For Sunday
Proper 11B
Collect
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. **
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
When Jesus took his disciples with him to Nazareth, with the intention to preach and heal in his hometown, he found the people unwilling to listen to him. They were famously distracted by who they thought he was. But it is from there, from that experience of rejection, that Jesus sends his disciples out into the world as apostles. They take his message of love, joy, and hope in repentance out, and if the message isn’t heard, then they are to keep going.
The disciples return to Jesus, surprised, excited, grateful. Because it worked. What Jesus sent them to do—it worked. They shared, healed, proclaimed, exorcised, redeemed and now they come back, exhausted and fulfilled.
And Jesus tries to give them rest. But something gets in the way. [Something is always getting in the way.] There is need. An enormous crowd: thousands of people. They’re just aimless and confused, fearful and unprotected. Jesus invites the disciples to feed them — a miracle they can, do.
There are brief moments of rest. They take them and make them. None of it is easy. And the need is always there. The temptation to serve is constant.
What we see, however, is that Jesus doesn’t allow them to stay. To reside within the need or to protect from every need. This isn’t a comment on the needy growing long enough bootstraps or the inevitability of poverty (so why bother?) but of the persistent existence of discipleship. That we always are needed. That our work will never end. It is up to us to rest.
And it is up to us to command each other to rest.
That is the part of the Sabbath command we most refuse ourselves: to make each other rest. To provide for one another the safety we need to stop when we need to stop—which is regularly.