A Lost Retreat: The Shepherd on the Shore
Proper 11 Year B; Mark 6: 30-34, 53-56.
The lectionary most of us use does not quite follow the logic or structure of Mark’s own narrative this week. We do resume directly after the cliffhanger (the sending of the twelve) and the flashback (Herod’s banquet) that were read in the previous two weeks; the disciples (“apostles” in fact—the only time Mark uses the term) have returned from their mission. Jesus then attempts to take them away in a boat to a deserted place to rest, but instead this turns into a teaching event near the water, like the parables discourse of chapter 4. This is all a prelude to the first miraculous feeding (6:35-44) which—along with the story that follows of Jesus walking on stormy water— is omitted by the lectionary, as this Gospel reading instead skips to the aftermath of the storm, another crowd scene where Jesus lands at Gennesaret and heals many people.
This editing arises because of what lies ahead on the next five Sundays, namely a jump to John’s Gospel and its longer version of the missing feeding and walking on water stories and their aftermath. This pattern of feeding-crossing-landing appears both here in Mark 6 and in Mark 8,1 as well as John 6, and echoes previous cases in which Jesus’ movement across the sea between peoples and territories is not just travelogue, but sign of an expanding mission.
In possible defense of the lectionary framers, or in any case with a view to working constructively with what we have, there is still a theme across these two episodes, namely the interaction between Jesus and the crowds, and signs of how his identity as the true leader of Israel is unfolding among his people and beyond.
The disciples (“apostles”) report. We don’t actually hear what happened, though; this may be because they are now more organically a part of all Jesus is doing. The two themes we are given in this Gospel, of teaching and of healing, also echo the scope of their recent mission. There is even a similarity between the itinerant and interdependent character of that recent mission (see 6:6-12), and the way food, travel, and saving action will be treated here.
Jesus takes the returned disciples aside, or tries to, because “they had no leisure even to eat” (31b). This is reminiscent of the scene in Mark 3: 20 that also initially problematizes the crowd; Adela Collins also suggests the sense of chaotic excitement may allude to the success of the work of the twelve.2 So the disciples’ incorporation into the widening circle of God’s work in Jesus is being emphasized, and they continue to figure in what follows, although not without some issues.
The attempt to achieve distance from the crowd doesn’t work, or at least not as readers ancient or modern may have been led to expect. The envisaged retreat simply can’t happen. Note here Mark’s subversion of the attractive “self-care” narrative that seems to have been offered; so if you just preach on “come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” as a proof-text without admitting how that actually doesn’t work here, you are ignoring the text. Jesus himself will eventually get to be alone and pray (6:46), but only after feeding the people, and this is part of what we don’t get to read.
More generally though, Mark’s Jesus is not presented as a sort of exemplar for spirituality; this narrative is about his unique mission and identity, not about curating everyone’s ministerial practice. The disciples are the people with whom the reader is invited to identify, warts and all; that does of course involve a form of identification with Jesus too (and this will be developed in the middle and later parts of the Gospel), but here his distinctiveness is emphasized. Here though perhaps the point is to set aside any notion of an apostolic intimacy grounded in a privileged relationship with Jesus apart from the people; instead we are shown (also in the feeding and storm stories, by the way) that true intimacy with Jesus is to share his work with the people.
So the crowd now follows Jesus and the disciples, spoiling the envisaged retreat. Yet the main problem here is not identified as the resulting lack of rest, but the oppression and alienation of the people. Jesus sees them not as an obstacle, but as “sheep without a shepherd.” Jesus’ (i.e., Mark’s) reference to Israelite kingship via the traditional shepherding metaphor is a further indictment on the current lack of just leadership in occupied Judea and Galilee. Remember that this also follows straight on from the story of Herod’s corrupt executive orders. The Jeremiah reading in Track 2 of the OT lections also picks up that theme of shepherd leadership clearly.
The story now depicts Jesus forming a community, acting as Messiah, initially by teaching: the sheep receive what they need in the self-giving work of the good shepherd, who guides them as teacher. That the teaching itself is not described should no longer surprise us (cf. 1:21-22; 1:39), but it is always in some sense what was stated at the beginning of the Gospel: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (1:15). Mark then has Jesus go on to address their material needs as well with the miraculous feeding, but that food episode has to wait for next week.
In the second part of our edited Gospel—feeding and storm now bracketed—Jesus and the disciples have crossed to Gennesaret. Jesus had again sent the disciples away (“he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side” 6:45). This time they were apparently making a hash of that mission, embodying how from now on they are both trusted insiders and also more or less hopeless—but more on that after August.
Nevertheless all reach the other side of the sea. Geography in Mark is theologically significant, and not just a matter of maps. The point here is that they have again “crossed over,” echoing the earlier storm narrative (see 4:35-5:1), where they went to the gentile country of the Gerasenes. The “other” place is being contrasted with the setting of the shepherd’s teaching; Jesus is taking his messianic work across a divide, to a wider world.
Werner Kelber and some other scholars take this “other” also to be a gentile setting, parallel to Gerasa, and so the spectacular description of healings—people carrying stretchers for miles to find Jesus, who meets them in “villages and cities and farms,” offering saving power in market-places—is a sort of parallel to the massive scale of the exorcism in that earlier crossing story.3 This scene is also an enlarged and enlivened synthesis of others in the past few chapters: people are being carried around on mats (2:4), Jesus is healing many who are sick (2:2, 3:10), and people are touching the fringe of his cloak (5:27). It is a vivid picture of divine power, a crowd scene again but a joyful one, a summation or climax of what has been taking place in this Galilean ministry.
So now Jesus is appearing more clearly as the ruler Herod is not, and his mission extends more clearly beyond Israel too. More of this and its consequences will be evident when we return to Mark in September. In both of these episodes, where Jesus teaches and heals, the crowd which had initially been a chaotic obstacle responds to Jesus with eagerness, and as he ministers with unique authority they become his own people. His work to serve and help his people models true authority, and true ministry; discipleship meanwhile is shown not to consist of a special intimacy with Jesus as such but to be the call to participate with him in that ministry to all.
Vincent Taylor, The Gospel According to St.Mark: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes, and Indexes. London: Macmillan, 1959, 331.
Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007, 318.
Werner H. Kelber, Mark’s Story of Jesus. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.