Mark Chapter 6:

Jesus teaching in the Temple (Mark 6:1-2)


Joseph the Carpenter, Georges de La Tour (Mark 6: 2-4)


Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .
Matthew 11 – John the Baptist has “heard in the prison the works of Christ” (vs 2)and he sends two his disciples to ask, “Are you he that should come, or should we look for another?” (vs 3) Jesus sends them back saying, “Go and show John again those things which you do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” (vs 4,5).


Michelangelo Caravaggio


Richard Strauss


Loaves and Fish; Calming the Sea, Part II

Mark 4 and 5: Why are you so fearful? . . . Be not afraid, only believe.

In Act I, Scene V of Hamlet, the title character says to his friend, Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

The Improbable Story of Alcides Moreno

Alcides Moreno



The Amazing Val Thomas


Faith and Medicine:

“Many studies done over the years indicate that the devout tend to be healthier. But the reasons remain far from clear. . . .(T)he most controversial research focuses on ‘intercessory’ or ‘distant’ prayer, which involves people trying to heal others through their intentions, thoughts or prayers, sometimes without the recipients knowing it. . . .

San Francisco cardiologist Randolph Byrd, for example, conducted an experiment in which he asked born-again Christians to pray for 192 people hospitalized for heart problems, comparing them with 201 not targeted for prayer. No one knew which group they were in. He reported in 1988 that those who were prayed for needed fewer drugs and less help breathing.

William Harris of St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City and colleagues published similar results in 1999 from a study involving nearly 1,000 hear patients, about half of whom were prayed for without their knowledge. . . .

‘I don’t see how you could quantify prayer - - either the results of it or the substance of it,’ said the Rev. Raymond Lawrence of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. ‘God is beyond the reach of science. It’s absurd to think you could use it to examine God’s play.’. . .

‘There’s nothing we know about the physical universe that could account for how the prayers of someone in Washington, D.C., could influence the health of a group of people in Iowa - - nothing whatsoever,’ Mr. Sloan (Richard Sloan, behavioral researcher at Columbia University).”

Rob Stein, Sunday, March 26, 2006

Mark 4 - of seeds and seas

Parables are simple, memorable word pictures that survive oral tradition easily. They are narrative in form but figurative in meaning. The rhetorical purposes of parables are to inform, convince, or persuade the audience. Christ’s stories were crafted to appealed to the young and old, poor and rich, and to the learned and unlearned as well.

“A fact of great significance is that Jesus our Lord saw in the entire world around him the analogies between earthly and heavenly things. His mightiest teachings were related to a farmer planting wheat, fishermen casting nets, the lamp, the bed, the bushel, the candlestick, the hen and little chickens, the yoke, pruning grape vines, patching old clothes, making bread, a son leaving home, a merchant seeking pearls, a shepherd finding the lost sheep, searching for a lost coin, lighting a lamp, sweeping the house, etc.” (Coffman) Often we find Jesus speaking to the masses in parables, and later, secretly or in private, explaining (or at least attempting to explain) everything to his disciples.









So why does Jesus use parables? Stephen L Harris avers that Jesus used parables because they provoked thought and interaction with the listeners. Because of the parables'ambiguous content, audiences had to become more active in the processing of the narrative. James Burton Coffman notes several reasons why Jesus taught in parables. “(1) He did so in order to fulfill prophecy. (2) He did so to confound the spies of the Pharisees. (3) He thus challenged his disciples to greater spiritual discernment. (4) The Hebrew people were familiar with that method. (5) It made his teachings easier to remember. (6) The parables were interesting in the highest degree. (7) They contained the dynamic teaching of Jesus in language which was unsuitable to the court-charges the Pharisees were anxious to make against him. In short, he, by this method, taught those who wished to know the truth and confounded those who sought to oppose him. In the literature of all the world, there is nothing to compare with the parables of Jesus.”