As Jesus leads his disciples and his followers into new territory, they go on a journey, which they discover is quite challenging: spiritually, emotionally, and physically challenging, even demanding. But alongside that, we are going to see that he is going into new territory spiritually. It's not Jewish land, and there are not Jewish people there. He is taking his disciples across a lake to a region that is both unfamiliar and quite uncomfortable for the disciples. As Jesus steps into human history, he keeps showing them through his words, his works, and his ways that this is what happens when the kingdom of God is on the move-when God rules in people's lives, when God rules in communities.Īt this point, Jesus is spreading the message even further. He is speaking to an oppressed people for whom God has become a distant thing, a distant religion, rather than a close relational reality.
What Mark reveals up to this point is that Jesus has stepped onto the stage of human history, proclaiming a message of good news: the message of the kingdom of God. Mark is writing to a group of believers who are in a really difficult, threatening time the church in Rome was pressured day in and day out for their faith. We are in Mark's gospel, at the end of Mark 4, and let me remind us all of the context.
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