Author: Lowell Grisham

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” I don’t want to compromise the traditional understanding of the cross as a call of self-denial and willing suffering service, but it strikes me this morning that there is another experience that has some similar qualities.

There is seeing. And there is deeper insight.

Today we read of Jesus warning the disciples about the “yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.”

In every generation there are those who would incite mobs to violence. They believe they do so in defense of something good that is threatened. Often, they are wrong.

In every generation there are dogs who only get the crumbs falling from the children’s tables. Who are they? How can we recognize their full humanity?

Two women. One an independent business woman. The other a slave-girl with a gift of divination. Lydia becomes the host for the new community of Jesus. I wonder what happened to the slave-girl.

Two things strike me today as I read the story from Mark’s gospel. First, I connect with Jesus’ compassion for the disciples (and for himself) as he responds to their weariness, inviting them to “come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” Second, I sense the obligation Jesus places on the disciples when they recognize the hunger and need of the multitude. He tells them, “You give them something to eat.”

It takes a strong political stomach to read the Daily Office. The scripture’s occupation with such matters implies that we too are to pay attention to the politics and intrigue of our own day.

Every generation has the opportunity to expand the arc of justice. But we have to be able to see where conventional wisdom, religious authority and the law are being stretched by the moral universe in our own day.

The scripture has been fulfilled, it would seem. Since the 1980’s at least, to those who have, more has been given; and from those who have less, more has been taken away.