Reflecting on Mark 2 18-28

This week we’re studying Mark 2:18-28, to inform our consideration of the “social teaching of the Christian church” that is “the Christian view of recreation.”

We may see both some point of contact between Jesus’ teaching on fasting and Sabbath observance and whatever contemporary Christians might mean by “recreation.” We may also see plenty of difference. Because of that, we might want to begin our reflections on the text by asking ourselves what we mean by “recreation,” and what we think that might or might not have to do with “Sabbath” and Sabbath observance.

We will probably want to review what we know about Sabbath in the first place, and when and how we have learned what we’ve learned about it. [Here’s one contemporary rabbinic source.] [Here’s a Christian source, that advocates strict Sabbath observance.] How does our knowledge about the Sabbath seem to influence our understanding of its relationship to “recreation”?

For that matter, what are our thoughts and feelings about the Sabbath? How do those seem to be influenced by the things we know about it? What more would we like to learn about the Sabbath? Why?

Back to “recreation” – what aspects of “recreation” seem to be addressed by these reflections on Sabbath? And what aspects of “recreation” seem not to be addressed? How helpful is it, do we think, to reflect on “recreation” and “the Christian view” of it, within the frame of “Sabbath? What other frames might be available to Christians for thinking about “recreation,” and how might those take our reflections in different directions? What might we gain, and what might we fail to notice, if we did that?

Some notes on the text are here. Here are a couple of additional questions we might want to think about, or to discuss in class:

The first part of the text addresses fasting. How do we ourselves think about fasting?

[More personal] When do we ourselves practice fasting, and for what reason or reasons? What have we noticed about it, or learned from it? Would we describe fasting as recreational, and why, or why not?

What do Jesus’ examples of the unshrunk cloth and the new wine mean to us? What does Jesus seem to be saying to the critics in the context of the original conversation? What does the conversation say to us today?

What thoughts do we have about Jesus’ use of the story from 1 Samuel 21, about David taking the Showbread, to answer the critics? What are the implications, do we think, of Jesus’ using this particular story?

[More personal] How do we ourselves keep the Sabbath? Why?

Image: “After lunch on the banks of the Seine” Daniel Ridgway Knight, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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