Proper 11B: 2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Psalm 89:20-37;
Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
The Rev. Cameron Partridge
July 21, 2024
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.
This morning our gospel passage launches us into a several week journey. The text picks up right after last week’s passage. “The apostles gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught” (Mark 6:30). Jesus had earlier gathered these twelve and had sent them out to teach in the villages. They had gone about with very little – no belt or extra tunic, no money, no bread; just a staff and the good news of the nearness of God’s reign, calling them and all they met to turn, to cast out evil, to heal (Mark 6:6b-13). Their activities had such an impact that Herod Antipas had heard of it, causing him to wonder if Jesus was actually John the Baptist raised from the dead – an unsettling prospect for him, given how he had treated John, as we heard last week (Mark 6:14-29). Now as the apostles regrouped around Jesus, they reported all that they had experienced. Hearing their stories, he had something to say 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” (Mark 6:31). Come away, he says. Come away and rest. Come to a place of leisure and nourishment. Where is this place? It is the eremos. The wilderness. The desert.
I was struck by this location when I myself was away at a place of leisure and nourishment, reading Bonnie Thurston’s little book The Spiritual Landscape of Mark.[1] (Don’t worry, I also read unchurchy things!) That the desert was the place to which Jesus would call his weary disciples away struck me at first as odd. To be sure, the Greek term eremos can be translated as wilderness as well as desert. In our case as well, the word is actually modifying the term topos or place. The Revised Standard Version translates it as a “lonely place.” But its rendering for us as a “deserted place” evokes the stand-alone term “desert” for a reason. The desert is where the Spirit drives Jesus right after his baptism, you may recall. There he is tested and remains for forty days (Mark 1:12-13). The desert or wilderness is also the domain in which the Israelites wandered for forty years after their liberation from bondage. With Jesus’ temptation and the Israelite journey being stories we hear during Lent, the desert is a locale associated with that season in particular and not so much with the summer months. Yet the desert emphasis in our passage is not a tiny detail or a one-off: as Thurston points out, in our text and the passage we would normally hear next week, it is mentioned three times.[2] Come away to a deserted place; they went in a boat to a deserted place; and then in the story that follows, after they arrive and things had taken a turn, the disciples point out, “this is a deserted place.” If the wilderness or desert is a place of testing, it isn’t obvious why Jesus, recognizing the apostles’ exhaustion, would tell them to go there to be restored.
As it happens, during the journey to get to this deserted place, it rapidly becomes rather un-deserted. As we heard, “Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them” (6:33). As soon as the boat lands, Jesus sees this growing, unruly group and “had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (6:34). He responds by teaching them. Time seems to get away from Jesus[3] and the disciples feel the need to remind him that, given their remote location, he ought to give them a signal to disperse so they could go somewhere and eat. This gathered crowd was very large: at least 5000 strong, the text later mentions. The disciples had, after all, withdrawn for rest. They were not prepared to feed such a group. But of course, you’re likely familiar with this story and Jesus’ response: “you give them something to eat” (6:37). Now, you might be thinking, in what way is this turn of events restful? How is it restorative? In an obvious sense, it isn’t – I cannot imagine how it could have been in the initial moment when the disciples receive such overwhelming, truly inscrutable instruction. But then as they responded, seeking out and distributing what turned out to be the five loaves and two fish that Jesus blessed, broke, and gave to them to share with the crowd, something truly unexpected was revealed. This un-deserted desert was a place of deep, miraculous nourishment. Writing of this story and of the desert-located feeding of the four thousand later in Mark, Thurston says, “Jesus is ‘the embodiment of abundance in the midst of scarcity’… Jesus provides abundance in the desert.”[4] The desert, the lonely locale, the un-inhabited place that paradoxically becomes crowded with need, is in fact the place where God in Jesus Christ meets us, teaches us, feeds us with the bread of life, the wisest of nourishment.
The seventh century Byzantine monastic theologian Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662 C.E.) reflected further on the resonance of meaning and sustenance we might find in the desert. There is a collection of Maximus’ responses to questions about inscrutable passages of Scripture – in a way, his version of our Wrestling with the Scriptures format, I was amused to note this week. In one of them, referencing Matthew’s story of the feeding of the four thousand, Maximus is asked why the crowd remained with Jesus for three days in the desert. In response, Maximus immediately invites us to think of the desert in connection with the nature of human beings and of our world in which we experience “hardships in faith and in the hope of the good things to come.”[5] Further along, in answer to another desert-related question, the word evokes for him “human nature, as well as this world, and each particular soul.”[6] The desert reflects our experiences of hardship, of deep difficulty. It is a place in which the promise of fullness of life is not obviously reflected back to us. What may feel most obvious there is not abundance but lack. It is a place to which we may go carrying loss, struggle in faith, longing for hope but having a hard time seeing it. And despite its evocation of loneliness, it is a place in which we travel in good company. For another aspect of the desert that Maximus lifts up is that it is a place where a “voice cries out, ‘prepare the way of God,’” as we hear in the season of Advent. Yet it is not just one or two voices that carry that cry, Maximus emphasizes, not only Isaiah or John the Baptist. It is a whole host of holy ones who are desert witnesses: from Noah to Moses, from Isaiah to John, from Miriam to Mary, “every saint, through [their] own way of life, possessing a word that cries out… to others, is clearly the voice and forerunner of the Word…”[7] We come to the desert crying out from and about the particular circumstances of our lives and the life of our world, crying out for justice, for healing, for liberation, for peace. We cry out together, “prepare the way of God,” praying that God’s just reign would be manifest in its nearness, its presence.
And Jesus the Wisdom of God, the Word made flesh who dwelt among us, comes. The Holy One of God meets us there. And once Christ reveals himself to us, we cling to him. We remain with him there as the ultimate Source of our hope, the One whom we can trust to show us the way to fullness of life, the One who promises to be with us always, even to the end of the age. But more amazingly, in that presence, in that hope, Christ not only nourishes us but also steeps us in abundant life. Christ equips us to feed others, to be a source of support and strength among others who may feel lost, abandoned, cast out, shunted to the margins. The desert is indeed the place Christ calls us, dear friends. The desert blossoms abundantly in, with, and through us, as we collectively cry out, as we receive nourishment, and as we are equipped to facilitate the nourishment of others.
I leave you this morning with an image of Christ who meets and nourishes us in the desert. Here is an icon called Christ of the Desert, written by Robert Lentz, a copy of which hangs in our small conference room.[8] Behold the One who is with us in test and challenge, who proclaims good news and shares the unfathomable abundance of his bread of Wisdom. Behold Christ who equips us to share that news, that abundance with all around us. May the desert make us glad this morning, and sustain us for the journey ahead.
[1] Bonnie B. Thurston, The Spiritual Landscape of Mark (Collegeville, MN, 2008).
[2] Thurston, 10
[3] As Thurston humorously notes “as so often happens with teachers…” p. 10
[4] Thurston, 11, first quoting Mary Ann Tolbert, “Asceticism and Mark’s Gospel” in eds. L. Vaage and V. Wimbush, Asceticism and the New Testament (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 44.
[5]St. Maximos the Confessor on Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), Question 39, p. 226.
[6] St. Maximos, Question 47, p. 259
[7] St. Maximos, Question 47, p. 259
[8] Robert Lentz and Edwina Gateley, Christ In the Margins: Icons and Biographies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 12.
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