3.5.22 - Mark 1 & 2: Rethinking Fasting, Purity, and Healing (Kenny Camacho)

SCRIPTURE: Mark 1:29-2:22

“This is the very heart of what we have so often gotten wrong in the American church: we’re supposed to be aiming at something. We’re not supposed to be trying to go backwards, to a point when we used to be healthy! Jesus is here for the sick, and if Jesus really is the Messiah, that means we have to rethink our Savior in Jesus’s terms: is the goal to restore Israel…or to grow Israel? Is the goal to restore me, or to grow me? This is our good news: every day, God wants us to get closer to the Kingdom of God. He wants us to go deeper in our relationships with Him, which are relationships He has made intimate through His Son and through His Holy Spirit. He doesn’t want us to always be seeking “do-overs” and “clean slates” and second, third, or hundredth chances to follow the Law: He wants us to His heart…which the Law merely reflects.” 



REFLECTION/DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. This is the first weekend of the Lenten season. Talk a bit about your past experiences with observing Lent, if you have had any. What did you “give up”? What positive changes did you experience, if any?

  2. In the passages for this week, we keep seeing a tension between who Jesus says he is–the Messiah!–and the expectations the religious leaders of his time have for that figure. Discuss this: what were the Pharisees looking for? What does Jesus say his mission in the world is? Why are they in conflict?

  3. We often say Jesus “lived without sin.” The Pharisees would disagree: he does several things in these passages which made him ceremonially unclean. Why is this a big deal? What does it teach us about how Jesus views cleanliness?

  4. We also often say that God “cannot bear sin in His presence.” Have you ever thought about how Jesus challenges that belief? What does Jesus’s ministry teach us about who God is and what God wants for His children?

  5. Do you sometimes feel tempted to think about purity as something you start with…and are trying not to lose? What would it change in your life if you flipped that around: what if you’re becoming more pure, as a follower of Jesus? Does that change the ways you think of your past? Your future? Your present?



Kenny Camacho