Word: facing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Whatever Jesus' final expectation, that reign did not arrive in his lifetime or in the lives of his earliest companions. Yet a majority of his followers continue to expect it. In the face of so long an uncertainty, how has his following not only endured but grown so hugely through two millenniums? And what can be expected of his long potent holding power over human imagination and hope in the near and distant future? If benign Christian institutions and the capacity to believe in a God who loves his creation should weaken fatally, if the artistic inspiration of the figure...
...this universe at least has intensified, though I have felt no right to claim intimacy with him. As for so many others, he has never seemed less than mysterious, and my experience of his overwhelming but oddly businesslike healing and the memory of the unstinting mercy in his grave face and eyes are indelible...
...face of all contradictions and confusions then, our reader might be asked to return to Mark, not only the oldest but the clearest Gospel, and to deduce the full story it means to tell. In its brevity and speed--some 12,000 words in English, a mere pamphlet--Mark implies a far more complicated process of human growth than its outline specifies...
...eerie and unbecoming. The God who was leading this man was no father tossing a child. By then Peter and James had dozed off, but John--being younger--managed to stay half awake through most of the prayer. He could hardly see Jesus, just flashes of his face when the moon broke clear, and then it was wrenched by an agony greater than the joy they'd seen when he came down toward them on Mount Hermon after his meeting with Moses and Elijah...
More than once John started to stand and go to him--whoever this despairing demon was, John could at least try the things he'd learned about demon expulsion. But then he'd catch a new glimpse of the face, and he'd stay where he was. Maybe this was no demon at all but the bitterest lesson Jesus must learn before the incomparably bitter cross--Jesus had told John more than once that a cross would stand near the end of his road. Now John heard one more thing, several times: "Let this cup pass. Abba, not this...