The denial does not appear so sharply in the English translation but in Greek the form of the Hebraic oath is still quite visible. The Greek reads literally: “If a sign shall be given to this generation.” This is the standard way of avoiding the full form of a sworn statement: “(May God strike me down) if a sign shall be given to this generation.” … Such a refusal under oath hardly allows exception and one is not surprised that the oath form is totally absent from Luke and Matthew: “if” is replaced by “not” in the Greek.

Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson. (Sie selbst sind die Lehre.)

Jesus … felt the danger so strongly, that when people who were not ill or in trouble came to him and asked him to exercise his powers as a sign of his mission, he was irritated beyond measure, and refused with an indignation which they … must have thought very unreasonable.

Do you not understand that the ideology of scarcity has been broken, overwhelmed by the divine gift of abundance?

The Markan story was not accepted by either Matthew or Luke. they also refused to accept 238 Deaf Mute Cured [2/1]. Since both miracles mention Jesus’ use of spittle, in Mark 7:33 and 8:23, that seems the most likely reason for their avoidance. Morton Smith mentions spittle as an instance of how “the miracle stories in the Gospels show a great many of the minor traits of magical procedures”(1973b:223) and David Aune places it among “techniques… well-known to both Jewish and Graeco-Roman magical practitioners”(1537).
…
The magic features of that process are also emphasized by the private nature of the cure, “out of the village.”

What does it say, really, about Jesus as healer? There’s something almost comic about the situation: I see men as trees walking. Back to the drawing board. But there is something wonderfully noncoercive about Jesus’ role, a sort of patience as healer, and an eagerness to hear the man’s version of his own experience. Jesus takes him out of town. Respectful or reclusive? Or was it cruelty to take the man out of his pleasant distortion? Would it have been merciful to leave the man in the vagueness of perceptual half-truth? Was Jesus tempted to do that at first, and then, respecting the man’s right to painful sight, did He reject the temptation?

… —about the resoration of vision in adulthood to a patient blind from early childhoodWhat would vision be like in such a patient? Would it be “normal” from the moment vision was restored? This is what one might think at first. This is the commonsensical notion—that the eyes will be opened, the scales will fall from them, and (in the words of the New Testament) the blind man will “receive” sight.

But could it be that simple? Was not experience necessary to see? Did one not have to learn to see? … (There is a hint of it even in the Bible, in Mark’s description of the miracle at Bethsaida; for here, at first, the blind man saw “men as trees, walking,” and only subsequently was his eyesight restored.)

I like the blind man’s description of “men like trees walking,” because it sounds so real, like it wasn’t made up by some editor. Only someone who had been blind would say that. (p. 298)

Jesus needs to wrestle with the issue of his public reputation. … Surely this exchange shows how Jesus had to keep struggling with the temptations posed by his growing reputation.

A second and much more significant development came from Mark himself as a major facet of his own theology, a theology in which acceptance of the humble and hidden, suffering and rejected Jesus was an absolute prerequisite to being accepted by him in the imminent apocalyptic consummation. It was Mark, therefore, and Mark alone who created the suffering and rising Son of Man and placed all those units in 240 Passion-Resurrection Prophecy [2/1] on the lips of Jesus.

Jesus saw the path to death
and his heart was willing,
but the Love that gave him breath
wept to see the killing.

Jesus could have walked away
as the people jeered him,
but compassion made him stay
till some hearts revered him.

Jesus asked us each to pray
late into the evening.
Soldiers carried him away;
we awoke to grieving.

Jesus saw the path to death
and his heart was willing,
but the Love that gave him breath
wept to see the killing.

The church, by becoming the state, surrendered the possibility of acting as an intermediary. It yielded its essential role as the protector of the people of God; it ceased to be able to preach resistance. One might even say that in its grasping for power, the instutional church gave up the right to die for its beliefs in exchange for the right to kill for its beliefs. (p. 82)

Anyone who believes deeply is a potential martyr, for belief always entails a bedrock principle that will not yield. (p. 42)

Sever me from myself that I may be grateful to you;
may I perish to myself that I may be safe in you;
may I die to myself that I may live in you;
may I wither to myself that I may blossom in you;
may I be emptied of myself that I may abound in you;
may I be nothing to myself that I may be all to you.

For the sacrificed – in the hour of sacrifice – only one thing counts: faith – alone among enemies and skeptics. Faith, in spite of the humiliation which is both the necessary precondition and the consequence of faith, faith without any hope of compensation other than he can find in a faith which reality seems so thoroughly to refute.

Lord I am Thine and Thou art mine;
So mine Thou art that something more
I may presume Thee mine than Thine
For thou didst suffer to restore
Not thee but me and to be mine:
And with advantage mine the more
Since Thou in death wast none of Thine
Yet then as mine didst me restore:
O Be mine still; still make me Thine;
Or rather make no Thine and Mine.

He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life.

… the poverty of life induced by the overabundance of our opportunities.

Life that
wants to live.
(Unlived life
of which one can die.)

But there is also another moral. … “Give away your lands if you want to, but don’t expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won’t gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.

I must say that among educated people politics occupies far too great a proportion of time. All the periodicals, all the newspapers are saturated with politics, although many of the objects they are discussing are very transient and short term. Of course, everywhere in the world people do occupy themselves with higher themes, and not just writers, but they always have a narrow audience, sometimes even appear to be some strange group on the edge of things, peripheral. In truth, questions of higher spirit cannot even be compared to the sort of blinking frivolity or politics. The ultimate problems of life and death show up the colossal nature of this difference even more. Modern humankind is characterized precisely by the loss of the ability to answer the principal problems of life and death. People are prepared to stuff their heads with anything, and to talk of any subject, but only to block off the contemplation of this subject. This is the reason for the increasing pettiness of our society, the concentration on the small and irrelevant.

“When you prescribed a year at this place for me, you told me I would find great joy,” a student said to Suzuki Roshi, as they sat sipping tea in Suzuki’s cabin at Tassajara. “To find that great joy, I will first have to lose the will to live, won’t I, Roshi?”

“Yes,” he said, “but without gaining a will to die.”

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole
And, casting out my self, become a soul.

If I can learn to love death, then I can begin to find refuge in change.

It’s almost the definition of a calling that there is strong inner resistance to it.  The resistance is not practical—how will I make money, can I live with the straitened circumstances, etc.—but existential: Can I navigate this strong current, and can I remain myself while losing myself within it?

Of all the powers of love,
this: it is possible

to die; which means
it’s possible to live.

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities
That of race and that of soul

The more I am enabled to give myself away, the more complete I become. When I can let go that part of me which struggles vainly to believe, then with my whole self I rejoice in knowing. The more I am enabled to abandon myself, the more full of life I am. So: death ought to be the ultimate act of self abandonment in order that we may become wholly alive. To count on death as the only thing a human being can count on is an affirmation of life.

We must learn this invitation of Christ:
“Those who wish to come after me
must renounce themselves.”
Let them renounce themselves
renounce their comforts
renounce their personal opinions.
and follow only the mind of Christ
which can lead us to death
but will surely also lead us to resurrection. (p. 5)

“But those who for love of me uproot themselves and accompany the people and go with the poor in their suffering and become incarnated and feel as their own the pain and the abuse they will secure their lives, because my Father will reward them.”

Brothers and sisters, God’s word calls us to this today. Let me tell you with all the conviction I can muster, it is worthwhile to be a Christian. (p. 154)

The courage to die for their beliefs is given only to those who have had the courage to live for them. The final victory over their terror of pain and physical death is the last of a thousand victories and defeats in the war which is fought daily and hourly in the human mind and soul: the war in the overcoming of self. Dissected and examined in detail this is a most unglamorous battle and to the outsider seems absurd; but it is the constant denying of the natural human urge to stay in bed longer than necessary, to eat or drink more than is justifiable, to be intolerant of the stupid, and to accumulate more than a fair share of this world’s goods, that makes possible the gradual freeing of the human spirit.

The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires. Not so for the follower. No, no. The follower aspires with all his strength, with all his will to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he is living amongst a “Christian people,” the same danger results for him as was once the case when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ. And because of the follower’s life, it will become evident who the admirers are, for the admirers will become agitated with him. Even that these words are presented as they are here will disturb many – but then they must likewise belong to the admirers.

Jesus’ striking statement
calling for carrying crosses
was challenging
and impressive
and implausible
hyperbole
until he took himself
literally.

We can still be the spring
by carrying the cross with resurrection faith
by acts of courage in the face of death
by laying down our lives
as ransom for our children’s hope.

Optimistic words alone are empty
in a dangerous time.
We can proclaim the resurrection
only by our acts.

No one finds the way to morality who only has the eyes of commonly accepted rationality, but only he who knows that he also must do that, which to common judgment, appears as exaggerated.

We weren’t tourists in this world collecting souvenirs, we were pilgrims on a journey seeking the Eternal Kingdom, on fire for God.

Eternal and most glorious God, suffer me not so to undervalue myself as to give away my soul, Thy soul, Thy dear and precious soul, for nothing; and all the world is nothing, if the soul must be given for it.

Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

She makes a quiet breakfast for herself.
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,

Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of day,
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his beds mosaic with the dew.

His young employers having got in late,
He and cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.

Let what the wide world values
I leave my soul in peace.

Heaven constantly dwells with him
who in poverty can be rich.

Well, there is time left—
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!