I asked ChatGPT’s image generator, “What sort of image would you create to illustrate the concept of a dead nation?” and this is what it produced.
Nations die. Just like people. The reasons nations die are as varied and numerous as the reasons people die. Some nations die because they just get too unwieldy to survive, like the Roman Empire. It simply became too large to manage, which led to a fatal weakening of its political structure and military capability, and ultimately to its collapse. Some die because of internal rot. The German Weimar Republic, for example, died when its president appointed a madman named Adolf Hitler to be its chancellor, and he in turn dismantled its democratic institutions. The Weimar Republic died, replaced by the Third Reich, which was supposed to last a thousand years, but it died in the most common way nations die – because they are conquered.
One of the things I try to do when I read the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, when he uses an odd or striking metaphor like “I will make you fishers of people”
We have had more than enough of contempt,
In today’s gospel lesson from the sixth chapter of Mark, Jesus has come home to Nazareth immediately after last week’s two stories of healing. Apparently he is there for at least a few days and when the Sabbath comes he does as he has done elsewhere: he goes to the synagogue. In Luke’s version of this story, Jesus is given a scroll from the prophet Isaiah and reads from it:
Our kids this week have been “Shipwrecked,” but they’ve also been “rescued by Jesus.”
