WDJA (What Did Jesus Ask?) III: Who will not leave the 99 to find the one?

2024 Fall

September 22, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 18:10–14

But as someone put it, “the one statistically unimportant wanderer means everything to this shepherd. Human thinking says ‘Let it go; we have 99.’ God’s thinking is, ‘there were 100; where is my one.’ Jesus is trying to convert us to the mentality of the one, to the importance of the statistically unimportant.”[1]

Sometimes we get this right, this mentality of the one. Sometimes we pour all our energy into the straggler. You might have one child you can ignore from mewling infancy to sensible adulthood. You don’t have to say a word to her, you practically don’t have to think about her, and she’ll still win the state championship in lacrosse and get a scholarship to Northwestern and become a brain surgeon. Meanwhile her younger brother has trouble reading and making friends and has you scurrying around from teacher to therapist to private tutor.

[1]Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, vol. 2: The Churchbook (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, first published 1990, revised 2004), p. 219.

Who Touched Me?

October 13, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg

WDJA (What Did Jesus Ask?) V: Why are you talking about having no bread?

October 6, 2024 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Mark 8:14–21

This passage is “Jesus in the interrogative mode” as Bill Evertsberg has been putting it. This passage is more question than anything else. A flood of questions. A torrent of questions. A deluge. And it’s hard not to feel the exasperation of Jesus. His questions disclose his mood. By the time we get to this scene in Mark 8, the disciples have been on a long journey away from home. They have been back and forth across the Sea of Galilee at least twice. If you’ve been on a boat ride across the Sea of Galilee, you’ll be able to picture this perfectly. On the boat ride over, Jesus calms a storm. On the boat ride back, he walks on water. On one side of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus feeds a crowd of 5,000. Then crossing back to the other side of the sea, he performs that same miracle again, this time for a crowd of 4,000. (That’s more people than fit in the Lyric Opera and the Chicago Theatre combined.)

What do you want me to do?

September 29, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Mark 10:46–52

There are all kinds of good and bad reasons to come to church, but it’s good to pause for a moment and consider what we hope will happen here between us and Jesus. Maybe we want Jesus to do for us the same thing that he did for Blind Bartimaeus—open our blind eyes. Open our eyes to the fact that not implacable wrath but unfailing love is the beating heart of the universe. He loves us enough to go to Golgotha. We are indeed beautifully loved. In one of his novels Czech author Milan Kundera puts it like this: “All [our] faults are redeemed by love’s magic eyes.”#_ftn1 Do you see what he means? That only when we see ourselves with the magic eyes of God’s love can we live up to and into the person God knows we have the capacity to become? #_ftnref1Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 122.