The surprising posture of confessing God #LectioCast

E. Scott Jones joins the program, and he loves to preach on Job! This is a good thing, inasmuch as Job 23, Ps 22, and Heb 4 are all Job-like stories. And it might just be that the failure of Mark’s rich man is a failure to embrace the Job narrative himself. Job 23 Spoiler… Read more about The surprising posture of confessing God #LectioCast

E. Scott Jones joins the program, and he loves to preach on Job! This is a good thing, inasmuch as Job 23, Ps 22, and Heb 4 are all Job-like stories. And it might just be that the failure of Mark’s rich man is a failure to embrace the Job narrative himself.

Job 23 Spoiler alert: God doesn’t listen like Job hopes God will. In fact, the whole book is couched to undo the world that we wish were: where the good guys are blessed and the bad guys get theirs.

Psalm 22 Daniel wants to hold onto the earthy, gritty reality of what god-forsakenness looks like. Israel’s story of the past reminds God how God is supposed to act in the present. The core testimony is that God answers, so how do we deal with the “but”? And you may or may not get a Mountain Goats blast…

Hebrews 4:12-16 Trying to figure out the most famous verse of Hebrews. Scott points out that our high priest has been Job and the singer of Ps 22.

Mark 10:17-31 Reentering the story of the rich man. Scott encourages us to turn the tables on ourselves: You are the man! The story has the power to lay bare what we do not yet accept about the ministry of Jesus.

Footnotes: “Animal Mask,” by the Mountain Goats

E. Scott Jones is pastor at First Central Congregational United Church of Christ. He has Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oklahoma and lectures in the Philosophy Department at Creighton University. If you listen carefully, you might hear him drop a little Process Theology. But don’t hold it against him.

Daniel Kirk is a writer, speaker, blogger, and New Testament professor who lives in San Francisco, CA. He holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from Duke University and is the author of a pair of books, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God and Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? His third book A Man Attested by God: the Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, is off to the printers. He blogs regularly at StoriedTheology.com  (jrdkirk.com). You can follow him on Twitter @jrdkirk and on Facebook at Facebook.com/jrdkirk.