Eating Mark 13:1-8

This week, we tackle a gospel we don’t know what to make of, a type of literature we don’t understand, and a meaning for 21st Century American Christians that is consistent with Jesus’s teaching in under 4 minutes. What a workout!

This means there isn’t as much time to deal with what this story is not. There is a strand through Christian history that has wanted to see the time before Jesus as the “Old Covenant” and that Jesus brings a “New Covenant”. This language is very familiar to us. But where we get into trouble is by extrapolating from this thinking that Jesus (and more specifically, Christianity as known over the last thousand years or so) replaces Judaism. This is not consistent with Jesus’s teaching. This is most prevalent in conservative evangelical Protestants who take Jesus’s talk of the Temple’s destruction as evidence of their specific religious identity superseding others. This seems far away from what Jesus is teaching, and constructed without regard to the very things Jesus was teaching in the Temple and to whom he was teaching.

Today, we focus on the context. Specifically: what Jesus teaches and where. Because it reveals what is always a part of the apocalyptic despite its challenging appearance: truth about the present world and a promise of a more just tomorrow.

Eating Scripture is a short video series in which we explore the juicy and the crunchy in this week’s gospel in four minutes or fewer.

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