Happy Ash Wednesday and Lent, Beloved! I hope you find the space to worship somewhere today to hear the call to repentance, receive the ashes, and be blessed. Here’s today’s post…

One of the most famous parts of the Gospel of Matthew is the Sermon on the Mount. It is among the first things Jesus does in Matthew and takes up three full chapters (5, 6 & 7). Here in Mark, we get it in eight verses from chapter 9 and a couple more coming in 10. Because of Mark’s quick, short and crude writing style, we get a quick, short, and crude teaching. The problem with that is that then we come away with a quick, short, and crude understanding of what Jesus is teaching here.

What Mark misses that I think is key to these teachings is what we find in Matthew, which is first of all a connection to the 10 commandments, and secondly, a getting to the heart and spirit of the commandments, not the letter of them. Mark misses that. The Jesus in Mark here seems suddenly concerned with mere moral behavior, which is ambiguous and undefined. It lacks depth. This could be good in that it forces us to look within ourselves to figure out how God might be working in and on us, and this is a very suitable idea for Ash Wednesday, but it’s also so crude in its telling that I find it a bit of a turnoff.

That being said, it’s important that it’s there. All along the Gospel of Mark has focused on Jesus moving from the Son of God who heals the sick, casts out demons, walks on water and calms storms to the Son of God who will be arrested, killed and ultimately will rise. The Gospel of Mark has been about the Kingdom tearing open and unleashing the Spirit of God onto the world. It has been about wholeness, healing, and restoration. In this sense, it’s been a big-picture book (as opposed to a big picture-book). These verses remind us of the importance of the small-picture as well. What’s going on within us matters. How we live our individual lives day-to-day matters. Holiness of heart, mind, and soul holiness” matters.

We must be about the big-picture work of recognizing Jesus as the “Son of God” who both performs miracles for the world and yet will also suffer for the world, but we also must be about the small-picture work of letting the spirit of Christ dwell within us to guide and steer our lives to holy living. Mark reminds us here that though what is going on around me in the world matters, so too does what is going in within.