“The apostles gathered
around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught.” From the
Gospel for today, the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, verse 30.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Gospel reading has been put
together from two sections, one from the middle of chapter 6, and the other
from the end of chapter 6. These sections are separated by two of the great stories
of the Gospel, Jesus’s Feeding of the Five Thousand, and his walking on water.
The compilers of the lectionary clearly intend us to understand the two
separate sections as a continuous narrative, interrupted, so to speak, by the
miracle stories. Combining the sections
in this way prompts us to listen more closely to what the narrative actually
says, more than we may if we hear them merely as preamble and conclusion to the
miracle stories.
“The apostles gathered around Jesus, and
told him all that they had done and taught.” These words don’t actually say
what the apostles had “done and taught,” so we must look elsewhere in the
Gospel, to find out what they had been doing and teaching. This text encouraged
me to read through Mark’s Gospel, right up to the beginning of today’s reading,
so that I could list what Jesus and the apostles did and taught.
Earlier in chapter 6, Jesus “called the
twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the
unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing…except a staff…so they went
out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and
anointed…many who were sick and cured them.” They were teaching repentance, and
they were casting out demons and curing the sick. They reported this work to
Jesus. But there were other teachings too, which aren’t mentioned in this
chapter, so we need to go back to the beginning of the Gospel to recall them.
In chapter 1, the Gospel says “Jesus came
to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying … “the kingdom of God
has come near; repent, and believe the good news.” The good news was, and is,
news of the coming of the kingdom, and Jesus and his disciples are signs of the
kingdom, and were, are, in fact, the means by which the kingdom was, is, coming
into the world. Other signs of the kingdom, the casting out of unclean spirits
and the curing of the sick followed later. But not too much later. In fact,
they followed almost immediately the calling of the Twelve. Jesus cast out an
unclean spirit in the synagogue at Capernaum, and cured many sick at Simon’s
house, beginning with Simon’s mother-in-law. The healings and the casting out
of spirits are all signs of the new teaching that Jesus brought, the nearness
of God and his kingdom.
So the new teaching of Jesus expanded from
the opening proclamation of the kingdom and repentance and a call to believe
the good news. It expanded to include healing the sick and the demon-possessed.
But there was more to come, as Jesus and his followers revealed more of what
the kingdom and repentance meant. The revelation didn’t stop with mere
proclamation. It included, as we have heard, healing and demon-removal. It soon
came to include the power to forgive sins, and the acting-out of radical freedom.
God’s kingdom was not to be limited by religion and social convention, as Jesus
and his followers would make clear.
In chapter 2, the crowd brought a
paralyzed man to Jesus, for a cure. What they got at the outset was something
else. Instead of curing him, Jesus said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” This
did not give the crowd what they wanted, and caused murmurings of “blasphemy.”
So, to prove that he, and his apostles, could forgive sins, Jesus cured the
paralytic. Notice what has happened here. Jesus subordinated a physical cure to
a spiritual one. He extended forgiveness first. This reminds us of what Jesus’s
primary mission was in Mark’s Gospel: proclaiming the good news of God. The
cures and demon-removals, while valuable and important and necessary, were
incomplete without understanding that they were signs of the kingdom and steps
towards its fulfilment. They were not ends in themselves, although the people
who sought them likely thought so.
The kingdom didn’t stop even there, with
the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins. There was still more. Jesus called
Levi the tax-collector to join him, and even went to dinner at Levi’s house. In
those days tax-collectors in the Roman Empire weren’t government
employees, but rather contractors who agreed to collect a certain amount for
the Empire, and whatever they were able to extract from people above that
amount, belonged to them. It is easy to realize how abusive that system could
be, and it was, so Jesus was compromising his reputation by taking Levi into
his circle and accepting hospitality from him. The Gospel says that “tax
collectors and sinners” were at dinner with Levi and Jesus, without telling us
what the "sinners" were doing. Just being there was sin enough, probably. The point here
is that Jesus was not restrained by religious taboos and social respectability.
The scribes and Pharisees disapproved of this gathering, but Jesus was not held
back by their disapproval, and he taught his disciples to ignore it. God’s
kingdom is not about enforcing religious restrictions and social conventions,
in the time of the story, and in our time as well. This expanded the disciples’
understanding of what the forgiveness of sins really meant. It had meaning
beyond the physical and spiritual cure of one sick man. It had implications for
the whole society, and its religion.
Jesus was equally free in his attitude to the
fasting regulations, and about work on the Sabbath. He turned the conventional
expectations upside down, and ignored them when there was a strong spiritual
reason to do so. Jesus compared his teaching of the kingdom to a wedding feast,
in which fasting would be out of place. “The wedding guests cannot fast while
the bridegroom is with them,” he said. The disciples plucked corn on the
Sabbath, Jesus healed a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath, and so on. It
is clear from all these examples, that Jesus progressively expanded on the
meaning of the good news of God, the good news of the kingdom. The good news
had nothing to do with reinforcing religious and social conventions, and
everything to do with leading all who heard, and hear, the good news, to a new
experience of freedom in God.
How do we respond to the good news of the
kingdom? Are we like the scribes and Pharisees, looking only for violations of
traditional rules and regulations? Are we like the crowds following Jesus, hoping
for something spectacular, a miracle, a wonder, a sign? Or are we like the
apostles, learning from Jesus, eager to tell him all that we have done and
taught, all that we have made of the teaching and practice that we have learned
from him? Are we like them in their eagerness to bring the kingdom into the
world? Are we ready to lead all whom we encounter into a new experience, an experience
of freedom in God?
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
