Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Devotional Reading 2

We have called our congregation and friends to spend the 40 days of Lent reading the different Gospel accounts of the last week of Jesus' life. This week we will be reading Mark's version which can be found in Mark 11:1 - 16:8 (six chapters). We made some helpful suggestions for what you could do while you're reading each week in the last entry.

May God add God's blessing to the reading of the Word this week! Amen!

Share what gets stirred up in you...it might benefit someone else.

A page from my journal:

As I was reading the last week of Jesus' life from Matthew's Gospel, I was struck by the manner in which Jesus entered Jerusalem. He road in on a donkey. As much as Jesus, the offering of the crowd also struck me. They shout in praise "Hosanna to the Son of David." That term would have shocked most of the hearers into a recognition that Jesus was challenging the political powers that be. Son of David would have conjured up images of a return to the days of old when the kingdom of Israel was at it's height ~ a condition that would require that the Roman Empire be thrown out of that part of the world! Can you imagine the way that the people are stirred up by an image such as this during the beginning of the Passover celebration? Indeed, Matthew says in verse 10, "And when Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, "Who is this?" No wonder they take Jesus seriously and want to silence him in the end. Makes me wonder about how sanitized my Jesus often is. I fail to see most of the time that Jesus was down in the nitty gritty aspects of life and that his life and way challenged and changed things. How is Jesus challenging and changing me? How is Jesus working through me to change things in the world? mtd.

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