February 13, 2011 | 4:00 p.m.

Sermon

Part of the Sermon Series
“Preaching through the Gospel of Mark”

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Mark 6

I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but there are some days when I wake up in the morning well rested, in good health, with a positive attitude about the day in front of me, ready to take on the world and accept whatever comes my way. Other days I pull the covers over my head, hit the snooze button as many times as possible, and resist the start of another day, pessimistic about life and work and the struggles of the day and just hoping people will leave me alone. I don’t think I’m completely alone in this, and I think there’s another thing about it that is common to many of us: it’s surprisingly easy for either one of those types of days to morph into the other. A piece of news we receive, a comment someone makes out of kindness or meanness or even by accident, something we hoped for that doesn’t come to pass or something unexpected that does happen—any one of these things and many others create days and times in our lives when things seem to be just the way they are supposed to be or days that are far, far away from perfect. Things happen to us all the time that show us a life that feels broken or a life that feels whole. Spiritually speaking, we might speak of the good or whole moments as times when we feel close to God, when we have a sense of God’s presence or activity in our lives. But for most of us, life is also marked by times when we do not feel this closeness or wholeness with God, and we find ourselves wondering where God has gone or where it is we are supposed to look if we want to find God.

In the Gospel of Mark, we find people in Jesus’ own time at just about every imaginable place on this continuum between brokenness and wholeness, faith and doubt. I have spoken in previous weeks about the kind of Jesus Mark is trying to portray to his readers. Jesus is a person who heals people and reaches out to people on the margins of life; Jesus questions unjust authorities and works a lot of what the Bible calls “mighty acts,” things we might call miracles. These things we know about Jesus. But today I want to ask what Mark is trying to say about the other people in the story—people who are in relationship to Jesus. What does Mark say about people who meet Jesus and who follow him, or who choose not to? I hope that asking such questions might have some meaning for us, people who try to follow him today and who often fail at it or don’t feel like it on those days when life doesn’t seem so great or God doesn’t seem so present.

There is much that separates us from the first followers of Jesus—time and place and circumstances—but I have a hunch about something that we share with those people: it’s my hunch that they exhibited much of the same ambivalence about following him that we see in our own lives today. It is tempting to assume that had we been right there with Jesus in the flesh that there would have been no doubt about following him and we would somehow suddenly become the people that we have always hoped we would be. As we read the story the way Mark tells it, however, that does not seem to have been the case. Jesus meets people who resist his message and many others who follow at a distance, unsure what to make of him, and even his twelve disciples who are closest to him walk a thin line between trusting Jesus and doubting him, often falling more on the side of doubt than trust. With that in mind, I want to talk with you this evening about three stories in the Gospel of Mark where we see how people react to Jesus and ask what those stories might mean for our own attempts to trust God when we ourselves may not always feel whole or confident or trusting toward God.

One more comment before I get into the stories themselves: Something we see again and again in these stories is that some people respond favorably to Jesus while others do not. It is not as if, on seeing and hearing him in the flesh, everyone was instantly on his side. In a way that is rather unhelpful the church has often read passages like this as if to suggest that some people accept Jesus but others do not or, to put it more crudely, some are saved while others are damned. Tonight I’d like for us to look at these texts with a different set of assumptions, a set of assumptions that’s probably a lot more similar to what life is like for us. On some days, I am more receptive to Jesus than on others. I’m going to give the people in tonight’s stories the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were the same way. The assumption I’m going to make is that Mark tells all of these stories to show us that we are all on a journey where sometimes we trust and accept God’s truth and other times we reject or shy away from it, and Mark tells the story the way he does so that we will always have someone to relate to as we live our lives, hoping that we will more often choose the right path and follow where Jesus wants to lead us.

I read three stories: in the first story, Jesus is rejected in his hometown; in the second, even out of that feeling of rejection, Jesus sends out his disciples to join him in his work, telling them that they too will be rejected; and in the third story, Jesus calls back the disciples to nurture them, but they still doubt the power of his message.

In the first story, Jesus, still new to his ministry but gaining something of a reputation, returns to Nazareth, the town where he had been brought up. Contrary to the positive reception he has received in other places, those who hear his message, we are told, “took offense at him.” In response to them, Jesus says, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown.” It’s a comment he makes without any apparent reference but as if people know what it means, almost as if it were some kind of cliché. The meaning is clear: Jesus did not expect that all people would always listen to him with enthusiasm and was not surprised when people doubted him. He’s having one of those days we all have, and importantly, he assumes there will be days like that.

In the second story, it is this very assumption about hard times that governs the way Jesus sends his disciples out on their own to join in his ministry: Here we find Jesus, having left his home town, traveling again from one village to the next sharing his message, and his disciples have now been with him long enough that he begins to send them out in pairs. He tells them to travel with minimal supplies and to count on the kindness of people they meet to sustain them, for they are taking no food and no money for shelter. And Jesus also says this to them: “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” Clearly, Jesus does not only expect that people will reject him, but that all of us will experience rejection and defiance, and Jesus is not surprised by that. It is almost as if he is saying, “People will doubt and reject you from time to time, because that is what people often do.”

I suppose we could be pessimistic or disappointed about this portrayal of humankind, disappointed that the God who created us and who comes to us in Jesus Christ expects to be rejected by us. I choose to think of it another way: the idea that God understands rejection is actually a good indication that God understands us. God knows that part of what it means to be human means that we sometimes feel rejected and we sometimes reject others, but it also seems as if we have a choice in the matter. Mark’s Gospel teaches us about Jesus through these stories of some who choose not to hear what Jesus has to say because he wants us to know that some people do choose to hear him, and we too have that choice. This theme comes up again and again in service of an important message: no matter how many times you might have made the wrong choice in your own life, Jesus continues to offer his message of hope, new everyday to those who want to hear it.

The patience and perseverance of this message comes through in the third story. The feeding of the 5,000 is one of the most well-known passages in the Bible; it has that fairy tale quality that plays so well in Sunday School, so most of us who grew up in the church probably recognize it. Maybe you can remember, as I do, felt boards and perforated cut-and-paste workbooks full of little fishes and loaves and characters with amazed looks on their faces because of the miracle they’ve just witnessed. This Sunday School portrayal does us a bit of a disservice, because unfortunately we are in no better a position than those cardboard characters when it comes to figuring out how Jesus took two fish and five loaves and fed a crowd. Over time, biblical scholars, some unsatisfied with the mystery of this act of God, have proposed that all of the listeners actually had some food with them and, inspired by the generosity of Jesus, took out what they had been hiding in their packs and shared it with everyone. It’s a nice thought. But these impressive acts of God appear in story after story about Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, and when we get stuck on explaining the miracle we often miss the point of the story. Having acknowledged the two fish and five loaves and having admitted that I cannot explain to you how Jesus managed to feed the crowd, let’s bracket that so that I can point out a few things about how Mark tells the story.

Jump back with me to where we left off: The disciples have returned from their journeys out into the world and have been accepted in some places and rejected in others. They are tired, and Jesus invites them to take a break. The story of the fishes and loaves begins with an invitation to tired disciples: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while,” he says. Jesus knows that the task of following him is a difficult one. He knows that many times it does not involve all of the feelings of affirmation that perhaps it should and that trying to be the good and whole people God calls us to be can wear us out. He calls his disciples away to rest.

Jesus’ plan doesn’t work out. He gets in a boat with the disciples, and they head for a quiet place but arrive only to find that they’ve been followed and they will not get a break. The disciples get stuck at work. Something came up. This is almost certainly one of those turning points in a day, one of those moments that could really ruin your attitude. Not only are Jesus and the disciples spent, but they are surrounded by needy people who want even more from them. And soon everyone is hungry. Jesus, it says, “had compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” And when the disciples suggest that they should disperse the crowd to neighboring villages to find food, Jesus challenges his disciples to have compassion of their own: “You give them something to eat,” he says.

This is the moment where the mighty act of God takes place: somehow, when the disciples are at their wits’ end, Jesus finds a way to provide for them what they cannot provide for themselves. Jesus finds them when they are worn out and tired and hungry and finds a way to feed them and give them rest.

I don’t know how to explain many of God’s mighty acts in Mark: the healings, the feeding of thousands, the walking on the water. What I do know is that just as in the stories we read today, we walk through our lives often getting glimpses of God, and often we miss or are not in a place to receive what is before us because we are too tired or lazy or stubborn. God finds us anyway, heals us, challenges us, invites us to rest, feeds us for the journey before us. When we are empty and do not know how to find the food we need, God finds us. Mark’s message to us is that Jesus is not just present to us when we are at our most faithful, our most optimistic, or our most motivated place, but that when we feel empty and do not know how to fill ourselves up again, Jesus has been there as well, and God feeds us in those places too. Amen.