This last sentence is one point in Mark’s Gospel where we find Jesus himself thinking beyond his immediate circle of hearers—namely, his disciples who have gathered around him on the Mount of Olives for this teaching—and thinking about the many who will hear him through them. We can almost see and hear Jesus at this point speaking to us, looking past his disciples and directly into the camera, as it were, to deliver this admonition to us: “Keep awake!” The question for us in this interim is not,
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