Sharing the liberating love of Jesus
Proper 18B | Mark 7:24-37
This week we get a couple of stunning stories of grace that sound different from what came before. The evangelist we know as Mark is famous for his punchy prose, its sense of urgency and pace (everything is suddenly and then), but most of all, its brevity. Mark’s is the shortest gospel. By a lot.
This evangelist is a master, however, which belies the oft-label of its lowly word choice in the original Greek. This is particularly profound against John’s labored poetic style. But Mark offers what writers call concision, which is to say, he makes the point concisely. And he does this by setting up his stories for maximum effect.
Most of the time in this gospel, healings take place after the story or between the stories. A narrator is telling you about all of the people who were healed as a matter of volume. To give these two stories this much real estate is remarkable—meaning we ought to remark on it!
These two healing stories also run counter to the experience from the previous chapter, when the crowds are following Jesus and the disciples and fame is spreading like crazy and all of these people are coming out to be healed and here Jesus is clearly trying to get away from that. A big mass movement of people and its supposed leader wants nothing to do with it …
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