Perspective: INTRO
Pastor Pastor Andreas Beccai and Series Guide Team.
We began our first season of The Beautiful Upset in the middle of Mark’s Gospel. Which is an odd place to begin a story. Usually, you meet the characters before joining them halfway down the road.
But we did it on purpose. In Mark 8, Jesus begins to speak plainly about his suffering, rejection and death. His disciples have come to believe he is the Messiah. Now they must discover how little that word means what they thought it meant. We joined them there and followed Jesus towards Jerusalem.
For season two, we’re going back to the beginning. There’s something to be said for returning to the opening pages of a story when you know where it leads. You notice things you missed. A word takes on weight. An encounter that seemed ordinary turns out to have been telling you something all along.
Mark’s first words are “Good News”. Before the arguments, before the bewilderment of the disciples, before the cross, he tells us that the story we are about to read is good. We may need to come back to that when Jesus does something we don’t understand.
And he will. He will welcome people others have learned to keep at a distance. He will forgive sins, interrupt familiar religious arrangements and call people away from work they know how to do into a life they can scarcely imagine. Some will be delighted. Others will wish he had left things alone. We may find ourselves in both groups.
Over these six weeks, we’ll return to those early encounters. We’ll watch people make their first attempts to understand Jesus, and perhaps become a little more honest about our own. It is easy, after years of hearing these stories, to assume we know what he will say. Familiarity can keep us from listening.
So we begin again. With good news, a voice in the wilderness and the coming of someone we may not know quite as well as we thought.
Welcome to season two of The Beautiful Upset.
Pastor Andreas
But we did it on purpose. In Mark 8, Jesus begins to speak plainly about his suffering, rejection and death. His disciples have come to believe he is the Messiah. Now they must discover how little that word means what they thought it meant. We joined them there and followed Jesus towards Jerusalem.
For season two, we’re going back to the beginning. There’s something to be said for returning to the opening pages of a story when you know where it leads. You notice things you missed. A word takes on weight. An encounter that seemed ordinary turns out to have been telling you something all along.
Mark’s first words are “Good News”. Before the arguments, before the bewilderment of the disciples, before the cross, he tells us that the story we are about to read is good. We may need to come back to that when Jesus does something we don’t understand.
And he will. He will welcome people others have learned to keep at a distance. He will forgive sins, interrupt familiar religious arrangements and call people away from work they know how to do into a life they can scarcely imagine. Some will be delighted. Others will wish he had left things alone. We may find ourselves in both groups.
Over these six weeks, we’ll return to those early encounters. We’ll watch people make their first attempts to understand Jesus, and perhaps become a little more honest about our own. It is easy, after years of hearing these stories, to assume we know what he will say. Familiarity can keep us from listening.
So we begin again. With good news, a voice in the wilderness and the coming of someone we may not know quite as well as we thought.
Welcome to season two of The Beautiful Upset.
Pastor Andreas
No Comments