Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:11-22
No matter where Jesus and his disciples went, they could not escape the multitudes who ran after them. That only gave Jesus more opportunities to teach the people and be compassionate toward those in need. The compassion of Jesus stands out as the most remarkable feature in these two brief summaries of the Galilean ministry.
The second part of the reading is the conclusion to the first major section of Mark’s gospel. The emphasis has been on the declaration that Mark made near the gospel’s beginning, as Jesus came up out of the baptizing waters of Jordan: the Spirit was on him (Mark 1:10). And that’s the same message which Peter gave Cornelius the centurion following Peter’s revelation that the good news embodied in Christ was for Gentiles as well as Jews: “Jesus of Nazareth, whom God anointed with the Holy Spirit and endowed with power,...traveled around doing good and healing everyone oppressed by the devil because God was with him” (Acts 10:38).
In the first part of the gospel reading, Jesus has compassion on the twelve whom he had sent out, his apostles as he calls them. He called them away for a debriefing, but they were soon recognized and the respite was over. In the second part of the reading it is the crowd which received Jesus’ compassion. The verses skipped between the two readings recount the feeding of the five thousand, so we know that Jesus wasn’t just found by a few nosy people. He was sought out by many through word of mouth. As he and the twelve tried to escape once more the sharp-eyed folks in the crowd noticed that he must have slipped away by boat. The word spread once more and the crowds were waiting for him when he was ready to put aground further along the lake shore.
Wherever Jesus went, people had needs. At times it seemed that their needs outdistanced his capacity to meet them. Yet Jesus always embraced the people and their needs. He dealt with pressing crowds, with random hands reaching out to touch his garments, with people who didn’t even feel good enough or connected enough to ask for his help.
You and I are a pretty self-sufficient lot. We don’t fend completely for ourselves like our ancestors did several generations ago. As the character in the decades old commercial said, “Mother, please, I can do it myself.”
The reality is that there are a lot of things we can’t do for ourselves. And a deeper reality is that there are a lot of people who can’t do as much as we can. I don’t mean physical things. I’m talking about mental, psychological, and spiritual things. Every newscast, every front page, every Internet news feed is filled with the reality of deeply seated pain, anger, anguish, fear, guilt, uncertainty, helplessness. It’s not only in the victims, but also in those who do unbelievable things like shooting up an armed forces recruiting station or a movie theater. It is also in the arrogance of demagogic politicians speaking without thinking through their thoughts as well as the knee-jerk acceptance of such political pablum without parsing it for truth and falsehood.
Human pain is as omnipresent as human beings. And most of it can’t be touched by acetaminophen or ibuprofen or stronger drugs. That’s because a lot of human pain is societal, institutional, systemic. It is because we human beings build walls. It goes back nearly as far back as people go. Abel was a shepherd. Cain was farmer. Rodgers and Hammerstein alluded to that in a song from the musical, Oklahoma, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends.” We divide. Me versus the world. Us and them. Democrats and republicans, owners and employees, government and people, slaves and free people, gay and straight, immigrants and native-born citizens, Protestants and Catholics, Israelis and Palestinians, creationists and evolutionists, Sunnis and Shiites, whites and blacks, jingoists and pacifists.
Walls divide, and that’s what Paul was trying to tell the Ephesians. Robert Frost’s great poem says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” For Paul that something was Jesus and his gospel. Jesus does away with the us-them understanding of the world. There will be no walls when Jesus gets through with us. That’s our pain because it is hard to live without walls dividing us from other people. We want to be set apart, special, secure, pain-free. The trouble is that we can’t live in isolation, no matter how much we want to.
I love to drive down roads when there is little or no traffic. But that rarely happens. I dislike having to stop at intersections. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome. As the number of vehicles increases, engineers have developed new ways to keep traffic flowing smoothly. The criss-crossing levels of ramps ease the flow of traffic. Rotary intersections may slow traffic but by taking turns and cooperating, drivers don’t have to wait for light changes.
Paul strove in his Ephesian letter to create a sense of unity among the several classes of converts in the early church, particularly Gentiles and Jews, who had very significant differences. The crucial element is their common faith in what Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross did in giving everyone access to God. The Jews needed to get beyond the issue of “circumcision,” the symbol of belonging to Israel’s sacred covenant. Because of that exclusiveness, they were “without Christ.”
In a similar manner, many Gentiles excluded from God’s favor people of other religious traditions because they did not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, Son of the living God. The church has clung to that exclusiveness and still wrestles with what Peter wrestled with about letting in outsiders who are different.
The gift of God’s Spirit to create a new humanity through faith was universal. That is plain in the events of Pentecost. You and I have to keep thinking about the walls we keep trying to repair as fast as Christ is trying to remove them. This letter proclaims this message while at the same time making it abundantly clear that such unity can only be through faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that we keep trying to wall off to protect God while the world on the other side of our walls cries out in pain for justice, integrity, righteousness, humility.
There can be no closed doors in the fellowship of faith. The letter writer reiterates that while the doors of faith are wide open to everyone, the building to which we are moving in faith from many directions has Jesus Christ as its cornerstone. As so often in depicting theological concepts, the metaphor creates the situation of truth being found not in a conflicting state of either/or but of both/and.
Christ did not live an either/or gospel. He did not separate himself from the world. He stepped into the midst of it, whether it was a crowd on a hillside that needed fed with both teaching and with bread, a throng following him seeking healing, a crowd hugging the lanes of Jerusalem, or even hanging from a cross with arms spread wide saying, “Father, forgive.”
A number of years ago there were a growing number of homeless people in Evanston, Illinois. A Baptist church in that wealthy Chicago suburb decided to open its doors as a shelter and other Evanston church leaders were considering doing the same. When the Evanston city council heard about this, it attempted to pass a new zoning ordinance to wall the city off from homeless people by forbidding the use of churches as shelters for the homeless. The organizer of one shelter project had no complaint. Rather than opening up a shelter for the homeless, they hosted an all-night prayer vigil to which all were welcomed with pillows and blankets besides bulletins and hymnals. Christ tears down the walls we keep trying to put up.
Both parts of the gospel reading and the Ephesian passage challenge the church to live in the world, a world which is suffering and in need of healing reconciliation. To withhold the wholeness that Christ gives is to practice the religious malpractice that Jeremiah decried in his writing read earlier.
Let us begin by recognizing for ourselves that Jesus is the healer and reconciler that each of us needs. When we are healed and reconciled ourselves, Christ then can be a healer and reconciler through our activity in our community. The ways of life are crowded. And they cross every which way in an unorderly fashion. That did not stop Jesus. It should not stop us, either.
Amen.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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