Sermon onMark 6:30-34, 53-56

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

I got really excited when I read this week’s Gospel reading.

I thought to myself, “This is great! Jesus tells his disciples to come away and rest. This is perfect for our Sabbath theme!”

Two weeks ago, we read about Jesus sending out his disciples in pairs, empty handed, to go town to town sharing the good news of the Beloved Community and casting out demons and healing people.

Our story today begins with the disciples having returned from their travels. Jesus could hardly hear them as they talked over each other in their excitement to share all they had experienced.

So, Jesus said, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

“This is going to be perfect,” I thought. “We can talk about retreats and camp experiences that can be so powerful in people’s faith lives. We can talk about how important it is to spend time away reflecting and encouraging each other.”

Jesus and his disciples got into a boat and started toward their destination. But when they got there, there was a huge crowd waiting for them!

“Okay,” I thought. “Their retreat didn’t go quite as planned, but maybe Jesus showed good boundaries and protected the time he had planned with his disciples. I’m sure they all needed to restore themselves and process everything that had happened.”

Maybe Jesus said, “Thank you for your attention, but I’m not available right now”?

No. He did not.

“He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”

Well, that’s nice, but that’s not showing us good boundaries, Jesus!

Then, the part we didn’t read today that comes in the middle of our readingis the stories of the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on water. We’ll read both of those stories from the Gospel of John in the next couple weeks, but our reading today skips them.

Jesus didn’t only teach the crowds, he worked a miracle to feed them out of practically nothing and then defied the laws of nature to walk on water instead of relaxing in a boat. That doesn’t exactly sound restful!

Then, when our reading picks back up, it talks about Jesus being recognized everywhere he went. The disciples’ travels must have been successful, because everyone seemed to know Jesus and want him to heal them. It seems like Jesus must have been even busier than before their interrupted retreat.

So much for a good Sabbath story!

It seems like even Jesus couldn’t maintain good boundaries or carve out time for self-care! Most of us don’t have crowds of people following us around, but our lives feel just as busy. The line about “many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat,” resonates.

It seems like our world is moving faster and faster. Sometimes it feels like one wrong step and we’ll fall off the treadmill of life, making fools of ourselves and probably breaking something in the process.

There are plenty of suggested solutions, though. Everywhere you turn, there are articles and videos and bestsellers recommending another form of self-care: take a bath, have a cup of tea, wake up at 4 a.m. to journal!

That’s not even to mention the marketers who try to get us to believe that this candle, that planner, or this detox diet plan is the key to finally being calm, collected, and in control of our overloaded lives.

But when we try all the things and we’re still tired,

When we buy the products and services and we’re still anxious,

Then it must be our fault, right?

We’re just not upholding our boundaries well enough. Or we’re not finding enough alone time while simultaneously not sufficiently nurturing our important relationships.

We’re just not trying hard enough. Or maybe we’re trying too hard?

It’s a challenge to find real rest in our world today.

As much as I wanted our Gospel reading to give us an example of Jesus resting that we could hopefullylearn something from, this story isn’t really about rest.

It’s contrasting Jesus’ compassionate leadership with Herod’s violent reign.

We did an introduction to Ephesians last week, so we didn’t talk about the gruesome story of the death of John the Baptist from our Gospel reading.

Here’s a quick refresher: King Herod was hearing all these stories about the miraculous works Jesus and his disciples were doing, and he worried that maybe Jesus was actually a resurrected John the Baptist.

That doesn’t sound bad, except that Herod had been the one to order John’s death.

Herod’s wife, who had formerly been his sister-in-law, was not a fan of John, because he called out the political implications of Herod marrying her. His new marriage allied him more closely with the Roman occupiers.

So, when she had the chance, she got her husband to do what he had been too afraid to do: behead John the Baptist.

This story doesn’t seem like it has much to do with Jesus’ interrupted retreat, but there’s a literary device used commonly in the Gospel of Mark that links the two stories.

Officially, the literary device is called “interpolation,” but I prefer the less formal term “Markan sandwich.”

Basically, one story is sandwiched in the middle of another story.

We saw an example of this three weeks ago when we read the story of the woman with the chronic bleeding, which was sandwiched in between the two halves of the story of Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead. This sandwiching links the two stories into one unit—wraps them in butcher paper, so to speak—so that the reader knows to look at how the stories relate to each other.

In this chapter of Mark, the story of Herod having John the Baptist beheaded is sandwiched between Jesus sending out the disciples two by two and when they return.

By sandwiching these stories, the writer of Mark shows how very different Jesus’ compassion for the crowds was from Herod’s power hungry and violent rule.Instead of Herod’s bloody birthday party for the elite, Jesus fed the 5,000.

Even the line about Jesus seeing that “they were like sheep without a shepherd” recalls our first reading from Jeremiah, where bad leadership is described as bad shepherds who scatter the flock. Jesus came as the Good Shepherd to bring those who were mistreated by the bad shepherds like Herod and the dominating Roman Empire into the peace and fulfillment of the Beloved Community.

So, even though our reading isn’t about Jesus and his disciples going off on a relaxing retreat, maybe this story is about rest after all: the rest and peace Jesus brought the flock of people who found their hope in him.

We can turn to Jesus for rest and peace, too. That’s what Sabbath is for: to set aside time to enjoy God, to remember that we don’t have to do anything—God loves us because we are.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a beautiful book called The Sabbath. He describes Judaism as a “religion of time” that “teaches us to be attached to holiness in time,” and the Sabbath as “our great cathedrals.” He says, “the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise.”

It's powerful to think of time this way and learn from our Jewish siblings. The dominant culture in the US is very concerned with constructing things, whether projects, buildings, careers, or bank accounts. But in Sabbath, we build a cathedral of time, we pause and dwell in the holiness of time.

Think of the last time you felt awe. Maybe it was in a beautiful church or a view of the ocean or a vast gallery in an art museum. Now picture that sense of awe in time instead of space. That is Sabbath.

We get to admire God, who is bigger than time and certainly bigger than anything we can accomplish by our efforts. We just get to enjoy and rest in God’s compassionate presence.

I hoped for rest for Jesus and the disciples in our Gospel story, but the rest in that story is for the crowds, the lost sheep who found a compassionate Good Shepherd to build a cathedral in time with.

I encourage you to find that holiness in time this week. Even if it’s only five minutes, rest, breathe, be in awe of God. Rest in the compassionate embrace of your Good Shepherd and be at peace.