Don't Sleep Through The Wedding

I was learning to play the card game Hearts.

And I was in the middle of one of these early games, and I thought I was doing really well, but I was actually doing very poorly because the way Hearts works, you do not win by getting the most points, you win by getting the least points.

Every time you end up with a heart in your hand, you get an extra point.

But you could shoot for the moon, and if you shoot for the moon, you get all the hearts plus the queen of spades, you get 26, and you get zero points.

Everyone else gets 26 points.

All I heard was, "Shoot for 26." [laughing] So I was trying to win the game, not realizing until we're about four or five hands in that I was actually in very, very last place because I didn't know how to keep score.

Everybody has an idea in their mind of how you keep score in life.

Like, what is it that makes a good life? What is it that counts? What is it that gets measured as something that is of, of value? This is how life is supposed to work.

This is what a good life looks like.

This is what a good family looks like.

This is what a good marriage looks like.

This is what good children look like.

You, you show up here, you don't show up there.

You do this, you don't do that.

You say these things, you don't say th- those things.

You like these posts, you, you don't like those posts.

You associate with these people, you don't associate with those people.

It's like a big scoreboard, and we all have an idea of what a good life or good person looks like.

By the way, this is what secular people do.

This is what religious people do.

This is not a strictly religious thing.

This is a human thing that gets done.

And when something doesn't fit in one of our categories, doesn't make it on one of our scoreboards, we, we assume that something might be off.

The question that this passage is gonna bring up for us, though, is what if our categories and what if our scoreboards are actually the problem, and that they are keeping score in the wrong kinda way? That is the tension we're finding here in Mark chapter 2.

We are right in the middle of what scholars would call the conflict narratives in the life of Jesus, that Jesus is in the middle of having a stream of episodes, especially with religious leaders, where He's letting them down, He's confronting their expectations, and they're not liking it as it's happening.