oil on canvas, $500.00.  Buy art here.

Mark 1:21-28, a retelling

They walked between the olive trees along the lake to the small fishing village of Capernaum, and on the sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue and taught.  The people were astonished, because he didn’t teach like the scribes, who thought that the rules  which they tediously parsed were all that God had to say to humanity.  He taught with authority.  A man in the synagogue, who’s spirit was muddled by a thousand things and who was stretched and scratched inside by tearing claws, cried out “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”  Jesus spoke directly to the man’s spiritual state: “Be silent!  Set this man free!”  And the man convulsed and cried out, and all of the jangling brokenness inside of him gathered itself up and came out of him.  The synagogue filled with babbling voices – they echoed off of the walls – “What is this?”  “A new teaching, with authority!”  “He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!”  His fame began to spread around the circle of the lake, where the sun beat down and anemones bloomed on the plains, and fishing boats sailed out on the deep blue of the water.