Sunday: 7th Sunday after Pentecost
Reading: Mark 6:30-34; 53-56
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

The committee who chose the gospel reading for this morning didn't leave a preacher much. Did you notice how the Gospel reading skips 19 verses? It's the feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus walking on water. We're left with the scraps. It's frustrating. Well, this morning's gospel does begin with the disciples excitedly telling Jesus all they had done and taught. That is enough right there for us to check in on the twelve, to see if they really have that much to be excited about, to see what we can learn about discipleship. You might remember that the 12 disciples have been off in pairs preaching that people should repent. They had gone without food or money, relying on the hospitality of strangers. They had driven out many demons and healed many. No longer were they just following Jesus; they were doing God's work themselves. Right? I fear our selection's one sentence of triumph is unfortunately an outlier, the pinnacle for the disciples.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus often tells the people he heals not to tell anyone. There are insiders and outsiders in Mark. You could be forgiven for assuming that the 12 disciples are on the inside. Forgiven, but wrong. Mark presents us a story of a bunch of bumbling fools. First of all, these guys didn't pass some rigorous Foreign Service exam to become disciples. Jesus picks them seemingly randomly. He is walking along and sees two fishermen. "You two, follow me." "OK." A little further down the lakeshore, two more are called. They immediately leave their father. After calling the 12 Jesus takes them up a mountain and commissions them to be apostles, to be sent out to proclaim the message. In chapter 4 Jesus tells the disciples that the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to them, but to those on the outside everything is said in parables that they may not perceive or understand. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that the disciples are not given any better vision than anybody else. These 12 see incredible miracles like the healing of the Gerasene demoniac and the healing of the hemorrhaging woman who touches Jesus' cloak. But immediately after that, when Jesus shows the power to calm a storm they are shocked and terrified, "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him?" They watch Jesus feed thousands from just a few loaves and fishes twice, but show no more understanding the second time around. "How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?" Even when Peter shows a little sign of understanding by calling Jesus "the Christ" he quickly blows it and is rebuked harshly by Jesus. These guys, in the words of the great teacher Donald Juel, seem impenetrable, yielding to neither instruction nor experience. (1) And the problem with the disciples does not seem to be ignorance, but blindness. Community college would not help. Jesus asks them in chapter 8, "Do you have eyes, and fail to see?" The solution to blindness is not learning or experience. The solution is healing.
It's troubling. If the disciples couldn't see, what hope do we have? If our condition is likened to blindness, then what can we do but wait to be healed? We are the soil in the parable of the sower, being told to become better soil. Particularly in our community-where learning is revered and hard work is rewarded-healing as the option sounds unpalatable.

This is one of those moments when a preacher feels stuck-fidelity to the text suggests that I don't leave us a way out. It suggests that we have to live with the uncomfortable notion that we might not be on the inside. It means putting the power to understand God outside of our grasp. The Gospel of Mark doesn't bail the disciples out. The disciples are all gone by the time Jesus dies. The only faithful ones left, the women, they run away in fear in the very last verse. The tension of the disciples' impenetrability is not eased in Mark. Fidelity to the text suggests that discipleship is anything but clear. Want to be a good disciple of Jesus-hope you are given sight.

Any interpretation beyond that can smack of self-rationalization. I will risk it. There must be a way of creating an environment where a healing can take place-incorporating practices that will allow, prompt, God to give us sight. It is clear that learning the right thing wouldn't create that environment. Scholar Walter Wink said the following about the disciples, but we can say it about ourselves. (2) "[God] is not just interested in pouring a fresh new content into [our] heads, but in emptying them, of displacing the old presuppositions, of giving [us] a new mind. [God] cannot achieve that, however, by exhortation to think differently, since [our] minds (like those of the disciples) are programmed by the software of those presuppositions. All [God] can do is to induce a systems breakdown, using that strangely neglected educational tool, deliberately induced frustration."
Deliberately induced frustration. Where does that leave us? As Paul says, three verses before our Ephesians reading begins this morning, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God." Where does deliberately induced frustration leave us? Needing God's grace. Or to paraphrase Tertullian, "Faith is the gift of God through Christ to the helpless, who blindly grope in the dark night of their storm tossed world, toiling hard at the oars against mounting waves of opposition, and who are ready to abandon hope." (3) Mark's portrayal of the disciples shows the reader the incredible struggle of coming to sight. Thankfully it wasn't up to the disciples to heal themselves.

At SPR, we say it is our mission to nurture one another in our journeys of faith. We need to be careful what we nurture. The disciples were formed by having their presuppositions overturned, not nurtured. We don't want to come back to Jesus boasting about all we have done and seen even though we don't get it. Christian Formation is not tidily winks. If it is anything it is what prepares us to go from blindness to sight. Mark's Jesus is clear that those who understand God like children, are aware of their fallibility, those who confess their blindness, these might be given sight. Might. We should at least know that becoming a disciple will involve frustration. If the healer comes, we will glory in our new sight. When? How? Mark's portrayal of the 12 disciples highlights that whom God chooses to be on the inside is finally a mystery.

1. Those words and the general outline of this description of the disciples come from Donald Juel, The Gospel of Mark (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1999), 74-76.
2. Walter Wink, "The Education of the Apostles: Mark's View of Human Transformation," Religious Education, 1988.
3. As paraphrased by Wink.