MARK 6:30-34, 53-56 is the Gospel Reading for this Sunday, and one I’ve found particularly rich: It’s a story of how things just don’t go as planned, even for Jesus.
Mark tells us about a guy, a leader, just wanting to give his friends some peace and quiet: “[Jesus] said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.”
So far, so good. Jesus is tired, the disciples are overworked, they’re all exhausted and they’re hungry — like too many of us in our busy lives, they were too busy to eat. (Of all the Gospels, Mark rushes us along; he has everyone always gadding about, here and there.)
This time, crowds gather twice to meet Jesus.
First, Jesus tries to get his disciples away only to find Crowd No. 1 gathering.
Then he leaves with them by boat again, only to find that Crowd No. 2 has seen the boat and rushes to get to where he will land.
Like too many of us, we face busy traffic and long lines all over town and in the parks and at restaurants and at concerts; sometimes we just want to say “Enough!”
We just need quiet times.
American poet and essayist Kathleen Norris spent a year doing research for The Cloister Walk, a non-fiction memoir of the time she spent in a monastery.
It’s a great book that presents the quiet, ordered, loving world of the monastery at St. John’s Abbey outside of Minneapolis/St. Paul through a number of stories: the proper and improper ways in which one might read the lessons (“the monks would kill anyone who emoted during the lesson!”), the monastic critique of an American society immured in capitalism (the abbot asking “just how many choices of breakfast cereal does a monk need?”), the difficulties of paying attention to prayer when one is tired or sick.
The heart of the memoir is the monastic life in which the monks balance prayer, work and rest in the context of the church year.
Norris described her difficulty in making herself go to the various services that marked the passage of each day when the lectors read through reading after reading from one of the gloomier of the prophets, again and again and again.
She described this period, memorably, as “trudging through Jeremiah,” and wrote at length at how difficult it is to deal with absolutists; even on the page, his anger is evident.
As Jeremiah tells us, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.”
That’s an indictment, even a threat, that comes too close to home today for us clergy types as we live in a society in which very few people hold too many of the resources that ought to be available to all, in which people don’t have adequate access to food, housing and health care, where people are being cheated by the very institutions that ought to be protecting them, where the big merchants simultaneously pay folks less than a living wage while also selling substandard products.
That’s wrong, it’s immoral and it’s unethical.
And for prophets, that means absolute total failure, directed either to the people as a whole or, in this case, specifically to the religious leaders of his day (and probably ours, too, in this era of a Prosperity Gospel).
But it’s hard to hear the prophets shouting at us. Worse, they can tempt us to self-righteousness.
As C. S. Lewis pointed out in his book, Reflections on the Psalms, it’s easy to read the prophets and think that others are the problem, to think that at least we’re good people who do well, that the prophets don’t mean us.
But when we read these lessons today, we might just start to wonder: how good are we?
Do we deserve salvation?
At our worst, do we even want it? (As St. Augustine said of his conversion, “Save me, God, but not yet!”)
But God also turns our frustrations, our exhaustions, even our own sin to good (this is the felix culpa, that God literally turns around what we’ve done wrong to make the world right).
Mark goes on to tell us of what happens to Crowd No. 1: “[Jesus] had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”
Crowd No. 2 fares even better, partially because of the strength of their own faith: “[The] people at once recognized [Jesus], and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was.
And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.”
Perhaps they had heard of the woman who had been bleeding for many years.
Her story appears one chapter earlier in Mark 5 and is expanded in both Matthew and Luke, indicating the story’s importance to the early church: “A woman who had been bleeding for 12 years approaches Jesus in a crowd and touches his cloak. Her bleeding stops immediately, and Jesus asks, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ When the woman confesses, Jesus says, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’”
All those people healed, simply by touching the hem of Jesus’ cloak, like the woman who had been bleeding.
Crowd No. 2 ends up converting a hope of some down time into what turns out to be a busy mission trip to all of the “villages, and cities, and farms, and many people were healed and made whole.”
The people of God today know that feeling of exhaustion, of being overwhelmed, of having too much of the work of the kingdom to do, of just wanted to eat with friends and lie down afterwards for a nap.
There is indeed much, too much, to do and yet we are called to do it all.
I don’t mean just our religious leaders — I mean all who follow Christ.
But the people who put together the lectionary for today knew their stuff.
Against Mark’s sense of time flowing too quickly, they put Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” for us to reflect on.
As the Psalmist knew, “Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, / and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”
So may we all!
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a deacon resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia.
