Mark Study: Part 1

I know I said I'd post often, and I promise I'll try.  I know I said I'd keep these fairly short, and I promise I'll try.  But dang, these past 5 days have been packed which leaves me no time to write and long posts.  Ugh, my life.  (Just kidding, I'm loving this.)

What have been up to that makes me so busy, you ask?

Monday: we had staff hang-out for women at Naty's house.  (Naty is a staff woman at Hope.)  It was great to get to know the women that I'll be working with this year better.

Tuesday: I was just at Hope, both replying to emails and being available to do whatever task needed to be done.

Wednesday: Staff Meeting!  It was great to finally hear from the different staff how I can help them this coming year as an intern.  Hope has many different ministries so there are a lot of different ways for me to serve.  I plan on trying our some different things - more on that later :)

Thursday and Friday: Mark Study!  That's what the rest of this post shall be about!

What is Mark Study?  It's a class that is done retreat-style.  We're at Hope all day with food, drinks, and our Bibles, going through the book of Mark.  This Thursday and Friday were half-days: 8:30-12:30.  Next week will be full days.  We basically just go line by line over the book of Mark inside a few parameters:

- you can cross-reference anything in the Old Testament.
- you can use Bible encyclopedias or dictionaries.
- you can't reference the New Testament.  At all (except what the text in Mark explicitly says).
- we spend the majority of time making observations from the text.  Don't interpret what it means until the end.

This all sounds easy, right?  IT'S NOT.  We constantly want to jump to conclusions and think about what the text means.  But can we do that properly if we're missing the majority of what the text actually says?  Not really.  It's been great to just go slow, get a feel for how the original readers took certain things when they read Mark, see how Mark's narrative connects to so much in the Old Testament.  My mind has been blown away.

Here are just a few things that have hit me thus far:
- the parallels between John the Baptist and Elijah are far more extensive than I originally thought.
- the scene where Jesus is baptized is so much more than just a baptism.  It is God the Father announcing Jesus as King.
- Mark's way of wording things was proclaiming to his readers that Christ is God and the promised Messiah.

There'll be more to come after a few more days of class!

Love.