Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we covered three accounts of the baptism of Jesus.

Anytime we cover different gospel accounts of the same event, there's a good chance I'll merge all the details into just one collective recap, especially if it's on the same day. So that also means that if we

read something and I don't address it in that day's recap, hang in there because it's probably coming

soon. Today we also read the Gospel of Mark for the first time. As we've discussed, each of the four

gospels has a unique lens on who Jesus is.

Mark's lens is Jesus as servant. So the four lenses are Matthew, Jesus as King, Mark, Jesus as

servant, Luke, Jesus as man, and John, Jesus as God. You can see how they present ideas that seem

juxtaposed, king and servant, man and

God, but that work together to help us learn how to connect the different aspects of who Jesus is.

We open in the desert with JTB, where he lives on locusts and honey. Gross, right? But the good news is

this maybe wasn't referring to bugs. It's possibly referring to the fruit of the carib tree that grows in the wilderness.

It's a fruit in a bean pod that people call locust, and it tastes like cacao.

It's kind of chocolatey.

So JTB was maybe eating dessert, and I thought I couldn't love him more.

His message to the people starts with a call to repent.

To repent means to turn and go the

other direction, to do a 180. But it's not so much a physical act as an inward turning, and it

implies a level of remorse. JTB commands people to repent and be baptized. But then he rebukes some people

for coming to be baptized. So what's going on? Do you want people to be baptized or not?

Here's the thing. The people he rebukes, the Pharisees and Sadducees,

they're part of the ruling class of the Jews in that day.

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