The Good Portion

Years ago, when she was a student at Chico State, my daughter came over for a visit. With her head in the refrigerator, she remarked: "Nothing ruins a good book like having to read it for a class!" In one breath she captured the human condition. Reading a good book is a joy. So why does being required to read it kill the joy? The answer lies at the heart of what it is to be a sinner. “I was once alive apart from the law,” wrote the Apostle Paul, “but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died” (Rom. 7:9-11). When a commandment appears, up pops the defiant head of rebellion, ready to poison our best pleasures. In the flesh, autonomy is king. We think of ourselves as free, yet we are dominated by our worldly desires, our physical urges, and our unrestrained personalities. We resent doing what we’ve been told we should or must do, even when we would happily have done it on our own. So we resist, or, when the fear of consequences outweighs the benefits, we submi...

The day after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus set in motion the chain of events that would lead to his death. Throwing the money-changers  out of the temple (11:1-19) was like kicking a hornets’ nest. Enraged, the chief priests, scribes, and elders devised a plan to destroy him. They challenged Jesus’ authority. With one question he silenced them and with one parable he indicted them. They retreated, but they regrouped. Proving the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows, they sent political rivals, the Pharisees and Herodians, to “trap him in his talk” (Mk. 12:13). Jesus stymied them as well. Finally, the Sadducees, who, Mark tells us, “say that there is no resurrection” (12:18), approached him with a question of their own (12:19-23): There was a widow who, in hopes of producing an heir for her first husband, married, each of her dead husband’s six brothers, one by one, each upon the death of the former. Eventually they all died, and so did she, without produ...