Don't Tell Anyone

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 1:40-2:12:

In 1901 William Wrede, who was a German New Testament scholar, published a book which came to be known in English as The Messianic Secret. Although there was initial rejection of his theory, it later became prominent in Markan scholarship. What Wrede was trying to wrestle with in Mark was two problems: The first is that Jesus never claims that he is the messiah and the second is that Jesus has this strange habit in Mark of telling people not to tell others who he is, or what he is doing. Jesus does this with the disciples, with those he heals and others and with demons he encounters. And so what Wrede argued was that Mark created this story of Jesus hiding his identity by asking people to keep quiet about it in order to overcome the tension in the early church between their belief that Jesus was the messiah against Jesus never claiming he was the Messiah. And so he postulated the idea of the Messianic secret that Jesus knew he was the Messiah but didn’t say so in order to be able to do his work, and that the disciples knew it all along but didn’t say it until after the resurrection because Jesus told them not to. Now I think Wrede is correct about one thing, and that is that Mark probably made up Jesus telling everyone not to say anything, and before you freak out about that I’ll explain why in a moment, but he is wrong about the reason, and there is no messianic secret. And although Wrede’s theory has largely fallen out of favor, if you read commentaries you will still find people tying themselves into knots to try and explain why Jesus is trying to keep everything secret, and in my opinion not only don’t their ideas make any sense, they are missing the most obvious thing, and that’s about what Mark is trying to teach us about discipleship and the cost of discipleship and what proper discipleship looks like.

And so last week as we began this series on Mark, and we looked at the beginning verses I commented on the fact that we get an early example of the cost of discipleship demonstrated for us in John the Baptist. That Jesus’ ministry begins when John is arrested and that he will then later be executed by the state as well, just as Jesus does. And so we already can see what discipleship means before we even get into the story of Jesus. And then when Jesus does begin his ministry he too has a call to repentance, just as John did, although he does not yet talk about forgiveness, that comes in the passage we heard today, but he also says that the Kingdom of God has come near. And I said that Jesus will then begin to show what that Kingdom looks like, or what God’s will is for the world, and that begins with healing. Because the first healing story in today’s passage of the healing of the leper, which ends the first chapter, is actually the third healing story to take place in Mark. The first healing takes place in a synagogue where Jesus heals a man who we are told has an unclean spirit, that is he is possessed, but the demon knows who Jesus is, calling him “the Holy One of God.” and Jesus silences him and casts it out. They then make their way to the home of Simon Peter, where Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, before he goes to a deserted place, remembering the importance of wilderness, which will come back in a moment, before then moving into the region of Galilee to preach and cast out demons, which is where he encounters the man with leprosy.

Practice Praise

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Thessalonians 5:12-23 and Luke 17:11-19:

Two weeks ago when we began talking about the kindness challenge, I said that I had originally planned on doing this series later, but felt called that we needed to be doing it now. That decision has been reinforced not just by those of you who have commented on the need to have this, and the arguments you all are having about kindness, which maybe sort of kind of defeating the point. But it was also reinforced by an email we got from the principal of the middle school this past week telling parents that one of their key emphasis to students was to be kind to one another, and then a meeting with the athletic director for the school district who said that she has a hard time retaining coaches because of the grief that they receive from some parents. And what she then basically said, although she didn’t know the language that we are using was to nix the negative, stop criticizing everything they do, give them a break, and instead start practicing praise and supporting them, and so that covers the first of the two rules of what we are being challenged to do in practicing the Kindness Challenge.

And so as a quick reminder this comes from a book of the same name written by Shaunti Feldhahn, and while the ultimate goal is to practice kindness in all areas of our lives, the challenge is to pick one relationship which you would like to improve, it could one that is only hanging on by a thread, or maybe one that’s going okay, but could be better, and then for 30 days to do three things. The first is not to say anything negative to them or about them to anyone else, and a reminder because someone asked me this week, that also includes all the non-verbal ways we express negativity or our displeasure. And there is a supplement, or another option for that rule that is really for men who are doing the challenge for their spouse, and you can hear about that or the other ways to avoid negativity by listening to last week’s message, which is available on our website and our Facebook and YouTube pages. The second rule, which is what we are talking about today, is to practice praise which is to find one positive thing that you can sincerely praise or affirm about the person you are doing the challenge for and to tell them and tell one other person, and do that every day for 30 days. And then the third rule, which we’ll conclude with next week is to do a small act of kindness or generosity every day for your person. And so while removing the negative comments is important, practicing praise, having to look for and talk about positive things in order to give praise is the catalyst to kindness because it then causes you to have to change what it is you are focusing on and paying attention to.