This Week: Proper 9B
Gospel: Mark 6:1-13
This week’s gospel pairs a site of failure with the promise of success. A bewitching pairing of stories about Jesus, healing, home, discipleship, challenge, discovery, discord, disappointment, and ultimately movement restored.
There is an interesting tension in the first half of the reading, as Jesus returns home to find people making assumptions about him. It is a distinctly familiar scenario—to the point that we might find its outcome quite predictable.
And yet, we are also prone to miss its power, I suspect. Missing also the chance to consider what exactly is at play in this moment. Why going home really is fraught for so many. Or why home itself is a place, not of understanding and connection, but assumptions and a refusal to learn about us, or anything else.
The secret at the heart of this moment, if we dare suggest one exists, is in the way we might fashion the people’s response as appropriate, expected, and therefor normal.
Normal
Normal has a way of describing two things at once: the usual and the every.
Normal is most often the usual kind. What we expect. What happens in those situations. What we come to expect most of the time.
But the idea of normal has a way of expressing something else. What everyone else is doing. What happens every time this occurs.
The former acknowledges the likelihood. The latter expects it to always occur.
That’s the thing about normal—normal wasn’t always and won’t always be.
When Jesus comes home, people struggle to see his growth as anything but a threat. A threat to their normal. To their identity. Perhaps even to their safety. Precisely because he’s inviting them to live into a new normal.
What’s our work here?
The shift from this event to the sending out of the disciples should offer us a way to look back on the previous story through a new lens: not merely as a story about something happening to Jesus, but as the challenge of discipleship itself.
While many people know the feeling of rejection, of being the one coming home as Jesus does, many also know the feeling of someone coming home changed.
Here, I’m reminded of the voices of parents angry that their kids went away to college and — gasp! — learned things Mom and Dad don’t know! The horror! This should be what the parents want for their kids. So why isn’t it always? Why do some parents want this and then hate when it happens? I suspect the basic politics that is often involved can both explain the situation and distract us from seeing the truth.
Many want growth without change. So we want learning to confirm our bias and maturity to lead children to agree with their parents.
Jesus then becomes a threat. His offer of repentance is rejected. Because that might mean he is better than they are. And they can’t have that.
Heading out
We might not want to face the first part, which is understandable, really. Especially in the ways our communities, families, and loved ones look just like the townspeople rejecting Jesus. And the positive message may be too hard to extract: that change is good. That repentance, baptism, resurrection are the name of the game for us. In that case, the second part may be more enticing.
The sending of the disciples as apostles is one of our most valuable stories. Not because it suggests we can be as powerful as Jesus on our own (quite the opposite, actually) but that we are responsible together for the work of Christ in the world.