MEDITATION: MARK 6: 14 – 29

A highly recommended link: http://www.janrichardson.com/ Jan Richardson is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, author, modern painter in the medieval tradition of illuminated manuscripts (you can find these copyrighted images online.) She is a very thoughtful Biblical commentator, as well. Here’s a taste of her thinking about this Sunday’s gospel:

 “Death does not have the last word in John’s story; blood is not the final legacy of the Baptizer. John had succeeded in making a way for the dawn that his father sang about at his birth. The one who “came as a witness to testify to the light” (John 1.7) had completed his purpose and his call, giving himself with complete abandon. “He himself was not the light,” the Gospel of John points out, yet the Baptist shimmered with steadfast purpose and with the joy that had marked his life from the moment he met Jesus.

The life of John the Baptist was utterly intertwined with the life of Jesus. And yet something about his love of Christ and his singleness of purpose enabled him to remain so much himself. In the fierce and focused rhythm and flow of his living and his dying, the Baptizer beckons us to reckon with what it means to divest ourselves in the service of Christ without becoming diminished, without giving up the self that God created.”