 Years ago, a book came out, The Five Love Languages. Perhaps some of you have come across it. Gary Smalley was the author. It came out in the 90s. And we read it. We discussed it as a family. And we basically figured each other out, except for me. Nobody could really figure out, is it gift-giving, quality time, you know, what is it? And it went on for two or three years, and perhaps more. One day, though, our daughter, Hannah, who's got four, it was little Tessa who was crawling across the floor and doing what she'd like to do. And that is pulling books off the shelf. And when we saw it, Hannah looked and said, books, that's her love language. And a light came on for all of us, because at long last, we finally figured out, my love language, books, reading them, writing them, but especially collecting them and sharing them with other people. And so that's why this sort of looks like my desk at home right now. I hope to get to various things. But before we officially begin, I want to say something that I sort of forgot to say, and that is welcome to more than 2,500 people who are watching with us via live stream. So can I see a show of hands of those of you who come from different countries? 15 different countries are with us this evening via live stream. Glory to God. You know, Kimberly mentioned that this past year has obviously posed all sorts of challenges to us and to you as well. And what she described was something really beautiful. We never would have thought of it. We didn't see it coming. That is when our two seminary and sons came home and since Jeremiah was scheduled to become a deacon, we really asked him to lead our family prayer. And of course he used the divine office, the brievery. And so for weeks, for months, for much of last year, it almost felt like something of a domestic monastery. And our home is usually much more like Grand Central Station than a convent. But there again, it was a sort of unexpected sabbatical with lots of grace. And then after Jeremiah's ordination to the transitional deaconate, but before he was ordained on May 21st of this year to the priesthood, we got to hear him preach. And I'll be honest, you know, I was expecting good things, but he surpassed my expectations. Very different than his father. There's an element of poise, self-possession, clarity, you know, whereas I'm more like Vesuvius. If you've never seen me before, you will see that in a few minutes. But you know, I also could see the formation of the next generation of our priests. Because for so long, the scriptures have sort of been a foreign book or a book that has been treated like an ancient historical book that isn't all that historical. And so for 20 years, Kimberl and I had, as our vision, in launching the St. Paul's Center, a legacy. We wanted to leave for our six kids, our 20 grandkids, but all of our other spiritual brothers and sisters, and that is the way to read the Bible from the heart of the church. You know, that's why I entitled the book, The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture, or How the Bible Became a Seconder Book, because that's what's happened over the years, over the last several decades. Things are changing, but consistently what we have found in sponsoring or hosting priest conferences, which the center does in California, in Texas, and West Virginia, and elsewhere, is that we will meet priests who are faithful, who are prayerful, who have been at it for 20, 25, 30, 35 years. One was 37 years a priest who came to us at the end of the retreat, and said, I've been a priest for 37 years. We've gone on annual retreats every year. It's what we're expected to do as priests. This one was better than all of the other 36 put together, because finally, I learned how to read the Bible, how to preach the Bible, how to pray through it, to connect the old and the new, and to see how the new is concealed in the old, and the old is revealed and fulfilled in the new. And he was basically echoing so much of what has been our vision for 20 years, our mission as well. But then he said the question. He asked this question that I've heard before and since, and that is, I went to Catholic grade school all the way through grade 12. And then to a Catholic college and then to a seminary. Why did we never, ever learn to read the Bible this way? And I told him that is the question that we are intent upon retiring so that in a generation, no one will even think of asking it. And if you hear Father Jeremiah preach, you will see what I mean. Because at Sacred Heart in Detroit with amazing teachers like Mary Healy and Peter Williamson, they're learning how to connect the dots, not just between the old and the new, but between sacred scripture and the sacred liturgy, the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Eucharist. And so to hear him preach and to have him surpass my expectations, which were already pretty high, was a great blessing. But I also wanna say this, that to be there at the ordination mass at the end of which our bishop who laid hands upon him to enable him to become our sacramental father in the supernatural order of grace, we watched as our bishop knelt to be blessed by Father Jeremiah. And then in the basement of our parish for the reception, a line formed until finally, his mom knelt at the kneeler and Father Jeremiah blessed Kimberley. And I was next. And I'll be honest, we have golden dharmthar hills. We have in our church, the word of God inspired, the word of God incarnate in sacred scripture, the first half of our worship and in the Holy Eucharist, the second half. And so I really wanna encourage you to take advantage of our time together of study and prayer, but also to take advantage of the resources that you're gonna be hearing about because I do believe that you're a part of this. It was just a little more than 50 years ago in 1970 when Pope Paul VI, now Saint Paul VI, promulgated a new lectionary, the revised lectionary that came out in 1970 basically created this three-year cycle, A, B, and C, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, previously been almost exclusively Matthew. More on that in just a little bit, but also the Old Testament readings. If you take a close look, you'll see roughly about a 400% increase in the amount of the Old Testament Catholics would be exposed to every year. And through the three-year cycle on Sundays and the two-year cycle in the Daily Mass, and the connections were obviously intended. And everybody was excited because that revised lectionary that came out became the template. Within about five years, every single mainline, Protestant denomination adopted our lectionary. The so-called Bible Christians had a lot to learn from those of us who truly are. But it wasn't about competition. I remember talking to my pastor years ago who was a seminary instructor when that happened, and he said, we were so excited, but we were never instructed, so he had no idea what the intention was of restoring this ancient way of reading sacred scripture, the old and the new coordinated in a sacred symphony. So I've been writing a lot, we've been sharing a lot over the years at ABS here as well as the St. Paul's Center. But what I wanna propose is that we are here a lot like Clovis and his companion, walking on the road to Emmaus with our Lord, our risen savior who they didn't recognize though their hearts were burning for hours, but not until he took blessed, broken, gave that bread where their eyes opened in the breaking of the bread and then he vanished. They walked all the way back and they shared with the apostles the first generation clergy, the hierarchy, as lay people you might say. And that's what I want you to do as you gather up the riches of God's word. I want you to take it back to family members, to friends, but also to our spiritual fathers, our priests, our deacons, our clergy, our seminarians too, because we have this great mission of the New Evangelization and a great task of entering more deeply into this partnership of clergy and laity. It's not competitive, it's not merely hierarchical, it really is collaborative. So let's go to our Father in heaven and ask him now in the name of Jesus for this gift, for this grace, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Almighty God, our Father in heaven, we thank you and praise you for giving us your word, the word that fashioned the cosmos out of nothing in the beginning, the word that was articulated in the promises, in the prophecies, in the prefiguring types that prepared your people for the fullness of time and the ultimate disclosure of your powerful love incarnate. And in the name of Jesus, your Son, our Savior, we ask you now to pour out the graces and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that He has merited, that we need so desperately, that we would be illuminated by the light of your word, but that we would also be incandled by the fire of your love, informed but also transformed. We've gotta believe that you want this, even more than we do. So hear us as with humble confidence we pray our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen. Saint Mark, pray for us in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Well, as you've heard me say, prepare the way of the Lord and the wilderness is really a line lifted straight from the opening of the second gospel. And so I wanna spend just a few minutes looking at the man, Saint Mark, and then the message of his gospel. Saint Mark, the evangelist, is by unanimous consent of the ancient tradition, the author. And yet in modern biblical scholarship, we'll often hear that the second gospel, like the other three, are anonymous. That is, they're attributed to four figures but really there isn't any proof that in the original we had the author's name. Well, there are several problems with that but one in particular would be the unanimous consensus in the first five, six, seven centuries, long before they had invented fax machines. How is it that all of the copies of Mark, not a single one of them is unattributed? Besides, if you wanted to forge a gospel and you wanted people to think that it was authoritative, why in the world would you call it the gospel of Mark? Mark, why wouldn't you call it the gospel of Peter? None of the four are named by him and so, well in fact in the tradition, John Mark, the cousin of Barnabas the Levite and so Mark was probably a Levite himself, was in fact Peter's companion, especially in Rome. So that when Peter went to Rome and preached the gospel in Rome and became the bishop of Rome and the first to be martyred in the series of popes, we have in Mark's gospel by early, the earliest to testimony, this sort of record of what Peter was preaching. And so in Peter chapter five verse 13, Peter refers to Mark as my beloved son. We also know from Acts 13 that Mark or John Mark accompanied Saint Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey. For whatever reason, he went back, he didn't finish the journey and so when Paul was about to begin the second one, Barnabas wanted to take his cousin John Mark, Paul didn't want to and so they split and we ended up doubling the apostolic fruit with Barnabas and Mark preaching and then Paul and Silas for the second and third missionary journeys. In the tradition, again it's practically unanimous, Mark was the one who took the gospel to Egypt to Alexandria where he became the bishop. He also was martyred there in the 60s and so if this gospel is properly identified as his, then it was almost certainly written before 70 AD. There are a number of good commentaries out there on the gospel of Mark. One of them is ideally suited for clergy and laity. Dr. Mary Healy is going to join us. She's not yet here but her gospel of Mark commentary is just unsurpassed. It's in the Catholic commentary and sacred scripture. The CCSS it should be in our bookstore although it might not be much longer. It is a masterpiece and what she does is to open up this shortest of the four gospels but it's not just the shortest, it's the most fast-paced, it's the most vivid. In fact, the Greek word othus which is translated immediately occurs over 40 times. You just begin reading the gospel of Mark and you're not even through the first two chapters and you've come across nearly a dozen instances of immediately he went there, immediately he did this, immediately they did that. There's just a sense of urgency. It's vivid, it's fast-paced. It's probably also an echo of Peter's own preaching style because if you want to keep a gentle audience in Rome locked in, then you better keep it fast-paced and vivid. It's also very similar to Matthew as well as Luke. In fact, about 90% of Mark is found in Matthew and Luke. About 50% of Mark is found in Luke. So this obviously raises the question that's been discussed for almost three centuries, you know, literary dependence. Who wrote first? Who read whom? Now, in modern times, Mark and priority gained an ascendancy and when I was studying back in the 70s and 80s as an evangelical, it's practically the only approach that we were taught. We were not even told that in the first seven or eight centuries of the early church, it was unanimous. The consensus was that Matthew wrote first, as Jerome would say, in Hebrew might've been Aramaic and then Mark compiles what he heard and learned from Peter in his preaching and then Luke as we read in the opening verses of his gospel, Luke consulted many sources and eyewitnesses before compiling his account and we're not really certain about the fourth gospel. St. John, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, martyred, we don't really know much more about the dating of John but we're focusing on Mark and so I just wanna raise the question. You know, modern historical critical scholarship has a lot to teach us but at the same time, they're often uncritical of their own use of criticism to paraphrase Cardinal Ratzinger's famous address in New York City back in 1988, that they're so critical of everything except the limitations of their own critical methods. So he called for a legitimate and respectful criticism of criticism and that's really what began to open my eyes to the likelihood of the truth of the patristic consensus that yes indeed Matthew may have written first. For one thing, you find in many passages Matthew and Luke differ from Mark in exactly the same way. If you think about it, that's kinda hard to explain if they have used him independently. The best explanation for the many passages that are shared by Matthew and Luke is not some hypothetical source we call Q for the German word Quella because if Mark wrote first, we have to explain, well how did Matthew and Luke end up with so much in common that you don't find in Mark, there must have been some other source. Quella, the word in German for source, so it's Mark and Q, the two source hypothesis if Mark is first. So Mark in priority necessitates this hypothesis of Q. Now none of the ancient sources mentioned Q, there isn't even a fragment of a manuscript of Q, it's basically a hypothesis generated by a speculative theory. And so I began to look more closely and one of our ABS conferences back in 99, we had William Farmer, one of the most famous New Testament scholars who had reopened the question and had kind of shown how as a Protestant, he had come to believe in the patristic consensus of methane priority. And then he converted in the mid 90s and came here as a new Catholic shortly before God called him home. William Farmer really created a kind of breakthrough in this kind of scholarship though. So you have Mark's omission of certain passages best explained by his intention to write briefly the essentials of the Gospel of Jesus especially as he would have heard Peter preach it. And that's why if you would allow me to conduct a kind of thought experiment if we take seriously the patristic testimony that Matthew wrote first but that he wrote in Hebrew and then Mark wrote on the basis of Peter's testimony at some point Matthew's Gospel must have been translated into Greek. And so at that point I suspect Matthew might have had a keen interest in what Peter had guided Mark in writing. So perhaps in the translation of Matthew from Hebrew to Greek, we have these overlaps. We have this interdependence. It's speculation but it actually does a far, it does a fair bit in answering some of the questions that I've heard discussed by critics. In any case, I want to mention the fact that all of this at one level was purely academic because we're here really to just hear the voice of the Lord to discover the way of the Lord and how he used Mark as well as Matthew, Luke and John. And just parenthetically, I also wanted to mention something else that's happened since COVID last year and that is, well, holy week, last year when suddenly Lent became even lent here than it already was, right? Quarantine comes from 40 days. But it went beyond 40 days. It spilled into holy week and beyond here and our diocese, it wasn't until Pentecost that things began to open up first on our campus and then elsewhere, it was so beautiful. But during holy week, you might recall that the Chosen, this brand new TV series with Jonathan Rumi playing Jesus in the most amazing way came out for free, live streaming and so we gathered as a family each evening during holy week to watch all of the episodes of season one. In fact, we just finished the episodes of season two. And I am no television critic, believe me, my kids would vouch for that. But I approach any kind of religious show, movie, TV series with low expectations. But I mean, what has happened with that series is to make the Gospels come alive and even if you don't sign off in every single detail what Jonathan has done with Dallas Jenkins and others is to make the gospel come alive for Gen Z and the post millennials and it's kind of exciting to see in my own kids. And meanwhile, I posted this on my public Facebook page and Jonathan Rumi himself contacted me. And so I sent him another message and then one night during holy week, I got a voicemail having shared my cell phone which I'm not about to do tonight. This, this, this voice, this familiar voice, the voicemail began, hello, Scott, Dr. Hahn, this is Jesus. I'm like, yeah, no, it's Jonathan. Thank you for posting that, you know, and we connected by phone for the first of many times. And so I'm really grateful. And, you know, I made a note that at some point this week I wanted to really recommend to those of you who are not familiar with this series to check it out. There is a free app if you have an iPhone or a droid or whatever and just go and get it. It's the chosen and you can watch it for free using the app and keep up with the seasons and all of that kind of thing. Back to Mark. Mark does something that is obviously similar to the other evangelists, especially Matthew and Luke. And that is he focuses on the Exodus. Only he treats it drawing straight out of Isaiah. And that's why I entitled this presentation The New Exodus. It's anything but original. In fact, here are the stack of books. This book by Ricky E. Watts. It's a doctoral dissertation, so it's not easy breezy, but it's entitled Isaiah's New Exodus in Mark. It changed the way I read the Second Gospel. Likewise, Joel Marcus, the way of the Lord, Christological exegesis of the Old Testament and the Gospel of Mark. And there are other things too. Perhaps we're more familiar with Matthew's Gospel, which we've treated in years before here at ABS. You think about the perils between the Old and the New between Moses and Jesus. And Matthew presents it according to the birth narrative and the infancy narrative and all of the rest. So we have God sending a savior to save his people at long last, but as soon as the savior is born in Bethlehem, what happens? The savior needed to be saved because of the imperial decree of this tyrant named Herod. And Matthew presents it in a way that would have echoed in the memories of his fellow Jewish Christians because it wasn't the first time God had sent a savior. God had sent Moses as the deliverer to his people way back in the Old Testament book of Exodus. And as soon as the deliverer was born, the deliverer needed to be delivered because of the imperial decree of a tyrant named Pharaoh. And so what did God do? Well, back then he used a man named Joseph who was the son of Jacob who was a righteous father. And he also had dreams, four of them. And so he made provisions for the Holy Family to come down where to Egypt of all places just like in Matthew's gospel, God raises up Joseph who is the son of Jacob who is described as righteous, who also is given four dreams. And one of them enables the Holy Family to escape the wrath of Herod by going to where? Egypt of all places, where the bread was and now where the bread of life is because they came from Bethlehem which means the house of bread. And so at the appointed time when Pharaoh dies, Moses is leading the people of Israel out of Egypt through the water of the Red Sea on into the desert where they're tested for 40 days while Moses fasted for 40 days atop Mount Sinai where he receives the covenant law. Sound familiar to Matthew's readers it did because when the Holy Family comes out of Egypt, out of Egypt have I called my son? Matthew quotes Hosea 11 verse one but Hosea wasn't just predicting a future, he was reflecting upon the past event of the Exodus and how a greater act of divine salvation would bring a new and greater Exodus. And so the Holy Family comes out. The next thing we read is that Jesus is passing through the water of the Jordan where he's anointed. And then of course we hear the voice from heaven, my beloved son, and then the spirit leads him out into the desert for how long for 40 days to be tested just like Israel was and to fast just like Moses did. But of course Jesus passed the test that Israel failed and why because he quoted the Bible? Well, yeah, but so did the devil. What Matthew shows us is that Jesus knew exactly where to go due to Ronomy chapters six through eight, which is where Moses had corrected the Israelites for having failed their test because man doesn't live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from his mouth. And so likewise you shall not put the Lord your to the test the Lord your God to the test especially if he's testing you and you shall worship him alone and not that golden calf you made. Jesus seemed to know exactly where to go and what to quote. And Matthew's readers were probably tracking this new Exodus typology. This new Moses typology that was all pointing to Christ. And what does Moses do after that 40 days? Well, he gets the law of the covenant there on the mount. We call Sinai, Jesus gives us the sermon of the mount as soon as the temptations are done. In Matthew four it runs from Matthew five through chapter seven. And so he calls the 12 just like Moses selected from the 12 tribes, 12 princes to help him govern Israel along with the law of God. And so Matthew presents us what is so clearly an Exodus typology. Dale Allison's classic work is entitled a new Moses, a study in methion typology. And a similar study has been done on Luke. And as I mentioned a moment ago, Joel Marcus's book, The Way of the Lord shows us this new Exodus typology. And Mark only it's different because unlike Matthew and Luke they both give us birth and infancy narratives whereas just out of the blue we hear the opening verse of Mark the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God as it is written in Isaiah the prophet. Behold I send my messenger before thy face who shall prepare thy way. The voice of one crying in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord make his paths straight. And so you go back and you read Mark and you get a sense that even if you didn't know Isaiah even if you're just a Gentile convert in Rome nevertheless the story begins right away and it moves along briskly. It's fast paced. It's dynamic. It just keeps your attention. But there's surplus value for people who know what Peter and Mark are up to because it's essentially the same kind of thing that what Matthew is up to only what Mark does is not begins with the Exodus in the book of Exodus. He begins with the new Exodus which is what you find in Isaiah 40. The second half of Isaiah runs from chapter 40 all the way to 66. And practically everyone who studies Isaiah notices the Isianic new Exodus that there's gonna be a new Moses only this new and greater Exodus is going to be different than the first one. The first one brought one nation Israel out of Egypt this one will bring Israel out of all of the nations the Gentiles but it's also going to invite the Gentiles up as well. The old Exodus brought Israel to Sinai where the Torah was given but only to them the 12 tribes to the exclusion of all of the Gentiles. Whereas what Isaiah shows is that the Torah that will be given will be it'll be a Davidic wisdom, a Solomonic wisdom for all of the nations to be instructed as well. So the new and greater Exodus will be for Israel to be restored, reunited all 12 tribes but also to bring the Gentiles back to a new Jerusalem to Mount Zion. And so the contrast between Sinai and Zion is just assumed Sinai was where the first Exodus led them where the Tabernacle was built just big enough for the 12 tribes to worship and where the Torah was given but only to the people of Israel. Whereas Zion is where the temple is built the largest precinct of which is the court of the Gentiles and so the Mosaic covenant at Sinai formed a nation the Davidic covenant at Zion formed a kingdom and that kingdom will be restored by a new and greater Exodus. And I would say Mark just kind of assumes that you're gonna follow along even if you don't get the Old Testament background. And so we have for example in chapter one verse 16 and passing along the Sea of Galilee he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting in that in the sea for they were fishermen and Jesus said to them follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And we are so familiar with that we don't really allow ourselves to recognize just how strange that sounds. So I wanna indicate that I think and a lot of others do too that what Mark is doing and Matthew does something very similar is he's drawing from the prophetic tradition of the new Exodus that you find not only in Isaiah 40 through 66 but throughout Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the other minor prophets too. Listen to Jeremiah chapter 16. This oracle the word of the Lord therefore the Lord says behold the days are coming as the Lord when it shall no longer be said as the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt. In other words Jeremiah is saying here's the word of the Lord forget about the Exodus. What? Yeah, forget about the first Exodus. You no longer going to invoke the Lord as the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt but rather you will invoke the name of the Lord as the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the North country and out of all the countries where he had driven them. You see the 12 tribes have been scattered and the dispersion beginning in 733 Assyria took out the Northern tribes of Galilee that came back in 722 and took out Ephraim and Manasseh. This is why we still speak of the myth of the 10 lost tribes because those 10 tribes were lost and never found. They were never reunited with the Southern kingdom. And then in 587 Babylon did the same thing to the South. I hope you know some of this. They knew all of this. Jeremiah's listeners are taking this in. So the Lord is going to bring about a new and greater Exodus because he's not just gonna bring this country out of Egypt but he's going to bring Israel out of all of the countries to which they've been scattered. How are you gonna do that? For I will bring them back to their own land which I gave to their fathers. For behold, I am sending for many fishers, says the Lord, and they shall catch them. So the disciples by the Sea of Galilee are being called to be fishers of men, to be the agents of the new Exodus, to be instruments by which God sets into motion a fulfillment that will surpass the original Exodus. And this Exodus typology plays out in Mark's gospel in ways, well, I suspect that there are going to be some workshops, like Curtis Mitch is going to be doing one on the tail of two temples, focusing on Mark 13. There'll be other things too, you know, just as a sidelight. If I had time, if you know my teaching, that's a very dangerous opening. You know, because in the first two chapters of Mark, Mark continues to play out this sort of intertextual echo from the Isianic New Exodus. Have you ever heard a recording of Martin Luther King's speech in 1968? I have a dream. It begins five scored years ago. What's he doing? He's invoking Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. And then he goes on to quote Amos Five. He quotes Shakespeare, Richard III. He also quotes the Declaration of Independence. He quotes Liberty for All. He just shows us basically that he's not only an American but patriotic and a Christian. And yet not once did Martin Luther King ever say, as Shakespeare said, quoting Amos. John Hollander speaks of this as metalepsis. That is intertextual echoes where you're citing or alluding to or echoing familiar texts that will evoke in a powerful way all of these memories. And by the time you hear Martin Luther King's whole address, he speaks of this dream that he can see it from a distance. He's not sure he's gonna live to actually enter into the Promised Land. But what is he doing without quoting a passage from the Bible? As Amos says, as Exodus says, he is using Exodus typology. Now it's not uninspired scripture but it's also not uninspiring. It's powerful precisely because of the way you supply surplus value to those who know the background sources. And if you don't, you still really enjoy the story but if you do, you're being beckoned to go out into the deep. And so in the first couple of chapters, if you know Isaiah, especially 40 through 66, you're going to be seeing the move from Christ, the Son of God to the Son of Man to being the servant, the suffering servant as we hear in the four servant songs from Isaiah 42 to Isaiah 53. But along the way, you're also going to see the question about fasting and the question about the Sabbath that we read in Mark two verse 18 and following. You go back to Isaiah 56 verses one and two, those who call the Sabbath a delight will be blessed by the Lord. And what is the fast that the Lord desires? Well, Isaiah 58 describes that in conjunction with the Sabbath. Then you also have a number of other passages in Isaiah regarding the bridegroom. What's the payoff? What difference does this make? Well, this is the Mark two 18. John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting and the people came and said to him, why do John's disciples and the Pharisees disciples fast? But your disciples do not fast. I mean, Jesus could have said, well, you know, we'll get to that. It's just, you know, elementary school for now. He could have said, well, we do. We just don't, you know, publicize it. But instead he says something that we've heard all over lives. It's almost necessary to take out the filters. Jesus said to them, can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? Look, Jesus, did you hear the question? John the Baptist and the Pharisees disciples fast, yours don't, why? This isn't a wedding. Do the bridegroom, you know, do the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is, this isn't a wedding. Why are you evoking the notion of the bridegroom? Because in the second half of Isaiah, at least three times the Lord will rejoice over his people as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride. Likewise, he's going to deck himself as a bridegroom. And so the servant of the Lord will be the instrument by which salvation comes, the new exodus is fulfilled. But is it the servant of the Lord or is it the Lord himself? Or could it be both? Because the Lord is the bridegroom, the servant seems to be connected as well. And so suddenly all of these themes concerning fasting, concerning the Sabbath, concerning the bridegroom and the wedding guests converge in a way where Mark is almost winking at his readers and saying, do you have ears to hear what the spirit is saying? Because if you do, there's a powerful evoking of the new exodus imagery. Likewise, the Sabbath continues on into chapter three. He enters the synagogue. There's a man with a withered hand and these people are spying on him to see what he's gonna do. And then he asks the question, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm? To save life or to kill? Which again, we hear Jesus say that it is an inspired gospel and so like any good parrot we say, praise you Lord Jesus Christ, you know? But wait, we ought to say what? What did Jesus just ask? Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm? To save life or to kill? Well, Jesus with all due respect, it is unlawful to do evil on any one of the seven days of the week. So why are you asking if it's lawful to do good or evil on the Sabbath? It's a rhetorical question, but one, polemically charged. Almost with a sacred sarcasm. And you can see how that unfolds because the next thing he does stretch out your hand and he heals it and he sees them plotting. He's angry, he's grieving. And so immediately there's Oothoos again. They took counsel with the Herodians, they're arch enemies. The Pharisees and the Herodians get together. Immediately after he healed that man on the Sabbath to plot how they would destroy him. Well, suddenly the veil, the curtain is pulled back. Why did Jesus ask the question, is it lawful to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath? I'm about to do good. And you're about to plot my murder on the Sabbath. No violation there. Ooh, wow. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. Wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove. And it goes on and on. I wish we could do it all tonight. So just sit back and relax. We'll be here for several hours. No, we won't. But what I wanna do next is to pinpoint the turning point, the hinge on which Mark's gospel turns because Mark gives us something cool, something unique. And that is a three-fold series of passion predictions. First at 831, then at 931, and then the third one occurs in 1035, 1033. So again, it's so familiar, but notice that this is sort of coming at the center of the gospel. And this is also coming right after Peter has confessed him to be the Christ. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed. And after three days rise again. And he said this plainly, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him and Jesus says, get behind me, Satan. So even the one who just got it right, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, totally gets it wrong because he doesn't see any connection between the Son of God, the Son of Man, and the suffering servant. But once you learn not only to read the scriptures forward from the old of the new, but as Richard Hayes calls his book, Reading Backwards, you go back from the new to the old and you find in the second half of Isaiah, the clues sprinkled liberally all over the place that kind of give that evocative power through the intertextual echoes that I dare say would surpass Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech if we have the ears to hear what the Spirit is saying. What Mark probably also recognized. And then Jesus adds in the next couple of verses and he called the multitude of his disciples and said, if any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Now all of them were familiar with crucifixion, but none of them were realizing that he would be crucified. So I mean, this is not like in the 18th century, the last decade, you say to take up your guillotine and follow me. No, a guillotine was horrible, but it was quick, relatively painless, whereas crucifixion was slow torture. It would have made no sense. And then again in chapter nine, verse 31, free was teaching his disciples saying to them, the son of man will be delivered into the hands of men and they will kill him and when he is killed, after three days he will rise, but they didn't understand the saying and they were afraid to ask. A lot like we sometimes get. The squeaky wheel still gets the grease. You have not because you ask not. If you want insight into why God would allow COVID and all of the political chaos that has descended upon us, ask him, press him. He won't take offense. He might take offense if we don't ask and we just resent him quietly. God punishes his people or the scriptures aren't true, but he doesn't punish them to get back at us. He punishes us to get us back to him. The inner logic of the law is love. Not only that we ought to love him with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength, but we ought to imitate him because he loves us with a divine and eternal love. He loves us more than we love ourselves and he not only calls us to love, he commands us to, but then he empowers us to do what we can't do without the Holy Spirit which he longs to pour out upon us. I mean, this good news that we call the Catholic gospel is almost too good to be true unless it is and it most certainly is. And so Mark is giving it to us in a rapid, vivid, fast-paced, action-oriented way. It might not be as steeped in the Old Testament as Matthew. It might not draw like John does. It's different than Luke, but there really is a fourfold gospel. And by training yourselves to hear, mark and to recognize his distinctive voice, I mean, you probably had instructors like I did who weaponized the four evangelists to show that their differences exceeded their similarities, which isn't true, but that these differences lead to diversity and that diversity leads to contradiction when in fact what I would propose is, if you're there attending an orchestra and you're hearing a symphony, it isn't like the woodwinds are competing with the brass. It isn't like the percussion, trying to revolt. No, they all have different parts to play, but it contributes. It's a kind of diversity that actually enhances the unity if you have the ears to hear and the heart to believe. And so Mark's gospel, I think, holds the key. So by the time we get to Mark 10, this is the real turning point, verse 32, and they were on the road going up to Jerusalem. Again, if there were world enough in time, I would go into this more because suddenly starting in Mark 10, but not before chapter 10, we hear about Jesus being the son of David. And no wonder because he's going up to Jerusalem, going up to suffer, but he's going up as the son of David to the city of David to restore the kingdom of David. And this is where Mark packs it all in, where you hear this. And so in that context, behold, we are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes and they will condemn him to death, deliver him to the Gentiles and they will mock him and spit upon him, scourge him and kill him and after three days he will rise. That's what you call prophetic detail. And why? Because the disciples would have needed it. I mean, we've just probably gone through the worst year of our lives, at least I feel that way. Well, they were about to go through the single worst week of their lives and maybe the worst week that anybody has ever gone through to see their Lord, their rabbi, their master, their teacher falsely accused, spat upon, tortured, denied, betrayed and then crucified. How do you recover from that? Well, first of all, Jesus prepares them for that so that when it happens, they look back and realize why they were so incredulous, why they were so ignorant, because they needed his help much more than they realized much more than they were willing to admit. I love to think about, you know, Jesus dying, rising and then deciding what to do on his first day back from the dead. I don't know about you, but, you know, what would you do if you were Jesus? And you've just been tortured, you've just been denied and betrayed and crucified, buried, and you descended into Hades. And on your first day back from the dead, you know, I would probably pay a visit to Pontius Pilate. Just check out those hands to see how clean they were. You know, I'd drop it on Caiaphas and Annas and maybe hover over the whole Sanhedrin and whisper, I'm back. I'd drop it on my mother as well and thank her for her prayers because they turned out to be the instrument of fidelity that the spirit used to raise me from the dead. Thank you, mother, for believing me when the disciples didn't, because she did and she prayed, I'm sure. And even though there's no gospel account of him appearing to her, it's practically all of the fathers who say, of course he did. But if we came up with a list of 10 options, I don't think on any of our lists, we would say my first day back from the dead, I wanna lead a really long Bible study with two guys who don't even recognize me. For several hours, mile after mile, until we arrive at this village and I take blessed break and give them the bread and their eyes are open. And then I vanish because they finally recognize my Eucharistic real presence. And they turn around and they walk all the way back and they testify to what they've seen. And then I show up again because on Easter Sunday, I wanna conduct two rather lengthy Bible studies that evening, he opened the scriptures, the law, the prophets and the Psalms to show how it was necessary for the Christ to suffer all of these things before entering into his glory. Not only are God's ways, not our ways, his priorities are not our priorities because he clearly prioritizes the importance of knowing the scriptures more than we do. But it really wasn't the case that Clovis and his companion were big biblical ignoramuses. They knew the Bible. They had played it forward. They knew the law and the prophets. They knew that Israel's in a state of exile. They knew that God had made all of these promises that are yet to be fulfilled. And so the Old Testament for them was like a story in search of an ending. And it wasn't an ending like what we expected going through the single darkest week of our lives, seeing the single most dastardly sin ever committed by the human race against Almighty God. And while they are torturing him, spitting, mocking him, crucifying him, what is he doing? Not simply Father forgive them for they know not what they do. He is redeeming his executioners. He is dying for the people who are killing him. Any brains exploding yet? Not only are his ways beyond our ways, but apart from his word, we would never understand them. But when our hearts get to burning and then our eyes are open in the breaking of the Eucharistic bread and we see the risen Savior's body, blood, soul and divinity in the Holy Eucharist, it's time to start reading backwards to go back to the Old Testament to find how the new is concealed in the old and how the old is revealed and fulfilled in the new. This is not just rhetorical. This isn't just historical information. This isn't just Catholic talking points or biblical theology. This is God the Father speaking to his sons and daughters saying, I love you more than you could possibly imagine because I am love from all eternity. And you only can learn to love me. You can only learn to love God in a God-like way through a long period, gradually. So this is why I want you to think about what we mean by exodus. Because if we know the exodus and we recognize there was a new and greater exodus and it's not only in the patriarchal tradition, it's also there in the prophets, no wonder it was soaked in the patristic sources of the early church fathers. But I want to propose to you that we ought to rethink the exodus because this is indeed the pattern of salvation. Not only for each of us individually, but for all of us as the new Israel, as the new people of God, because the exodus was not just an event that was one and done and over with. The exodus occurs in the aftermath of the Passover, glory to God, just like the new exodus will occur after Jesus institutes the Eucharist to be the new Passover. But the exodus is not just the way out of Egypt. It's not just crossing the Red Sea. It's not just entering the wilderness. The exodus is more than an event, it's in a journey. And it's for us to do that as well. And so it's coming out of Egypt, but it's not simply arriving at sign and to receive the law. When you read the song of Moses in Exodus 15, it's a curious thing because you've just come out of Egypt, you just passed through the Red Sea, you've just seen Pharaoh and the chariots and the horses drowned. And so what does Moses do? Let's just stop, I want to teach you a song. An exodus 15 consists mostly of a song. And it's sort of like the way we might start off a family vacation. The kids have no idea how long the journey will be. And so to forestall that irritating question that you know will come from the youngest, are we there yet? No, are we there now? No, stop asking. We'll never stop. So what do you do? We start singing. We do the family rosary as well. But when you read Exodus 15 and you get to verse 17, the concluding verse of that identifies where we're going. To God's abode, to God's own mountain, to God's own sanctuary. And suddenly you realize, well that's not Mount Sinai, that's a temporary rest stop. This is Mount Zion. This is no sprint, this is a marathon. This isn't over and done in a day. It isn't even over and done in a year. It isn't even over and done in a generation. It'll take generations. And then when you arrive at his mountain, at his sanctuary, Jerusalem, and the temple is built, it is later destroyed. And why? Because the earthly Jerusalem and the man-made temple were only temporary symbols that pointed to the ultimate destination of the ultimate exodus. And that is what? When we cross Jordan, we don't just look for a land the size of New Jersey, we call Canaan, the promised land flowing with milk and honey. We're looking for heaven. And Canaan is just a geographical sacrament, a sign that points beyond itself to the thing that God the Father has in store for all of us. And it won't last 490 years or 430 or any other Calc. It's gonna last 400 trillion years and that'll be the first minute of eternity. This is who we are because this is who he is. This is what he's done. And so the exodus as the pattern of our salvation is to basically show us that we're not just being delivered from slavery but for sonship. We're not just being delivered from the pharaoh and all of the idols of Egypt. We're being delivered for worshiping God. Which is not for his sake, but for ours. He gets nothing out of our worship. But when we worship the Lord in spirit and in truth and love him with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, we open ourselves up so that he can fill us with more and more of himself. That's why worship is a command performance. That's why worship is the goal of the exodus and the new and greater exodus and our lives now and for all eternity. When we go to Isaiah or when we go to Jeremiah and we discover that the earthly Jerusalem and the manmade temple were destroyed, desecrated, it's to set in the motion something greater than the second temple, which was a fraction of the size of Solomon's. Certainly something much greater than the Herodian temple that this madman architectural genius named Herod the Great built. Now ultimately it's a temple not made with hands. But what really broke the hearts of the prophets, especially Jeremiah, was not that the people of God were in exile, is that the people of God didn't know that they were in exile. In the beginning when they arrived in Babylonian captivity, they're bewildered. So Jeremiah gives them advice, you know, build houses, plant the fields, pray for the peace of the cities to which the Lord your God has scattered you. And they must have complied because as Jeremiah's ministry lasted 50 years like Isaiah's did in the previous century, what really gets at Jeremiah the most is that the people of God are in exile, but they're so comfortable they don't even think of themselves as exiles. So when the call goes out to restore Jerusalem to rebuild the temple, they're like, why bother? We built our houses, we planted our fields, we're at home in these cities. Brothers and sisters, that's where we are. We're Catholic Americans, and we love this land. And Paul reminded the Philippians in Philippians 320 that our citizenship is in heaven. He uses the technical legal term, polytuma. But he's not saying, so therefore renounce your Philippian citizenship. No, we're dual citizens. One is temporal, the other is eternal. And so we live as Americans, but especially as faithful Catholics. As a friend of mine, Austin Rust is fond of saying, and you're gonna hear me say this again and again, we need it, I need it. We're surrounded, we're outnumbered, we're outgunned as Catholics, we're even infiltrated. So what must we conclude? That there has never been a better time to be a faithful Catholic. God is still in control. Jesus is the Lord of lords and the king of kings, regardless of who occupies the White House. And we're in exile, and after this, our exile, we will behold the face of our common father and be reunited as a family, really and truly, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.