#mark 12

[tomicscomics]

11/08/2024

Shutter your windows, you shuddering widows.

___

JOKE-OGRAPHY: 1. In this Bible story, Jesus warns His followers against teachers who value their status more than their mission. They wear long, rich robes to show off their status. They go out to marketplaces to be recognized and greeted. They receive seats of honor at lavish banquets. They recite lengthy prayers in public to impress people with their piety. Yet, when entrusted by law with helping to manage the assets of grieving widows, they take advantage and cheat them out of their property (Jesus says they "devour the houses of widows" in most translations). These hypocrites like to LOOK good instead of BEING good, and Jesus says that'll earn them a terrible punishment. 2. In this cartoon, Jesus says His line from the Bible, ending with, "Yet they devour the houses of widows." He's explaining how the hypocritical teachers take advantage of people, and a nearby widow quietly listens and concurs. Suddenly, a flock of hypocritical teachers descends to feast upon her home, and she's forced to fight the literal embodiment of Jesus's figurative speech. 3. I've said it before, but using straight up verbs as onomatopoeias is super funny to me, and a lofty scholar hissing while he's thwacked by a broomstick is surely novel, right?

[a-queer-seminarian]

Excerpt from “Proleptic Sexual Love: God's Promiscuity Reflected in Christian Polyamory” by Robert Goss, 2004

[Read entire article here]

[In Mark 12:18-27,] the Sadducee critics challenge Jesus on the notion of the afterlife. They propose to Jesus the example of a woman who has been married seven times and ask him, 'In the resurrection, whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her' (Mk 12.23).

Jesus responds, 'For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven' (Mk 12.25).

In my years in religious life, I heard several sermons on this passage.

'Like angels in heaven' justified celibate religious life, 'Like angels' was understood as 'sexless' by centuries of Christian thought that transformed angels from sexual beings in the intertestamental period to sexless, disembodied spirits. 

Biblical scholar William Countryman writes:

Think...of the little letter of Jude, where it appears that early Christians were teaching that you needed to have sex with angels in order to gain high standing in heaven, Jude refers io this teaching only in veiled ways, but that is what he's attacking. Of course, his readers knew the Hebrew Bible (mostly in Greek translation), and they knew the story in Genesis 6.1-4 about angels having sex with human women and the offspring being giants, Jude refers to that story and also to the story of the men of Sodom who in the same manner as these angels 'went after strange flesh' (Jude 7, referring to Genesis 18).

Even today if you suggest that angels were sexual in a sermon, many Christians suffer an erotophobic panic attack, picturing their sacred icons of angels popularized by such a program as Touched by Angel. The idea of a 'sexual' Delia Reese as an angel is too much to bear, even for some queer Christian imaginations.

But if you strip away the overlay of more than a millennium and a half of Christian readings of sexless angels and ask what is intended by the phrase 'like the angels', the intent of Jesus' logion is that there is no marriage and family in God's coming reign. 

God abolishes the institution of marriage, which is understood as a property right and ownership of women. 

But traditionally, ecclesial exegetes have understood that this text not only abolishes marriage but also sexuality because of its narrow interpretation of marriage for the purpose of procreation. But nothing merits such a reading of the abolishment of sexuality, and a queer reading can restore sexuality to the coming reign of God.

Certainly, Jesus attacked marriage as the patriarchal possession of women in marriage and the patriarchal family, on which the Jewish and Roman political order of domination was based. One can maintain that Jesus was asserting the abolishment of patriarchal marriage in the coming reign of God. 

Virginia Moiienkott writes:

Milton interpreted Jesus' remark about no heavenly marrying or giving in marriage (Matt, 22,29-30} to mean not that there would be no sex in heaven, but rather that sex in resurrection bodies would have none of the binary possessiveness and constriction of marriage in a fallen world, instead, as Jesus put it, resurrection bodies would be 'as the angels in heaven' — a vision of astonishing freedom.

A queer reading might likewise affirm that there is no marriage and patriarchal family, but it also might assert that there is sexuality without procreation in the coming reign of God. But there is no more marriage. This is confirmed in the Lukan version of the story when Jesus says, 'Indeed they cannot die anymore because they are angels in heaven' (Lk. 20.36).

The Sadducees are traditionalists who reject the Pharisee solution of resurrection to the afterlife but who, in addition, find transcendence of death in the lives of their descendants. In God's coming reign, there is no need for marriage and children when you live forever in resurrected bodies. But does that abolish sexuality in the age to come? Or is the reign of God a giant bathhouse for queer sex and other polymorphous forms as Milton dares to imagine?

[biblequotesdaily]

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Mark 12:30 & 31

[lonestarfangirl2014]

If he's back can the vision kids please meet their grandpa....and great grandpa to for that matter.....

Wait I need to get caught up. The marvel wiki said mark 12 is visions uncle....lol I guess I can accept that but I still want the kids to call him grandpa at least once.

Lol now I'm just imaging a pym family get together

[nelc]

A #USNavy FJ-4 Fury practising free-fall nuclear bomb delivery via toss bombing (Circa 1957). Notice the tiny counterweight under the right wing?

[coreofthebible]

The center strand of the core of the Bible

The center strand of the core of the Bible

Matthew 22:36-40 – “Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest? ” He said to him, “Love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. “This is the greatest and most important command. “The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. “All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”Mark 12:28-31 – One of the scribes approached. When he…

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[biblebloodhound]

Be Generous (Mark 12:41-44)

If there’s a litmus test of one’s true benevolence and spirituality, it’s how money is handled and/or mishandled.

The Widow’s Mite by James Christensen Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you; this poor widow has put more into the…

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[christ-l0ver]