Do You Enjoy Change?

Good morning, Church. Do you enjoy change? I’m sure if you sit and think about it for a moment, you’d say that it depends on what kind of change I’m talking about. Some changes, we know, are for the better. But many changes, we fear, are for the worse. That can make unplanned change a discomforting and stressful thing. It might even make us want to complain or protest or fight back against it. But sometimes that change comes from God, whether we realize it at first or not.

While Mark gives us a treasure trove of information about Jesus in his gospel account, you may have noticed that not everybody who was there watching and listening to Jesus walked away happy. That’s sort of surprising. You might think that Jesus’ healings and teachings and demonstrations of power would win over everybody who witnessed them, but they didn’t. Why not? In part, Jesus’ entry into public ministry created confrontations with those who already held public and religious power, and people don’t usually like to give up power in any arena. If you control the remote control in your house, do you like to give it up? I didn’t think so.

Jesus, however, claims to have authority even over the things of God (Mark 2:28). And as one with authority, he told people and showed people how they had misunderstood or misused God’s word in the past in ways that contradicted God’s good intentions. You might think that spreading good news and multiplying blessings in the lives of ordinary people would be welcomed by all, but that began to change when Jesus’ actions bumped up against the traditions and the traditional repositories of authority in his culture. The same dynamic still exists today in our communities and in God’s church. If we’re going to navigate those issues well, we need to start by listening to the one in charge of change.

—Patrick Barber