In chapter 5, Mark spends an unusually large amount of time (for him, at least) on two stories. The first is when Jesus cast out a legion of demons from a single person and into a herd of pigs. The second was Jesus healing the daughter of a local religious leader.
In the first story, Jesus does several things one would not expect a good first century Jewish man to do. He made a stop in gentile territory. He interacted with a man who was clearly demon possessed and who had extraordinary strength. He cast out the demons into a herd of pigs. And then he instructed the healed man not to follow him, but rather to tell the townspeople about him (and how he destroyed a significant portion of their income). In taking these actions, Jesus flaunted both Jewish tradition and gentile economics. Besides the healed man, I don't know who would have been happy with his actions.
In the second story, while going to the religious leader's house to heal his daughter, he is distracted by a woman who healed herself by touching Jesus's clothes. Jesus stops to find out who touched him. Normally, someone would rush to the religious leader's home because he was clearly the more important person. But Jesus stopped to encounter a poor woman who demonstrated enough faith to force a healing. This delay was enough for the leader's daughter to die. But, Jesus goes anyway and raises her from the dead. Again, not what people would have expected.
One of the lessons I take from this is that Jesus does not have the same priorities that we do. He looks at things at a different perspective from us. I think it's valuable to try to see his perspective in reading through the gospels and asking ourselves how different we are and what we need to change.
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