Mark Photos - 9:9-13 - Repeats
The Coming of Elijah As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean. Then they asked him, “Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” He said to them, “Elijah is indeed coming first to restore all things. How then is it written about the Son of Man, that he is to go through many sufferings and be treated with contempt? But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written about him.”
--- Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it... -George Santayana Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it... -Edmund Burke
Anyone who has studied history knows that it is cyclical. What has happened before will happen again (or as it was said in the TV show, Battlestar Galactica, "All this has happened before, all this will happen again.")...That's the sense I get from this passage - The history of what came before Jesus was that prophets did not lead easy lives. Their lives were hard. They spoke truth to power and power never likes hearing truth. We see this with the lives of every prophet in the Old Testament and Jesus is telling the disciples that this will happen with him. Understandably, the disciples don't get this or don't want to understand it. Yet that is the truth that history has shown before Jesus, it is repeated with what happens to Jesus and it has repeated itself time and time again since that time. Name the person who spoke prophetic words and you will see this over and over and over. The cycle does not change. Human power never likes divine truth when that power is corrupted and going against the ways of God.