This Week: Proper 11B
Gospel: Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
After last week’s interlude in which we witness Herod cracking up as he remembers how he killed John the Baptizer and we were all forced to imagine a person’s head on a platter, we are brought back to our moment. Here. When Jesus couldn’t go home again and his disciples were sent out into the world to do wonders.
This moment invites us into a beautiful tension. Of the disciples coming back excited by their success — and the coming disappointment that they don’t quite get the point. This tension, unfortunately, is hidden by the slicing of the lectionary. But we, instead, are invited to the existential problem of needing to rest and not getting to.
In the hole of this gospel donut is the feeding of the multitudes and Jesus walking on water: a pair of miracles that reveal the generosity of God and confusion of the disciples. We don’t get to see what Jesus sacrifices the disciples’ rest for. Or how he then gives them rest after.
At the heart of this moment is the idea of rest—and how the disciples need it, can’t get it, and then do get it. And how this itself matches the pattern they just experienced—how they went out into the world, allowed others to host them, and then moved on. There is a pattern of ongoing work, rest, departure—repeated in each new encounter. Here, they will work, rest/depart. And when they get to the other side, they will have more work. And no doubt also rest and departure.
I sense that we may have an easier time with this idea intellectually than in action. Or maybe it is my own workaholism mixed with perfectionism that says how about we just stay here and keep working?
This makes the whole equation a difficult sell for many Americans, I’d say. That we don’t work forever. We must rest. And we leave. It is just as difficult as the stuff the disciples just got done doing: visiting and letting other people host them. To let others be in control, setting the agenda, filling the plates, giving them a place to stay.
I suspect the whole thing would be easier to contend with if we imagined the disciples just following like lost puppies. Never thinking for themselves or having to worry about feeding themselves or going out to make a mess in the yard. It would certainly make our own sense of discipleship easier to think that we don’t have to work and rest and keep moving. That this (whatever this is—this moment, place, work, life!) is temporary. That we all have to move sometime.
My parents stayed in one spot so we only had to go to one high school. But lots of people move. And lots of people live in the town they grew up in. Around the corner from the house they grew up in. Down the street from where their parents grew up.
The idea that we can’t stay here, here (and let’s all read that both literally and metaphorically) can be scary. But it is also essential to following Jesus. Because he doesn’t stay in one place long. Ever.
And maybe that is the most revolutionary thing about trusting him. That we’re invited to move. And grow up. And change, become. Then, when we’re just starting to come to grips with that fact, Jesus nudges us or knocks us upside the head and says Listen! You’ve got to help others get what you now get.
And then we move. Sharing with people along the way. And resting. So we can do the whole thing again.
Maybe, like the disciples, we will marvel in what we accomplish and love every minute of it.