Wednesday: Second Week in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 2: WEDNESDAY...

...People sometimes have the idea that the world of the Bible is rather like the world of some old churches: quiet, serious, a bit old-fashioned, with nobody ever doing or saying anything to shock or frighten people. Sometimes, indeed, those who organize the biblical passages that are to be read out in churches seem deliberately to miss out the bits that might show how wrong that view is.

Certainly it’s a good job we haven’t missed out this passage, partly because it is indeed everything that people sometimes think the Bible is not and partly because it is quite important for the overall story Mark is telling us.

To begin with, of course, the behaviour of Herod and his family reads, even at two thousand years’ distance, like the sort of thing you’d find in the gossip pages of a trashy magazine. A newspaper reporter once told a friend of mine that the stories that sell best include sex, royalty and religion; and this one has them all. In spades...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright