Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
21^st of July, 2024

Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6: 30-34 and 53-56

I do like the beginning of today’s reading from the Gospel according to Mark. As I have said many times, Mark’s version of the gospel is short, scary, and strange. But not today. Today, we have Jesus demonstrating gentleness and thoughtfulness as he invites the Twelve to retreat to a quiet place for rest and refreshment. This is a leader who cares for his followers, no matter how obtuse those followers might be.

In today’s reading, the Twelve are called ‘apostles’ – those who are sent out – because they are reporting back to Jesus on what they had done after he had sent them out two by two. In between that sending and their return Mark gave us the story of the beheading of John the baptizer to remind his readers that being an apostle is not a safe occupation, and that if the Twelve inherit Jesus’ mission they are also likely to inherit his death. But for now the Twelve do not seem to be worried; they are eager to tell Jesus everything that they have done and taught.

Some commentators suggest that here the apostles are showing, in the words of Brendan Byrne, ‘a breathless sense of novice enthusiasm’.[1] If they are emphasising what they have done and taught, they are missing the point. Any success they had came not from their own abilities but from Jesus’ authority; that is what it means to be an ‘apostle’ who is sent on behalf of another. And yet the Twelve are coming back to boast about their success to the one who made it possible. They still have a way to go before they understand who Jesus is and who they are.

Jesus calls them to go apart with him to rest and eat. Maybe he is also planning to give his disciples some more private teaching. If Mark thinks that his readers need to be reminded of the usual end of the prophets in the middle of a story of missionary success, maybe Jesus feels the same. The problem is that Jesus’ ministry is proving too successful. Jesus wants to take them to ‘a deserted place by themselves’. The desolate or deserted place is the place where God during the Exodus had fed the people of Israel (Exodus 16); where John the baptizer preached repentance (Mark 1:3-5); where Jesus was tempted (Mark 1:12-13) and where he retreated to pray. (Mark 1:35) But the people see them going and get ahead of them, so that when Jesus leaves the boat in which he is travelling he is confronted by a great crowd, who seem to him to be ‘like sheep without a shepherd,’ the usual biblical term for the people of Israel being badly led by corrupt or negligent rulers. The attempt of Jesus and his followers to escape from the constant pressure of ministry is thwarted – now even the wilderness is peopled by those in need.

Jesus has ‘compassion’ for the people. In Greek the word means something like ‘stirred in the guts’. The word we use to translate it, ‘compassion,’ means ‘with intense emotion’ or ‘suffering with’. Unlike all the bad and absent shepherds from whom the people of Israel had suffered, here is a shepherd who cares so much for the sheep that he can feel their suffering with them. This shepherd is willing to teach them when he wishes to be alone and feed them when he is hungry. Today’s lectionary reading slightly complicates things, because between Jesus being moved with compassion and starting to teach, and the typical Markan summary passage that ends today’s reading and begins ‘When they had crossed over …’ a lot happens. The crowd in the wilderness who were receiving Jesus’ teaching, all five thousand of them, needed to be fed and they were, by five loaves and two fish. (Mark 6:35-44) Jesus then sent the disciples ahead of him in a boat and came to them walking on the water, which terrified them because they thought he was a ghost. (Mark 6:45-52) When we see the phenomenal success of Jesus’ mission in this summary statement, we are meant to compare the belief of the people with the disbelief of the disciples, who ‘did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened’. (Mark 6:52) In contrast, people throughout ‘that whole region’ know who Jesus is, and bring their sick to him. Jesus goes into villages and cities and farms – every type of settlement in Galilee – and heals the sick in marketplaces, the centre of political and economic power. Jesus’ healing power has seemingly increased. At first, people touched Jesus and were healed (Mark 3:7-12); then the woman with the haemorrhage touched his cloak (Mark 6:56); now all those who ‘touch even the fringe of his cloak’ are healed.

If we believe that what we see in the gathering in the wilderness is the nucleus of what will become the church, what do today’s passages tell us about how the church can demonstrate the kingdom of God? To begin with, rest is important. Jesus takes the Twelve to a place where they can rest and refresh, and although Jesus himself then teaches the crowds, the disciples do manage to go apart by themselves. It is not until the end of the day that we see his disciples again, when they come to him and say ‘“This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’” (Mark 6:35-36) While the needs of the world are great, and the church is called to imitate Jesus’ compassion, none of us is Jesus. Not even collectively is the church the Messiah. In today’s scenario, we are the Twelve, not Jesus, and we can take time to rest.

When that rest is over, we must not stay in the deserted place. Like Jesus, our responsibility is to be in the villages and cities and farms, bringing Jesus’ healing into the marketplaces. The church is not to remain cloistered in the lovely buildings that bring refreshment to our spirits, but to engage with people wherever they are. We are to do this imitating the God revealed in Jesus whose nature is Love. Throughout history too many Christians talked about God as an angry Judge, and we saw some of the worst of that last week in the idea of some people being predestined to life while others were predestined ‘to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice’.[2] The God we worship is the one who was revealed in Jesus, who had compassion for the crowd, and taught and healed them. The church is to do the same.

Today’s reading from the Letter to the Ephesians gives more advice to the church as it talks about the reconciliation between opposing groups that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection made possible. Through Christ God has reconciled the world to himself, through Christ peace has been created between the two groups most profoundly separated in the Roman Empire: Jews and Gentiles. The author of the Letter talks about Christ breaking down the dividing wall between the two and that wall was literal – a wall in the Temple in Jerusalem that separated the outermost Court of the Gentiles from the rest of the building. On the wall were notices, in both Greek and Latin, warning foreigners and uncircumcised men that crossing into one of the other courtyards was punishable by death. We are heirs of a tradition in which Christianity is a Gentile religion; it is difficult for us to truly comprehend the radicalness of the revolution that occurred in the early church when Gentiles were welcomed into the people of God.

In today’s reading we see the revolution from the Jewish perspective. The Gentiles are being addressed as the uncircumcised; those without Christ; aliens from Israel; strangers to the covenants of promise; without hope and without God. From the perspective of the writer these people had been distinguished by what they lacked and what they were not. But now they have been welcomed; no longer strangers but members of the household; no longer aliens but citizens; no longer without God but helping the community to become the holy temple that is the dwelling-place of God. Most astonishingly of all, this has happened not because the Gentiles have become Jewish, not because they have been circumcised or started to obey the dietary laws, but because Jews, too, have become part of something new. The identity of both groups is now a gift from Christ.

There is no place for dividing walls of hostility in the church, both because the church is the body of Christ and because the church is a sign of what will be true for the entire cosmos. This is something that the Uniting Church has been wrestling with during the Act2 process. One of the questions that was asked of Act2 was ‘What holds us together other than history and property?’ The answers that came were that ‘the Uniting Church is inclusive, committed to justice, in covenant, multicultural, joyfully ordains women, has a thoughtful approach to theology and scholarship and values our connections to other Christians and other faiths’. Act2 also recognises that ‘faced with rapid decline, the temptation may be to build a stronger, uniquely Uniting Church identity; high walls to protect us from the outside and make us more secure’. However, that is not the Uniting Church’s way. We do not build strong walls. Instead we ‘look out to the wide-open spaces of God’s love’:

Yes, from time to time we need to build fences, draw a line, define a boundary. And we have. We have said ‘yes’ to baptising children. We have said ‘yes’ to welcoming them at the Lord’s table. We have said ‘yes’ (again) to ordaining women called to ministry … As important as it was to define those boundaries, it was done carefully and sometimes reluctantly. We have also struggled with not defining boundaries where some have wished we would. Despite the pain it has sometimes caused, we have faithfully sought to bear witness to the unity to which Christ has called us.[3]

So we have congregations that accept LGBTIQ+ ministers and congregations that do not. We have ministers who will marry same-sex couples and ministers who will not. This is not because living without boundaries is easy. It most certainly is not. It is because we know that Christ has reconciled us to each other. In the words of the Letter to the Ephesians ‘in his flesh he has made both groups [those on either side of the ‘sexuality’ theological fault-line[4]] into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us’. That, at least, is the hope.

When we live out our oneness in Christ we reveal the unity that God is giving to all creation. This is an awesome responsibility to have, to model God’s intentions for the whole cosmos. Luckily for us, it is also a gift. We can live in ways that will lead to peace and reconciliation because Christ is our peace and reconciliation. In Christ, we are no longer strangers and aliens but citizens of God’s realm and children of God’s household. And if our awesome responsibility weighs on us too heavily, we know that Christ invites us to ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ I hope that sometimes, at least, the quiet place in which you can rest is this place: North Balwyn Uniting Church. Amen.

[1] Brendan Byrne, A Costly Freedom: A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel (2008), p. 114.

[2] Westminster Confession, Chapter 3, paragraph VII.

[3] Act2: The Gift of the Spirit (July 2024), p. 16.

[4] Act2: The Gift of the Spirit, p. 14.