In the passage that comes before this one, Mark talked about a scribe who had asked Jesus about the greatest commandment, and was impressed with Jesus’ answer.
Jesus was also pleased. He told the scribe he was very close to entering the kingdom of heaven. With such a warm endorsement from a scribe, this was a rare teachable moment, the right moment, in today’s passage, for Jesus to talk about Messiah, and to teach His disciples the difference between a false reading, and a true reading of scripture.
In this half-hour video, I’ll give a talk that falls into three divisions:
I Christ for the World, Mark 12:35-37
II Court of the Women, Mark 12:38-40
III Coins of the Widow, Mark 12:42-44
At the end of this teachable moment Jesus had with His disciples, you and I will learn that the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.
It is God’s pleasure to give to us. Then, real lovers of God worship Him by joyfully sharing His spiritual and material wealth with others in a way that upholds the receiver’s dignity and deflects attention from the giver.
What do you and I have that we can now see God is calling us to share with someone else, as a matter of generous love towards God Himself? This kind of sharing ends up making all of us richer.
Mark 12:35-44
Grace and Peace, Joanne YouTube Channel
[§Coins in hand | Royce Bair https://www.flickr.com/photos/ironrodart/, flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/]
