Sunday's Reading     Mark 3:20-35

I'm building a Jerusalem Cross raised-bed at home, the fourth such bed I've been a part of constructing. My prayer is that it will help me personally do some "gardening... of soil and soul" each day so that I can wake up every morning to a life of "FRIENDSHIP - with God, with other people, and with all creation" (Daniel Erlander).

Sure, once the Jerusalem Cross raised-bed is build and planted, I'll harvest healthy, organic veggies on which to feast and thrive. But this raised bed, in the shape of a Jerusalem cross, will remind me that the Master Gardener, God, wants to feed my soul too through a life not only of faith, but of action as well.

The Jerusalem Cross symbol, so tarnished historically by the Christian Church's failure to understand and live Jesus' message, reminds us Wesleyan Christians that one of the four acts we're to do regularly is the act of compassion.

Jesus in the Gospel reading this Sunday does multiple acts of compassion by healing many people. And the "Sunday School teachers," as Clarence Jordan, the writer of The Cotton Patch Gospel call the scribes (read "religious authorities"), in response spread a rumor that Jesus was able to do this because "he had an unclean spirit" (Mark 3:30).

What? Jesus? An unclean spirit? What gives?

Eugene Peterson records Jesus' sobering response this way.  “... if you persist in your slanders against God’s Holy Spirit, you are repudiating the very One who forgives, ..." (Mark 3:29).

The implication here is the last thing we want to do is separate ourselves from being in relationship with the One in whom we find fullness of life by resisting, if not opposing, the good the Spirit is doing in and through Jesus.

The acts of compassion Jesus did are sure signs that Jesus was of God. How important it is today for us not only to do acts of compassion regularly, but also to recognizes in the acts of compassion by others the Spirit at work building the kin(g)dom.