Jeremiah 23:1-16 Psalm 23 Ephesians 2:11-22 Mark 6:30-34,53-56
Some weeks are extra busy, aren’t they?
Some weeks we find ourselves, like the disciples, with so much coming and going, that we have ‘no leisure even to eat’. We can understand that sentiment.
But this morning’s gospel reading doesn’t even tell us the half of it! Putting it into context, the disciples have just returned from their first lone mission. They healed the sick, cast out demons, proclaimed repentance, and all with only a staff in their hand – no bread, bag, money or spare tunic. At the start of today’s passage, they return to Jesus, exhausted. He sees, and extends this wonderful invitation, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while’. So, they get into the boat and sail across to a deserted place by themselves. The introverts among us can hear the bliss in that sentence – a deserted place, all by themselves. But the crowd gets there first – a great crowd, interrupting their rest, and the work continues.
What the lection leaves out in the middle of the reading is the small matters of feeding 5000 people, walking on water and calming the wind and the waves.
A rest in a deserted place, on their own, this is NOT!
And still it continues. They regroup and seek solace in the next place their boat might take them. This time, the ‘whole region…began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was’ and they begged him and they touched him – reaching out and grabbing the fringe of his cloak – they’re surrounded by desperate people – it is all a far cry from that welcome he extended a few verses earlier – ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while’.
Following Jesus is sometimes exhausting.
Family, work, sickness, homelife, adulting, loneliness is sometimes exhausting.
And I think about the people, worldwide, who turned up for work on Friday morning this week, probably thinking they just had to get through the next 8 hours beforethe glorious weekend…and the worldwide computer outage hit. The blue screen of doom wreaked havoc all over the world and banks, telecommunications firms, TV and radio broadcasters, supermarkets, emergency service call centres, airlines, rail and transport links, healthcare providers and even the London stock exchange all went down. A single defect in a single computer update caused a universal headache and a vast amount of work for many people who were hoping to head into the weekend. Life is sometimes exhausting.
Come away to a deserted place and rest awhile, Jesus invites us still.
How can we do that? And when?
When will be led to lie down in green pastures and beside still waters and have our soul restored? And I wonder, if we don’t sometimes get to do that here, then when? If we can’t take a few minutes, in this sacred place, to sit, with Jesus, and rest, before launching back into the demands of life, when can we do it?
So, for a longer period than usual, let’s pause and be still. Let’s rest awhile, in the safety of the shepherd’s care…
Holy Adventures 