the simplified man loves God with all his heart and mind and soul and strength and abides trustingly in that love. Then indeed do we love our neighbors.

William Law, Weavings (September/October 1994), p. 5

Weavings

The measure of our love to God seems in justice to be the measure of our love of every virtue. We are to love and practice it with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength.

John Middleton Murray, “All the Way Down,” Weavings (September/October 1998), p. 40 [Me]

“All the Way Down”

For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.

[Me: This is because goodness is hidden deep within ourselves. What our minds or the minds of others can imagine, define, or plan, is so much less than the goodness that is possible.]

Jan Phillips, “Making Peace,” Weavings (September/October 1994), p. 5

“Making Peace”

… every contact with a lover of life brings us one step closer to loving our own.

Albert Schweitzer, A Place for Revelation, p. 3-12
Sundar Singh, Wisdom of the Sadhu, p. 38

Wisdom of the Sadhu

I long only to serve God the Master with all my heart and soul and mind and strength and to love my fellow men and women even as I love myself. I we allow this principle to guide our lives, then selfishness will flee from our hearts and we shall be like children of God. We will find in every man and woman our own brother and sister.

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, p. 106

An Altar in the World

The assignment is to love the God you did not make up with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and the second is like unto it: to love the neighbor you also did not make up as if that person were your own strange and particular self. Do this, and the doing will teach you everything you need to know. Do this, and you will live.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, p. 96

Hymn of the Universe

Within a universe which is structurally convergent the only possible way for one element to draw closer to other neighboring elements is by condensing the cone: that is, by driving towards the point of convergence the whole area of the world in which it is involved. In such a system it is impossible to love one’s neighbor without drawing close to God—and vise versa for that matter.

Marilyn von Waldner, “Prayer for the Kingdom,” What Return Can I Make
“The Cloud of Unknowing,” quoted byMalcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a 20th Century Pilgrim, p. 123

“The Cloud of Unknowing”

Of God Himself can no man think … He may well be loved but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden but by thought neither.

Imaging the Word, Vol. 1, p. 54-57

Mark 12:35-37

Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis, p. 142-144
Dallas Willard, “Jesus the Logician,” The Best Christian Writing 2000, p. 269 f.

Mark 12:38-40

John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 262
Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 229
Imaging the Word, Vol. 1, p. 62-65

Mark 12:41-44

Thomas R. Haney, Today’s Spirituality, p. 58
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Letter to Robert Bridges,” in Donald Nicholl, Holiness, p. 102 f.

“Letter to Robert Bridges”

… the difference of mind and being of the man who finds comforts all around him unbroken unless by constraints which are none of his own seeking and the man who is pinched by his own charity is too great for forecasting. It must be felt … It changes the whole man, if anything can; not his mind only but the will and everything.

J. Barrie Shepherd, “Holy Saturday at the Green Market,” Weavings (January/February 1996), p. 24-25

“Holy Saturday at the Green Market”

I think I caught the risen Christ,
just yesterday, on Broadway alongside Union Square.
We were returning from the Green Market
—fresh fish, green mesclun with a pinch
of bright and edible nasturtiums tossed on top,
some tiny new potatoes for our evening meal—
when I glimpsed ahead a shambling, awkward figure
lurching his twisted way along the sidewalk
and jerking fiercely now and then as if in seizure.
He wore a red baseball cap slightly off center,
sweat shirt, jeans, sneakers — all shabby
but well cared for, clean — and over his right arm
a cardboard carton with the lid cut off to shape
a sort of basket, I suppose, to display wares.
I glanced in as we passed and sure enough
there were ball-point pens, other plastic items
in there waiting to be purchased. Silent—
in my head—I wondered at the courage of one
so violently deformed, yet coping, contriving
to survive this predatory city.
Those contorted legs could not move him
that fast and we were swiftly past him to confront,
lying across a heap of trash bags up against the wall,
a homeless man, asleep, with the usual pathetic sign
informing all and sundry:
I’m in trouble, please help. Someday
I may be able to do the same for you.
I walked on, ignored both plea and promise,
passed right by as I’ve been taught to
by this casual, careless, care-less cruel city;
then glancing back over my shoulder saw our friend
in the red baseball cap struggle across,
laboriously read—how long it seemed to take
that grubby and ill-lettered sign, then lean
over and drop something in the cup.
Yes, I realize, it only encourages. I know
they’ll likely spend it all on booze. I’ve heard
and lived these arguments, knowing far too much,
believing far too little, and being so afraid,
for years now. But there was something in
that simple act, an eastered innocence
put me to shame, drove me to my knees
among the sidewalk lily vendors.
I think I caught the risen Christ,
a day early, but there just the same,
on Broadway yesterday alongside Union Square.

Imaging the Word, Vol. 1, p. 62-65