Come Away By Yourselves
Mark 6:30-56
There is nothing I like better than beginning my holiday sailing out of Portsmouth harbour. I like to stand on the rear deck all by myself and just drift out of the city. I love all the boats, the cranes, and the trains you can see. The cars and the funfair, the piers and the jetties, and the little pubs bursting with people. To be part of all that is what I am, but there is something right about just sailing on by sometimes. Putting clear blue water between you and it all, just for a while, going somewhere different and even, being someone else.
The insistence of Jesus that we take time out emerges from our New Testament reading.
It is described in a way that is tailor made for a twenty first century audience.
“Come away by yourselves to a lonely place and rest awhile” and then Mark himself adds
“for many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat”
To be in the close company of Jesus and simply re create yourself alongside of him.
This is an alluring prospect which could take shape in the context of a spiritual retreat or a summer holiday. If it sounds a lazy way out, it isn’t. For we need to remind ourselves that we are human and not God.
So I hope this summer Gospel will touch each of you in the coming weeks and cause you to drift out of your usual place – to find space with Jesus. Albeit a physical holiday journey – or simply the drifting of his grace into your heart wherever you are – and you simply give the time for it to happen
It would be good to leave it there really, but I think there are some pressing reasons why this invitation to take a holiday comes at this point in Mark’s Gospel.
It’s because summer does inevitably turn to winter.
The Gospels are peppered with little one liners that we might be inclined to miss because of the enormity of what follows.
“He went early in the morning to pray by himself” that’s the gist of it and you can find it time and again.
And following the prayer something important always happened. Jesus begins a long preaching tour, or finds himself in fierce debate with opponents, or names his twelve disciples and throws down a challenge to them.
In this passage though he takes the twelve with him as if he knew that what would follow would be something they would all share.
And if you read on in that chapter you will see that after the retreat three vital incidents occur, each one quickly on top of the other.
The feeding of the five thousand – an experience of wilderness
The stilling of the storm – an experience of abandonment
The visit to the people of Gennesaret – an experience of conflict.
The feeding of the five thousand meant going with Jesus to a place where nothing was – only people in need of nourishment.
The stilling of the storm meant going to a place where God would be hard to find – where the disciples feared for their lives and felt deserted.
The visit to Gennesaret meant the start of a provocative healing ministry where opposition against Jesus and his followers starts to get stirred.
Each of these three experiences would demand a drifting in of grace into the disciples lives if they were to cope with it – because each of the three experiences had something about them of Calvary.
Jesus fed the people in the wilderness – just as his cross would be set up in a barren place and from the offering up of one life would emerge the spiritual sustenance for everyone who had ever lived.
Jesus stilled the storm that gets created at the heart of abandonment. Left to their own devices on a boat in a storm, just as Jesus was abandoned on the cross – forsaken by his Father, deserted by his friends, with only the enemy to wag their heads at him like a storm of hate in which he was about to be engulfed.
Jesus performed numerous acts of healing in the land of Gennesar et, so much so that the religious authorities left their seats of power in the Holy City, and bustled the length and breadth of the country to catch up with him and accuse him and draw up the battle lines. On the cross the battle between good and evil reaches a climax – his dying body ranged against opposing voices against which only a thief and a centurion dare to dissent.
There fore this reading ends up giving us a number of facts about Christian discipleship.
Jesus wants to draw us away tenderly from the bustle of life – to give us space and time with him in places of comfort and peace. Because of his love for us, plain and simple and true, but because he knows that up head there will always be challenges.
If we come away with him to the place of refreshment – we must also go with him to the place of challenge.
The wilderness place – where there is little to rely on.
The abandoned place – where our fear is all we see.
The conflict place – where we are a minority voice.
And knowing that this is how it must be, not because we aren’t any good, not because we keep getting things wrong, but because we are human and yet have dared to ask that become part of Christ’s body – which gets itself crucified before it can rise again.
RH 20.7.08