Jesus chooses his core group of disciples, the Apostles, who will live and travel with him and to whom Jesus will impart his deepest and most extensive teachings. While Jesus speaks mysteriously, in parables, to the majority of his listeners, the Apostles will be privy to the hidden meanings of his words, the parables explained, albeit they will often fail to understand or be able to accept what Jesus tells them [ … ]

By now, and at such an early stage in Jesus’ ministry, the Jewish religious establishment is coming to fear and to hate Jesus. The Pharisees watch him, like malign, predatory spirits, looking to see fault and ready to pounce on any incriminating evidence. They have already closed their hearts against Jesus. To the Pharisees, Jesus represents a threat – to their own prestige – and an affront to their religious dogmas [ … ]

In today’s Gospel verses, Jesus teaches that the Pharisees have got it all wrong in relation to the Sabbath. While God gave the Sabbath to man as an opportunity to rest and to devote himself to divine worship, the Pharisees have choked the meaning of the Sabbath in a mass of legalese, turning it from being a time of joy into a time of anxiety and empty observance [ … ]

In today’s Gospel verses, as yesterday and tomorrow, Jesus finds himself in conflict with some of the Jewish religious leaders. Today, the issue is fasting. It seems Jesus and his disciples are not following received custom [ … ]

The words of Jesus to the paralytic man on his bed might have seemed strange and even, at first, insensitive: the paralytic has been brought to Jesus seeking to be healed, and Jesus says to him: ‘Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.’ This could hardly be what the paralysed man might have been expecting [ … ]

As Jesus died on the cross he would have looked like a leper. He had been scourged. Front and back, his skin would have been a bloody mess of welts, cuts and bruises. Being himself without sin, he died in the image of some of those most abject whom he came to save. Truly the self-sacrifice of our Lord was complete and extreme [ … ]

Through these verses, we see Jesus healing Simon’s mother in her home, immediately restoring her to wellbeing, so that she is able to serve life. Here Jesus heals in an intimate, domestic environment, within the home. The verses ask us to think of our families and our nearest and dearest ones [ … ]

Right at the start of Jesus’ ministry, Mark tells us of the fundamental difference between Jesus and other religious teachers. As we listen to these verses, we are struck by the presence of a Christ who is not, as so many in our modern age like to think, only a fine moral teacher, or a wise man with some fascinating spiritual insights to offer us. When Jesus talks about the Scriptures, when he teaches the people about God, he speaks not as the scribes but with authority, and he has that authority because he knows the Father intimately and he is the Son. As the Son, he doesn’t just explain Scripture; it is his right, he has this authority, to change, to add to, to subtract from, to reinterpret what was already received as the word of God [ … ]

The time is come. Jesus has been baptised by John. He has spent time alone in the wilderness, symbolic of the Exodus wanderings, and is come to Galilee to begin his ministry. His first act is to call the first of the apostles to their new vocation. In Mark’s Gospel, as in Matthew’s, this follows upon the arrest of John the Baptist. This clearly differs from the account of John’s Gospel, while the Gospel of Luke could be seen as presenting a more detailed and less stylised account of the meeting of Christ with the fishermen [ … ]

Jesus has told the rich young man that, to be perfect, he must do more than obey the commandments; additionally, he must give everything away and follow Jesus; he must sell it all, give the money to the poor, and pursue a life of total gratuity with Jesus [ … ]

The rich young man has recognized what Jesus has to offer him. Moved with great enthusiasm, he runs to Jesus to ask him what he must do. To this, Jesus reminds the young man of the Ten Commandments [ … ]

John tells Jesus that he and other disciples have forbidden a man from casting out devils in Jesus’ name, and Jesus tells him that he was wrong to do this. The man was doing good, irrespective of his not belonging to the community of disciples following Jesus. There is no call for exclusivity, so long as people are working faithfully for and toward the good. Jesus displays an ecumenical attitude here. Different faiths, different churches, can peacefully co-exist and work alongside each other for the greater good [ … ]

Jesus has a different way of teaching his disciples from that with which he speaks to the many. As he forms them for their apostolic work, so much of what they learn will come from being close to Jesus, living with him, sharing a way of life. We may think of a whole culture, a whole way of thinking and doing and being, being transmitted through a lived and community relationship, rather than, say, of the sort of education which divides the world up into classes and has a textbook and a teacher for each. Christ is no mere teacher in this sense: he is the Master; he is the Way [ … ]

Jesus has told his disciples for the first time that he must go to Jerusalem to suffer and die. In today’s Gospel verses, Jesus calls the multitudes also, to tell everyone about what it means to follow Jesus, to live a Christian life. While the Passion draws closer, the sign of the crucifixion looming prominently over these verses, we are enjoined in our own lives to deny ourselves and to take up our cross to follow Jesus [ … ]

Our verses begin with Jesus asking two questions. The first gives us a sense of the rumour and speculation surrounding Jesus as he preaches. The crowds see Jesus as a prophet, wondering if he might be one of the prophets returned. Jesus’ next question, ‘But whom say ye that I am?’ is a call to his disciples for faith and clarity, and Peter obliges, affirming that Jesus is the Messiah. Once more, Jesus charges his disciples to keep this knowledge secret. It is not yet time for our Lord to reveal himself, perhaps because the social situation is too dangerous, perhaps because the multitudes are not yet ready to receive such spiritual truth – we do not know [ … ]

Jesus has performed the second miracle of the loaves and fishes, following which the Pharisees have come to him, demanding to see a sign from heaven to prove that he is the Messiah. Jesus rejects and departs from the Pharisees, and now warns his disciples to be wary of them [ … ]

Jesus is saddened by the Pharisees’ heard-heartedness and their refusal to believe, despite the many and great healing miracles performed by Jesus, which all the world else is able to recognize and celebrate, filled with joy and wonder [ … ]

Today’s Bible verses are an extraordinary act of forgetting and of remembering. What do we mean by this? First off, we mean that Mark has not forgotten that he has already told us one story of Jesus feeding the multitude. To suggest otherwise than this would be absurd. We are intended to read this Gospel account of the feeding of a multitude in the light of our reading of the previous miracle of feeding. That’s part of the point [ … ]

In today’s Bible reading, we see clearly that many of those to whom Mark addresses his Gospel would not be familiar with Jewish customs. Mark, therefore, explains that the Jews wash as a ritual of purification prior to eating. This was initially a prescription for how priests should wash before offering sacrifice – see Exodus 30: 17ff – and was extended by tradition to all Jews before every meal. It may be helpful for us to remember that this was not a matter of hygiene; rather ritual purification was a symbol of the moral purity a person should have when approaching God. We may also consider our own practice of washing our hands and saying grace before meals, such that our participating in a meal becomes an act of thanksgiving to God, the meal a sacred space [ … ]

The apostles have returned exhausted and energized to Jesus. They have succeeded in their mission and they are full of the glory of what they have accomplished. They long to tell Jesus all that they have done in Jesus’ name. This is a triumph for the disciples. They long to share [ … ]

Herod the tetrarch, Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, was a client ‘king’ of the Romans. He is highly alert to the in/stability of his region and to his own position within the Roman authority. We may imagine that the fear of a popular leader amassing a following and potentially threatening authority contributed to the arrest of John the Baptist, this in addition to the reason we are given in the Gospel, which is that John had told Herod how immoral he was being in marrying his brother’s wife Herodias [ … ]