July 30, 2024: Tuesday Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark 12:18-27
May the LORD'S gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation fill you with hope today and always.
Please continue to offer prayers for those who are ill. But this past Sunday we received wonderful news from Camille at worship. Her blood work shows no sign of cancer. Her care regimen over the past several years has truly done its work and destroyed the cancer that she has struggled against. Thank you, LORD! This next week we have our Gospel music Sunday worship followed by our Hawaiian themed carry-in meal. Thanks in advance for your creativity and preparations. I hope to see you this Sunday for worship and good food.
This morning, we continue with chapter 12 in the Gospel of Mark. For the first time in this Gospel, we are encountered with the other, less often written about, religious leaders. They are the Sadducees. It really is interesting, because in so many ways we usually think of the leaders of the temple in terms of their conservatism. The Pharisees, and priests were indeed conservative, but the Pharisees used both the law and the prophets as their guides for the body of Jewish Law which they saw as the guiding principles for all of those rules for every aspect of a faithful Jew's living. However, the Sadducees were even more conservative, not believing in any life after death, or angels, or spirits, and certainly giving credence to only the first five books of the Bible, what is normally called the Torah. Please note that the Pharisees came to believe in a resurrection based on their own study of Scripture and discernment while they were held in exile in Persia. It is interesting that people with such diverse thinking and theological ideation could exist side by side, but evidently, both groups of religious leaders found Jesus to be a serious threat to their ways of thinking and learning and living. To be honest, Jesus was a threat to their wealth and authority, regardless of who it was. So, Jesus steps right up to confront them with what you and I know to be the Truth. The Sadducees wanted to impose the world of physical relationships on the Resurrection. Jesus makes it clear that neither heaven nor God are bound by the Jewish Torah in heaven. His inference is that we will all know one another, but not in the ways that we know one another in this world. In this world we have always wanted to make heaven an extension of all of the good things that we believe measure something important, like streets paved in gold, but Christ knew, and we have learned from Him, that Heaven is being in the presence of the Holy Trinity, the One True God, and that it will all be so much more than we could ever have hoped for, or dreamed of. It is my belief from the Orthodox Christian community that the hosts of heaven are busily present at every reading of the Word, and at every celebration of Communion. For me that means that every time I receive the Sacrament of the Altar, my parents, and grandparents, and everyone I have known are there celebrating along with all of the heavenly hosts. Those who now know for eternity that the joy of the Resurrection is real and true. Jesus also brings to us, a saying that is a little more difficult to understand. God is not the God of the dead! What Jesus is saying is that once a person has received from God His gifts of forgiveness, life, and Salvation, that person will never die. The grave becomes the gate to eternal life with the LORD. All of this is why we celebrate life when our loved ones depart from this physical world to God's Heavenly gift. In Christ we are alive in this world, and will be alive in the next, our heavenly home.
With love in Christ, Pastor Kim
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