[CatherineTorpey]

This week, the Reverend new dad Darrell Hamilton says: “This Sunday, I’m preaching on being a ‘Girl Dad,’ and there may even be a surprise guest. So you know you don’t want to miss that!” His scripture is Mark 5:21-42. This is the story of Jesus raising a girl from the dead.

Mark is the oldest of the four gospels, probably written right around the time of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. This time period is a time of the highest anxiety and difficulty for Jews, living under Roman rule. There were “zealots,” who were those fiercely opposed to Rome. But just as in our society, there would have been Jews who were sympathetic to the zealots and those who felt that the zealots were the “troublemakers,” and some who wanted to take advantage of the situation and others who simply wanted to escape it.

Mark’s gospel has a feeling of no-nonsense urgency. It is pretty brief, and you can read the whole Gospel of Mark in about an hour and a half. One of the clues that this is an early gospel is that there are several spots where Jesus’ words are given in Aramaic, which was the language he spoke. Aramaic was the language that Hebrew had evolved into. Hebrew was not spoken except within religious contexts (just as Latin was spoken in the Catholic church long after it had “died” as a spoken language). We can imagine that there were still enough people around who had actually known Jesus who remembered his exact words, especially since they themselves would have been Aramaic-speaking. Another thing typical of Mark in this chapter is that he insists that the miracle that be kept secret.

We can imagine how powerful it will be for Darrell, having just welcomed his baby girl into the world, to imagine Jesus saving a young girl from death.

Please leave any thoughts or comments here or join us at Bible in the Middle at 10:30am Sunday morning!

[Author]

Posts