Doing What Jesus Does
Doing What Jesus Does
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
Of the four gospels, the gospel of Mark was probably the first one to be written. The earliest Christian communities had certainly told many stories about what Jesus did and taught, and Mark – writing maybe 35 or 40 years after Easter – doesn’t even try to tell all of those stories. Instead, Mark has a very specific message about Jesus that he’s trying to communicate to his community, and he uses the some of the familiar stories about Jesus to communicate that message. He knows that his readers already know a lot about Jesus from other sources, but he chooses certain stories and builds a narrative in order to make certain points.
And so, in a sense, it’s unfortunate that our lectionary breaks up Mark’s gospel into these bite-size chunks every Sunday. Because when we only focus on one of the stories that Mark includes, we miss the whole structure of the narrative that Mark is trying to construct. And in fact, the people who designed the lectionary were so concerned that Mark is so much shorter than Matthew and Luke and there might not be enough readings for every Sunday of the year, that we get supplements from John’s gospel, and we’ll have that for the next 5 Sundays. And that breaks up the narrative of Mark even more.
This morning we have two short, relatively simple passages from the 6th chapter of Mark’s gospel. But when you put them into the whole context of the structure of the gospel, these simple passages are much more interesting and instructuve than they might seem.
So, let me take us back two Sundays to the beginning of chapter 6, when we read first about the messy visit of Jesus to his home town of Nazareth, and then Jesus sent out his disciples to do the same things that Jesus himself had been doing. So the disciples are to do what they’ve seen Jesus do. They are to go from town to town, to announce that the Kingdom is at hand, that all should repent and believe the good news, to embody the Kingdom by healing the sick, casting out demons. And if they face rejection and opposition, as Jesus did in Nazareth, they should do what Jesus did – shake the dust from the feet, and move on.
At the beginning of today’s gospel reading, the disciples return from that mission. And they’re all excited about what they have done, what they have accomplished, how successful their ministry has been. Jesus calls them aside, let’s go away to a deserted place. Be away for a while. Think, process this experience, reflect on it. That’s what Jesus himself did, at the beginning of the gospel, after his baptism. He goes into the desert to do the same thing, to reflect, to understand his call.
And if you remember, all the way back in February, when we read the earliest parts of Mark’s gospel. There was a reading about the first day Jesus went to the synagogue. He comes to Peter’s house and heals Peter’s mother-in-law, the whole town comes to the house looking for healing. And what does Jesus do? Well, he heals everyone, and the next morning when Peter gets up to go looking for Jesus, and he can’t find him. Because where is Jesus? He’s gone off by himself to a deserted place, to think, to reflect, to get clear on what he’s being called to do next.
Jesus tries to get away, and Peter comes tracking him down. Look, Jesus, people are looking for you, people need you, people are in need of healing and they’re trying to find you. And now, exactly the same thing happens to the disciples. As soon as they arrive at the deserted place, they’re noticed. People are looking for them. People who need healing interrupt their rest and call them back to their task.
If we were reading the gospel of Mark straight through, it would be easier to see it. But I think in these short passages today, Mark is trying to show us that (1) as we read two weeks ago, the disciples are sent out to do exactly the same things Jesus does, (2) as we read last week, John the Baptist suffers and dies exactly as Jesus will do, and now (3) as we read this week, the disciples return and report that they did exactly what Jesus did, and now they try to get away and rest and reflect and pray exactly as Jesus always does, and – exactly as always happens to Jesus – people who are in need reach out and find them.,
So that’s one of the recurring themes in Mark’s gospel – the disciples are called to do, we are called to do, exactly the same things that Jesus did. And another of the recurring themes in Mark’s gospel, which we’ve already seen on many Sundays this year, is that usually the disciples don’t understand very well what is happening. When the disciples put aside their misunderstandings, when they have the faith to just do the things thath Jesus does, then they experience the Kingdom. Other people find healing and peace. And they face the same obstacles and meet the same opposition that Jesus did.
But, in the stories we have today, when the disciples get back to hanging out with Jesus, they immediately lose their faith. They revert to their old ways. You might have noticed that today we read two short segments with a whole lot of verses missing in between. The verses that we skipped are the story of the feeding of the 5000 and the story of Jesus walking on the water – we’re going to spend the next few Sundays on those specific stories and their aftermath the way that John’s gospel tells them. But, whether John is telling the story or Mark is, the disciples don’t do very well in following Jesus either in the story of the feeding of the 5,000 or when Jesus walks on the water.
What Jesus does is he sees the crowd that has come to interrupt them and he has compassion on them. He sees that they are like sheep without a shepherd, and so he begins to teach them, which is what a shepherd does. And then he feeds them. In the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus embodies who God is – the shepherd promised in Jeremiah in the first reading today, a good shepherd who sets a table before us, who leads us beside still waters, and is with us even in the valley of darkness.
But the disciples don’t really help. They don’t understand that in the Kingdom God has provided enough to feed all. Then after the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus sends the disciples away and he comes to them on the water, he comes to them showing the very power of God to restrain the chaos of the waters in creation. And their reaction is fear – not trust, not faith. We see this in many different ways throughout Mark’s gospel.
And yet, there’s this one moment in Mark’s gospel when everything works out well for the disciples. And that moment is when they allow themselves to do just what Jesus did. It’s not about understanding what Jesus did – the disciples show by their actions, even after they come back, that they don’t understand, not really, who Jesus is and what Jesus is trying to do. But when they have the faith to say, I don’t really get this, but I’m just going to do what I’ve seen Jesus do – when they do that, everything works.
To actually do what Jesus did takes faith. Even if we don’t completely understand what Jesus is doing or why he is doing it, when we have the faith to do what Jesus does, we experience the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.
And so this morning we come here, to do what Jesus did, because he told us to do it. We open ourselves to the Word of God, we pray for the needs of the church and the whole world, we give thanks to God for the gifts that have been given us, and we celebrate and share with one another the presence of the living Christ in our midst. We do this with trust that, even if we don’t see how, he is shepherding us towards the Kingdom, that the Kingdom is truly present whether we realize it or not, that the Kingdom can become visible and tangible to us here in this church this morning, and to our neighbors as we are sent out on mission to do what Jesus did – if only we have the faith to see.