The last time we were together we came to Jesus’ appointing of the 12 apostles. The crowd seems to be unrelenting, they are so constant and so demanding that Jesus has asked His first followers to make sure a boat is in the Sea of Galilee so that He can escape the crowd if they get to the point where He feels crushed by them. After spending all night in prayer, His Father leads Him to surround Himself with the 12 men that had been chosen to be the “sent ones”, those that would remain with Jesus, that would be entrusted with His gospel, filled with
His Spirit and used by God to build His church. To kind of tie a bow around how we finished the last class, Jesus appointed those that would be anointed to fulfill His commission and do “even greater things” than He Himself had done. Mark then quickly takes us from Jesus’ surrounding Himself with the apostles to another view of the crowd and then the most serious opposition that He had experienced to this point in Mark’s letter. John Stott writes “We come now to a painful section—painful because its theme is the inability of people to see who
ought to be able to do so, in the spiritual sense.” In this section Jesus begins to speak in parables as His response to being rejected and defamed by the scribes and misunderstood by His own family.