St. Andrew’s January 31, 2024
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Have You Shared the Good News today?
The Rev. Rod Sprange
May the words of my mouth, the meditations of all our hearts and the actions in our lives, be now and always acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Do you know the story of Eutycus? St. Paul was preaching to the people of Troas from a third floor room. Paul had been preaching all evening, around midnight the young man, Eutychus, dozed off and fell out the window to his apparent death. The good new is that Paul went down and declared the man alive. Then, he went back up and continued preaching till dawn, then left!
It’s not my intention this morning to bore you to death - you should be reasonably safe in your pews.
Paul was preaching to a new batch of Christians. When we call ourselves Christians, what does it mean? If you confess to being a Christian what difference does it make in your life? If we are serious about it, and I think all of you are, then it means we are all disciples of Christ, or apprentices to Christ if you like. Part of our role is to learn all we can from Jesus, and pray for God’s help in shaping our lives after his example. As apprentices we are expected to practice our common profession. We are not expected to be perfect, because we are still students. But we are expected to study from the Master and to put into practice what we learn. If we are not doing that, what is the point?
The place we best learn about Jesus and his teaching is the Bible. When do you learn about the Gospel? Many of us rely on the snippets we hear from the Gospel each Sunday. The problem is, they are only snippets and don’t come with any context - unless the preacher expands on the chosen passage or we are already familiar with the whole Gospel. We can miss important parts of the message if we rely on just these snippets.
There are three important aspects of the snippet from Mark we just heard that I want to highlight, but to do so we need to look at the context of this reading. I mean, can you imagine reading a novel, but your book subscription only provides a third of a different chapter once a week - can you imagine trying to make sense of it, or understand the main characters? Well, its the same with the Gospel, we need the whole story I order to understand. We need to fill in all the blanks.
So let’s do some filling-in to see what leads up to the snippet we just heard, including the piece in the middle that the lectionary omitted, the feeding of the five thousand.
Earlier in Mark’s version of the Gospel, Jesus had recruited the first of the disciples and was staying at Simon-Peter and his brother Andrew’s house. Flocks of people had come to be cured of illnesses or had brought relatives to be healed. Night came and the crowd of people settled down for the night. Early in the morning while it was still dark, Jesus quietly left and went up into the hill to be alone to pray. The disciples came looking for him, found him in prayer, and told him how the crowd was waiting for him. Instead of getting up and going back to the house, as we might expect, Jesus said ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that’s what I came out to do.’ Let’s be clear. He said he came to proclaim his message, that was his mission.
Don’t you feel for those people still waiting for Jesus to heal them. He is not coming back people! Does Jesus lack compassion, that his message is more important than healing the sick? I believe Jesus had been wrestling about this in his prayers. He was praying about his mission and what his priority had to be. I am sure he felt conflicted. Later in today’s snippet we will get a different glimpse of his compassion, for now he did the Father’s will, which was to spread the Gospel widely. That was the most important task, and it was urgent.
Sometime after this Mark tells us how Jesus sent out the disciples in pairs to proclaim repentance. Jesus strategy was to teach a few apprentices and then send them out to expand his mission. He needed trained helpers.
Mark, then, leaves that part of the story to tell us of the events we heard about last week, of how Herod had arrested John the Baptist and through the cunning of Herodias had John beheaded. Matthew tells us that John was Jesus’s cousin, and all four Gospels tell how John was a mentor for Jesus and baptized him in the Jordan. Word of John’s execution spread quickly and Jesus would have heard about the violent death of his beloved cousin and mentor. I am sure he was in shock and grieving and wanted to get away from all the people demanding so much from him. When the disciples returned from their missions he said let’s get away to a quiet place and rest. They rowed across the lake. However, crowds of people had spotted him and about five thousand were clamouring on the shore to hear him and be healed of their infirmities.
I am sure Jesus and the disciples would have liked to keep going to get some rest and to allow Jesus time to grieve for his cousin. But Mark reports that Jesus had compassion for the crowd because “they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” Notice he takes the time to teach them, to share his Gospel message. True healing is found in the Gospel.
This next bit was omitted from today’s reading. When it was late in the day and darkness was coming, the disciples wanted Jesus to send the people away - because they would be hungry and they all needed to go and find food. This next piece is critical, Jesus tells the disciples “You feed them”. They took him to mean “give them food”. I think it had a double meaning, that they would later grasp. It was also his way of reminding them of the real food the people needed - the Gospel, and that it was their responsibility to share it. The responsibility of all his disciples, then and now.
Then follows the miracle of the loaves and fishes, which was skipped over in this morning’s reading. We also skipped over the story of Jesus walking on the water. I am sure you have heard those many times. But if you want a refresher, the missing verses from chapter 6 would make some good reading this afternoon.
The lectionary jumped ahead and took us straight to Jesus and the disciples arrival in Gennesaret where the people recognized him and demanded healing, not yet recognizing that true healing was to be found in his message of love and hope, the Gospel.
So what can we take from all of this, and what difference should it make in our lives? The first is that Jesus was indeed a compassionate man. But he was first of all a man of great faith and completely obedient to God who he knew as his Abba, poppa.
The second is that the true mission of Jesus Christ was to bring and be the Gospel, the Good News and to ensure that the Gospel would be heard around the world through mentoring disciples.
The third is that we are today’s disciples of Christ, that’s what It means when we say we are Christians, we are apprentices who need to learn from Jesus and practice what we learn. And our mission, the highest priority, must be to share the Good News, the Gospel.
The church in the west is dying because we haven’t been effectively sharing the Gospel, and too often the public is hearing an abominable false version of the Gospel - a false Gospel of supremacy, exclusion and hatred, rather than the true Gospel of love and inclusion.
So what is this Good News that Jesus brought and exemplified. The Good News that each of us is called to share?
I think it goes something like this; God recognized that humankind had lost its way. people had a misguided understanding of God, and were continually seeking something that was missing in their lives. I have heard it said, that that hole we feel inside us, that empty spot, is a God-shaped hole. Nothing else can fill or satisfy us.
The Good News that Jesus brought and we are to share is that God is a loving, creator God; that God loves us, each and everyone of us, and he sent Jesus to show us just how much and how far that loves goes. Through that love of God and Jesus, the Good News is that he has freed us from the power of sin and death. He has brought us hope of abundant life. And he has shown us the ways to experience that abundance.
If you want to know how, to experience abundant life, read the Gospels. But don’t just read alone, but also join a group of others seeking to understand.
May we be guided by the great shepherd of the sheep and may we dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Amen