Sermon 8th Sunday After Trinity 21 July
Readings: Jer. 23. 1-6; Eph. 2. 11-end; Mark 6. 30-34, 53-end
Theme: Shepherds’ Rest
Today the cycle of readings continues with the gospel of Mark and will then, for the next five weeks, move on to study chapter six of John’s gospel, returning to Mark at the beginning of September on the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity.
The background to our gospel reading for today from the sixth chapter of St Mark is the warning issued by the prophet Jeremiah to the false kings who had shepherded the people poorly and who had scattered and destroyed the unity of the people of God. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! Says the Lord”. But hope will be offered at the end of our reading from Jeremiah by the announcement that a new king will arise amongst the people from the line of David and he will rule with justice and wisdom. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” Both Israel and Judah, the two kingdoms of the divided people of the Lord will thus be reunited by this good shepherd, the true and wise king, who will once again reconcile the divided peoples after their exile.
It is to this pre-history of shepherding of the people that our gospel passage from St Mark alludes to today. The scene is set within the busyness of Mark’s chapter six with its various healings, miracles and teachings. And, whilst we will not read St Mark’s version of the feeding of the five thousand in chapter six (we will encounter this incident in the life of Jesus as we turn to St John’s gospel next week), the reading of our passage from Mark assumes this busy context as the scene for the teaching today about Shepherds’ rest.
The gospel begins in characteristically Markan style with the account of the apostles returning from their mission in the towns and villages of the Galilean region to tell him how things had gone for them. It is characteristic because it conjures up in our minds an almost domestic scene of the children coming home from school to tell a parent how their day had gone. This is the motherly and fatherly nature of Jesus, as the good shepherd, being set against the figures of the wicked kings of old who had led the people astray. The good shepherd, the true king in the line of David, Jesus, will lead the people with justice and righteousness. This is why Jesus tells the apostles to rest for a time. He says to them that they should, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while”. Jesus knows from his own experience the challenges of the mission. He knows how important it is to take time to recuperate one’s energies and to restore the inner harmony required in order to preach the gospel. The apostles seem to be have so busy that we are told, “they had no leisure even to eat”. So clearly, in their mission through the towns and villages they had been in great demand, and like a good shepherd Jesus bids them to come in the boat to a quiet place in order to rest. But the demand is so great for healing and teaching that the people spot them and arrive before the apostles and Jesus. The response of Jesus to these people is compassion. That most wonderful of human responses which means that we understand the plight of the other from our own personal experience. The personal experience of Jesus alluded to here is an implicit critique of the Jewish leaders of the time whom Jesus would have known and heard teach and so had formed his own judgments about. They were clearly in the lineage of the bad shepherds of the old kings who had provided little real guidance for the people. So, in contrast, Jesus, as the good shepherd, begins to teach them. However, the same happens in Gennesaret, and so clearly the shepherds’ rest will be an elusive aspiration in this sixth chapter of St Mark.
There is another line at the end of our passage for today which should ring some bells from our previous study of St Mark, namely, the phrase, “they begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak”. Here Mark is drawing our minds back to the healing of the woman with the problem of haemorrhaging in chapter five which was sandwiched together with the story of the healing of the daughter of the leader of the synagogue, Jairus. In other words, Mark is narrating one long story in his gospel in order, through the various activities and events recounted, to tell us who this Jesus is.
Today, it is the figure of the shepherd which is meant to convey to us the identity of Jesus. Jesus as the shepherd is the one who, in the line of David, will act as the messiah-king to lead his people out of exile and back into unity in their homeland. The new homeland that this good shepherd will lead the people into is the kingdom of God. The place where God’s rule will shepherd the people to “green pastures beside still waters to revive the soul” as we sang in Psalm 23 for our gradual hymn today.
So, there will be little time for shepherds’ rest in our scriptures on this eighth Sunday after Trinity because the urgency of the mission portrayed in Mark’s gospel places high demands on Jesus and the apostles, in fact such high demands that they seemed to have little time to eat never mind even to rest. The demands of the gospel should thus not be underestimated as we follow Jesus and the apostles around the towns and villages of Galilean region. Because of this, as disciples of the Lord, it is important for us to heed the words of Jesus, the good shepherd, who bids us to, “come away to a deserted place and to rest a while”.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.