Who do you show Jesus is?
Caesarea Philippi seems an odd place for Jesus to bring his disciples. Although technically within historic Israel, it was in a region of Greek villages, which were remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire 300 years before.
Herod the Great, the same Herod that bult the Temple Mount and hunted Jesus at his birth, established the city and built a temple to Augustus Caesar there. The people were supposed to worship Caesar as a god. (After Herod died, his son Philip the Tetrarch governed that region and added his very Greek name to it.)
Herod the Great also built a major temple there to Pan. Pan was a Greek god of fertility, agriculture and flocks who was worshipped in the region. At Caesarea Philippi is a huge cave which they thought was an entrance to the underworld.
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Be Doers
Jesus took the man who was deaf and had an impediment of speech aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers in his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then he said “Be opened” and his ears were opened and his tongue was released and he spoke plainly.
That seems very strange and I expect it seemed very strange to the people in that moment as well as the early Christians who first heard Mark’s gospel. Jesus was perfectly capable of healing people from afar, as he did the girl in the other healing we heard this morning. Why did he go farther than simply laying his hands upon the man as requested?
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In and Out
Many years ago, a parishioner gave me a book for my birthday called The Maker’s Diet. The author suffered from Crohn’s disease, which is a chronic auto-immune condition that attacks the small and large intestine. After seeing 70 doctors and trying every diet, drug and supplement he could find without success, he decided to see what the Bible said about healthy living; diet and exercise and so on.
There's nothing quite like a gift that at once says, "I really care," and "You're getting fat."
What goes in may not defile, but it sure can hurt. I thought at the time it was a trendy diet, but it turns out that like finances and a lot of other areas, we find the Bible has very practical truth in it.
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