Closely woven with his way of being among us, Jesus taught us. His central metaphor was the “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” – used 99 times in the New Testament. For those of us who don’t live under military occupation, the imagery can fall a bit flat and abstract – a theological term to be unpacked. For Jesus’s hearers the term “kingdom” must have elicited a visceral response, and not necessarily a pleasant one. Jesus’s hearers went about their lives under the rule of an emperor, governed by a vassal king,

When Jesus told his disciples that the temple would fall, he was right. It was destroyed in 70 C.E. by the Romans. But there is another, more important, sense in which Jesus saw the temple falling. He saw the sacrificial logic that sustains the temple beginning to crumble, and when this happens the entire system falls apart – slowly but surely. This is what Jesus set in motion on the cross and it’s truly great news, but let’s be clear, it also creates an unstable and dangerous situation in which “nation will rise against nation.” How can this be?

“Did you see the offering of the widow?” Jesus asks his disciples. “In case you think that the warning I just made about the scribes is unwarranted, this woman has just deposited all she had into an offering used to maintain the very oppressive system that has devoured her house in order to build another.” Could it be that Jesus is calling attention to the widow’s actions not so much for her giving but as a continuation of his pesky habit of pointing out the injustice of the scribes, the wealthy, and the oppressive system of temple-based economics that had been built for self-sustainability by those in power?

I recently heard an acronym popular among church youth groups for helping shape their understanding of faith: J.O.Y., which stands for Jesus, others, yourself. It’s a memory tool used to help young Christians in their understanding of discipleship.

Although I wasn’t familiar with J.O.Y., its general meaning was something drilled deeply into my young faith as a Christian. Having attended church all my life, I had been conditioned to see my spirituality through the following lenses: 1) put God first in your life! 2) love your neighbor, and 3) your own needs are not as important.

Our lectionary text this week invites us into one of the principal issues for us at Street Psalms – knowing how to see. Ironically, our teacher this week in learning how to see is actually a blind man. Many Biblical scholars have placed this text at the end of a portion of Mark’s Gospel that begins with the healing of a blind man, thus the section starting with Mark 8:22 and ending with Mark 10:52 is bookended by the healing of blind men. In between these two miracles, Jesus is trying feverishly to get the disciples to see and understand what he’s saying about his death and resurrection, but they are blind to his teachings.

The New Testament scholar N.T. Wright in his book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, reminds us that Jesus was glorified and crowned king in the most unusual coronation ceremony imaginable: on the cross. Of course, we like to think the coronation ceremony happened sometime after the nasty business of the cross – perhaps sometime after the resurrection in heaven as a reward for having done such a difficult deed. But this is not Jesus’s understanding of his own kingship, as this week’s passage makes clear.

We’ll find out in a few verses that “give up your wealth” isn’t what this man wants to hear. But putting aside for a moment the questions about entering heaven with or without our respective riches, or what size holes camels can actually fit through, first let’s consider just one word: “good.”

All three synoptic gospels note that Jesus takes issue with the phrasing of the rich man’s use of the word “good.” And each time Jesus says that only one is good, and that one is God.

During the recent visit of Pope Francis to the United States, one optic stood out: his daily embrace of children. Cynics might dismiss this as calculated media strategy or worse. An online commenter sneered, “Imagine that, another priest hugging and kissing children.” But Pope Francis, the “pope of the periphery,” makes cynicism difficult with his transparently genuine delight among the vulnerable.

This week’s lectionary Gospel text, Mark 9:38-50, is not for the faint of heart. The disciples encounter “someone” casting out demons in the name of Jesus. They want to shut down this rogue minister and put an end to his ministry because he’s not part of their inner circle. But the outsider and his ministry is no threat to Jesus whatsoever. He says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” The real threat that Jesus exposes in this text is the hidden envy brewing in the disciples’ hearts.

Reading Jesus’s comments about children, we are prone to overlay modern notions of the innocence, wonder, and simple delight of childhood. Social historians tell us that at least in the West, this conception especially arose and flourished with the “cult of the child” in post-Enlightenment Victorian times. Romanticized, idyllic images of the child abounded in books and on tea towels. Wordsworth would gush, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”

Perhaps the most beautiful question Jesus ever asked his disciples is found at the very center of the Gospel of Mark. In ancient Jewish literature, the key to a story’s meaning is often found in the middle of the story rather than the end, as is often the case in Western storytelling. This emphasis on the center is most obvious in Jewish “chiastic” poetry, often found in the Psalms; the very center of the poem gives the main point. For the Jewish storyteller, each story has a “sacred center” that contains its unique treasure of meaning.

Spread out in front of José was the ragtag congregation of drug addicts and alcoholics to whom he had come to preach. The problem this particular morning was that as he settled in behind the pulpit, he was unable to speak. He stood there feeling helpless until one of the ladies in the front row came up asking him if he was okay. Then she turned and proclaimed to the people around her, “The preacher can’t talk. He needs us to pray for him!”

Richard Beck is Professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University. On his blog Experimental Theology, Beck writes: “This radical openness to the Other always seems to get undermined in our churches. Why is that?, I mused. After thinking about it, the answer hit me. And it was a simple answer. The same thing that caused the exclusion of people from table fellowship in Jesus’s day is the exact same thing that causes the exclusion today. That is, a group of people is considered to be ‘unclean’ and these people are just not welcome. The reasons for being declared ‘unclean’ might have changed, but the underlying dynamic is still the same. And I began to realize: The logic of being ‘unclean,’ a source of ‘spiritual pollution,’ was undermining Jesus’ radical call to love.”

Jesus, like the disciples who were blind to your presence until they dined with you in the Resurrection, we too are blind to your presence until you dine with us. You are the stranger among us, revealed as the loving Host of the meal of our salvation. Open our eyes, Lord, to the stranger among us. We want to see and celebrate you at work in the world – creating, sustaining, and uniting all of creation in the meal of our salvation. Amen.

Our participation in Holy Communion unites us with the world, particularly those people and places in the world with whom we are most estranged. The Lord’s Table is a radically inclusive table that not only makes room for the “least of these,” it gives them preferred seating. These honored diners are precisely the ones who best remind us that the Eucharist is not the property of Christians as it is sometimes portrayed. It is the universal sign of God’s peace for all.

Growing up as a relative outsider to the Christian faith, but born into its cultural heritage, I understood this passage to be another exhibit in the “women are seductive and untrustworthy” narrative.

A young woman danced and by dancing got what she wanted, right? And another prophet of God was sacrificed to crowd desire and people-pleasing – a mirror of what would soon enough happen to Jesus Christ.

Having given away or sold most of our stuff, my wife Melanie and I were headed to Asia as community development workers with an organization called Gooddeeds. The name pretty much summed up what we wanted to do. As a young couple we wanted to engage our lives and our faith with the poorest, someplace. Woefully clueless but eager, we cast about for, well, clues. Tips, training, insights – anything to steer us in the right direction.