3.26.22 - Mark 6, 7, & 8: Feeling Again (and Again) the Generosity of God (Kenny Camacho)

SCRIPTURE: Mark 6:30-8:21


“We have to experience God routinely…because if we don’t, the gap between what our fear leads us to believe about God and the God who truly is will keep growing. We need to keep seeing Him with a soft heart. We need to be eager to have our assumptions challenged, to have our ‘minds blown’ by Him! What we have in Jesus is unimaginable access to an utterly overwhelming God, and what is so wild and excessive and inconceivable about God? It’s His grace. It’s his unthinkable and unrelenting willingness to pour Himself out for the people and the world He has made. Every time we try to put a limit on His kindness, He blows past it. Every time we try to say, “this far, and no further! Surely a God as mighty and as just and as powerful as You will stop here!” He says to us, ‘Do you still not understand?’”


DISCUSSION/REFLECTION QUESTIONS:

  1. Let’s take stock: what are you learning about Mark’s gospel in this series?

  2. In our passages for this week, Jesus and his disciples travel back and forth across the Sea of Galilee several times, alternating between trips to the western shore (Jewish territory) and the eastern shore (Gentile territory). He even performs two versions of the “same” miracle in each place: feeding large crowds with a few loaves of bread. Why do you think Mark includes so many of these stories? What point is he trying to get at, as he presents Jesus’s story?

  3. What do you think the disciples “don’t understand about the loaves”? Why does Mark says this specifically about their failure to recognize Jesus when he is walking on water?

  4. Kenny said that these chapters are about the “feel-able mystery of Jesus.” What do you think he meant by that? What do you think is the “mystery” of Jesus?

  5. Why do we (like the Pharisees) so often treat God as someone we have to impress with our good behavior before He will come to our rescue?

  6. What can we learn from Jesus’s description of the crowds as “sheep without a shepherd”? How does this shape the way he treats those crowds?

Kenny Camacho