Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• For the last two weeks, we’ve heard Jesus perform powerful miracles: calming a storm, exorcizing a demon, healing a woman, and bringing a child back from the dead. In addition to demonstrating Jesus’ power, those miracles provide a contrast to the reception Jesus received in his hometown, with the people who should have known him best.
• Jesus’ ministry in Nazareth began the same way it did in Capernaum, with Jesus teaching in the synagogue (1:21-22). But unlike Capernaum where he cast out a demon (1:23-28), in Nazareth his teaching was met with doubt and he left without performing a “deed of power” (6:5).
• The reference to Jesus’ mother and siblings returns the question first raised in chapter 3, to what family does Jesus belong? Once again Jesus’ family is identified as those who follow him and who do the will of God rather than his biological family.
• V. 3 is the only evidence in scripture of a possible occupation for Jesus. The word translated as carpenter is tektōn, which would have been anyone who worked with wood or other hard materials. As a craftsman in prosperous Galilee, Jesus’ family would have been of a middle class status, not an impoverished tenant farmer or day laborer, but not of the educated class either. Villagers commonly resented those who tried to cast themselves above their status, as the people of Nazareth might have felt Jesus was doing by teaching in the synagogue.
• The Gospel of Mark does not include a birth narrative, and the belief in what’s known as the “perpetual virginity of Mary” developed later, so the writer of Mark doesn’t have to make sense of Jesus having siblings. The point of this is not to create a family relationship with Jesus, but to demonstrate the scandal of Jesus presenting himself as a teacher when those he grew up with knew him to be a carpenter.
• V. 6 says that Jesus was “amazed” (thaumazō) at their lack faith. Thaumazō is the same word used to describe the crowd’s response to Jesus casting out the demon in 5:20. It is ironic that Jesus’ response mirrors the crowd’s.
• After Jesus left Nazareth, he took another preaching tour of Galilee. On this second tour, the disciples whom followed him the first time are now sent out in groups of two to expand the mission.
• The disciples were successfully able to carry out the mission Jesus sent them on, but they do not have their own independent authority, they work under the authority of Jesus.
• Sending missionaries out in pairs seems to have been common practice in early Christianity (Jesus called two brothers (Mark 1:16-20), Acts has Peter and John (Acts 3:11, 8:9) and Barnabas and Paul (Acts 11:25-23)). It could also be part of the Deuteronomic law that required two witnesses to testify (Numbers 35:30; Deuteronomy 19:15).
• 6:8-11 gives instructions for how the disciples were to act during their travels. Mark permitted a staff and sandals, which differed from Luke and Matthew who did not. But Mark did not allow an extra cloak, which would have provided warmth at night. This would have forced the disciples to depend on someone to house them. Since they were not permitted to carry money, the missionary work was not to be a money-making expedition. Requirement to stay at the first place that housed them kept them from seeking better accommodations elsewhere.
• Shaking the dust off one’s feet was a gesture of cursing a place, even stronger than washing one’s hands.
Works Sourced:
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
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