The Eikon Podcast

The account of Jesus' interaction with the rich young man is one of the more well-known of all the Gospels. It's a tragic tale of a man who could not let go of the thing that he loved the most when Jesus gave him one of the most difficult challenges for anyone he called to follow him. It leaves us to wonder if we would have responded more faithfully than he did. But was the call all that...

The disciples of Jesus wanted to keep children away from him. The Eikon team considers why that happened, what Mark wanted to convey in recounting this misunderstanding on their part, and the warning present for the church today. Can we become an obstacle to the younger generation or any other marginalized group, all the while thinking we are doing the right thing? They also discuss the church&apo...

The Eikon team dives into Mark 9:38-41 and discusses the implications of Jesus' challenging of the disciples assumptions about those that are not part of their small circle.

One of the more memorable interactions with Jesus in Mark's Gospel involves frustrated disciples, a demonically attacked young man, and a desperate father struggling in the murky ground between faith and doubt. The Eikon team enters this story, challenging us to see doubt for the positive force it can sometimes be and to enter this narrative in the way that Mark wants us to. They discuss how,...

The transfiguration is one of the more puzzling passages in the Gospels. Moses and Elijah appear, and Jesus is suddenly glowing? What is that all about? When we are rooted in the background of the Hebrew Bible and the ongoing context of Mark, it all makes much more sense than we might normally suspect. The Eikon Team jumps into this passage and shows this passage makes perfect sense in Mark's...

Mark 8:34-38 is one of the most well-known and often referenced passages on discipleship. Yet, points out the Eikon team, we have grown so accustomed to making assumptions about the meaning of common English phrases and skipping over the context of passages to apply them directly to us as individuals today, that we often neglect the true challenge and significance of what the author wants us to se...

Psychologist Jordan Peterson, a self-proclaimed agnostic, released a video message to Christian churches last week that had gone viral in some circles of Christianity. Is he on point or off base? The Eikon team discusses what they believe about that and the importance of being able to tell the difference.

The Eikon team arrives at our discussion at the turning point of Mark's Gospel. Jesus finally makes plain the life to which he is calling his disciples. And they immediately reject it. We often chuckle at Peter's boldness to reject and rebuke Jesus, but do we do the same thing in our lives? Have large portions of Christianity done just as Peter did as we engage in the so-called culture w...

Mark 8:22-26 contains one of the strangest events in Jesus' life. Why does Mark record an interaction between Jesus and a blind man that seems to go terribly wrong, at least at first. The Eikon team breaks down this important enacted parable and discusses why it was so important to the disciples and to the church today. Is it possible that we have missed the primary meaning of carrying our cr...

Jesus has been trying to teach his disciples what it really means to follow him but they just could not grasp the message. This puts them in danger of trying to bring about the kingdom through the wrong methods and means. The Eikon team examines Mark 8:14-21 to find out just what Jesus did to make this clear to his followers and what Mark is doing to apply this same challenge to the church. They d...

This week the Eikon team looks at Mark 8:1-13 and the feeding of the 4,000. They reveal Mark's awe-inspiring reasons for including two similar feeding miracles and why that message is just as relevant for us today as it was for the original readers. We can easily fall into the line of thinking that acts as though the problems we face in the world today are too big for kingdom solutions, but t...

In Mark 6:45-52 Mark crafts the incredible account of Jesus passing by the disciples while walking on the water. The Eikon team explores this passage and discusses what Mark was communicating about Jesus to his readers as well as how and why the disciples were in very real danger. They then discuss how we can fall prey to the same factors that caused the disciples to miss what was happening right...

The Eikon team examines Mark 6:30-44 and the incredible story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. They look at some important, but often missed details in that account that demonstrate Mark's explosive purposes for crafting that incident in the way that he has. Central to the discussion is a way of life challenged by Jesus that has taken deep roots in today's social and political culture which m...

The Eikon team shares a very special "news" story and discusses the upcoming two-week break before resuming the study of the Gospel of Mark.

Looking at Mark 6:6-13, the Eikon team discusses what Jesus was doing when he sent the apostles on a special two-by-two mission, what they might have thought they were being sent to do, and why Mark crafted this account the way he did. At the heart of this passage is a community that is being created with Cruciformity at its center rather than conversionism. The team then discusses the implication...

The Eikon Team takes on the beginning of Mark 6, taking a second look at Jesus in his hometown.

The Eikon Team dives into one of the Gospel of Mark's most beautifully crafted passages. Two women, separated by status, circumstance, age, social position, support system, and many other ways but see their stories intersect as they interact with Jesus. There is much in these two stories that we can miss with a modern eye but as we dive into the text, we have the opportunity to see what Mark...

Mark 5:1-20 is one of the darker and stranger scenes in all of Mark's Gospel. Jesus encounters a demon-possessed Gentile in a graveyard by the sea surrounded by herds of swine. From a Jewish perspective, it cannot get much worse than that. The Eikon team breaks down this scene as well as discussing who Jesus may have really been confronting here and why he might have sent the legion of demons...

The Eikon team moves to Mark 4:21-25 to continue examination of the Parable of the Sower, a parable so important that Jesus said if we don't grasp the heart of this parable, we will misunderstand everything that he is about. They explore what Jesus meant when he said that "whoever has will be given more" and "whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them,&q...

Author and Theologian, Tim Gombis, joins the Eikon Living team to discuss the Parable of the Sower. When Jesus first taught the Parable of the Sower, he made clear that not only was it pivotal to understanding his ministry, but also that many who would hear would misunderstand it and not put it into practice. Gombis walks through this foundational parable, showing how it provides a textual map for...

Looking at Mark 3:20-35, the Eikon team discusses important things to watch for when reading biblical texts. They demonstrate how Mark ties his text together to show that both Jesus' family and the teachers of the law were making dangerous miscalculations about the way of the Messiah. They finish up considering whether we can commit unforgivable sins today.

Jesus constantly seemed to take aim at the Sabbath practices of his day. Before we begin to ask what that means for us and whether or not we should be observing a Sabbath today, the Eikon Living team analyzes what Sabbath was, what it was intended for, and how it was approached by many of the Jewish believers of Jesus’ day. The reality is, they conclude, that Sabbath was a much bigger and deeper c...

One of the primary themes in Mark’s Gospel and one of his main challenges to the church revolves around our view of insiders and outsiders. Jesus constantly challenged those preconceptions about people that were typically excluded and marginalized. Rather than building fences to keep them out, he embraced those very people. But he didn’t stop there. Throughout his gospel Mark highlights that Jesus...

Do we fully understand the implications of the Gospel accounts surrounding Jesus’ confrontations with the demonic? The Eikon Living Team suggests that there is much more behind those encounters than we might first suppose. They also discuss why Jesus was perceived as having so much authority in his teaching, what we can learn about Jesus’ ministry from the evil use of power by Vladimir Putin, who...

Today’s study of Mark 1:12-20 includes discussions on why Mark seems so truncated in his accounts, what Jesus meant when he pronounced the coming of the kingdom, the importance of which direction the kingdom was moving, what is discipleship according to Mark, and whether we have completely misunderstood the meaning behind the phrase “fishers of men”? The team also responds to lessons that can be g...