Year B

Mark 6:1-13

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

Commissioned and Sent For the Gospel

Every one of us wants to have a sense that life is meaningful and to have a sense of identity. Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who spent three years in a Nazi concentration camp, noticed that many of the people who survived the Holocaust did so because they had a particular purpose for which to live. Today, in our readings we see several different ways God commissions God’s people to serve God’s purposes which brings purpose and meaning not only to our lives but to those around us. God commissioned David as monarch. God commissioned Jerusalem as a community to model God’s blessings despite what we see happening there today. This is why we need to pray for the Holy Land. God used Paul’s thorn in the flesh for God’s purposes and Jesus sent the twelve as wandering prophets to bless those whom they encountered.

Anointed King David’s story in the text today from 2 Samuel is the conclusion of a lengthy narrative which began back in 1 Samuel. It traces David’s long and difficult rise from shepherd boy to royal king. Author Walter Bruggemann calls it the story of “a genuine nobody to whom power was given.” But it wasn’t until Saul, Jonathan, Abner, and Ishbosheth–all other potential leaders were dead that the people were ready to accept David as their king. Our text today records two of the most significant moments in the history of Israel. One is David’s enthronement and the second is Jerusalem becoming the capital of Israel.

Gathering at Hebron, in the stony plains south of Jerusalem, David’s home base, at 30 year’s old, David’s acceptance by the people completed his ascension to power. He became not only the king, but the Great King, for the Lord the God of hosts was with him, and for forty years he so filled the office that even Jesus will bear the title, Son of David. It then took seven years after his enthronement, before David succeeds in taking Jerusalem as his capital of all Israel. David, more than just a king and Jerusalem, more than just a city: became Zion and the sign of God’s continuing favor. But whereas David received the acceptance and loyalty of his people, today we hear that Jesus experienced rejection in his hometown of Nazareth.

The link between the gospel text today and the Old Testament lesson seems quite obvious. As God touches the shepherd boy and gradually works in his heart to prepare him for leadership, so it is with Jesus. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Like the shepherd boy David, the carpenter’s son, comes to set his people free. After performing great miracles, Jesus decides to return to Nazareth, his hometown, where he goes to the synagogue to teach. As he begins to speak, the people are astounded by his wisdom, and the “deeds of power” but those who should have been proud of his growing popularity, wonder how God can use such an ordinary son of such ordinary parents from such an ordinary village.

They were offended by what they considered the presumptuousness of his actions and Jesus was not surprised by their rejection he quotes a familiar proverb, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” This rejection marked the beginning of a new phase of Jesus’ ministry, as he traveled beyond Galilee and began to include Gentiles as well as Jews in his ministry. This new expanded mission was now to be shared with his disciples, as he sends them out in pairs to do what he himself had been doing. He commissions them to preach repentance and to minister to the sick. They are to be ready whenever and wherever the Spirit sends them.

This first mission of the disciples is a reminder that we as Christ’s disciples today are a community commissioned by Jesus and sent out to serve as God’s agents in the world. While the faithless citizens of Nazareth could restrict God’s work in their own community, they could not ultimately restrict God’s work. Jesus and his disciples then and now set out with power and purpose to do the work of the kingdom far and wide. One good example of this was Francis of Assisi who patterned his own Order the Brothers Minor called simply the “Franciscans” after Jesus’ description of sending the twelve two by two, living a life of simplicity and engaging in a ministry of healing and sharing the good news.

“They were to wash one another’s feet, love one another and surrender themselves to Jesus: to follow the humility and poverty of Christ and to rejoice to be with despised persons, with the poor and the weak, the sick, the beggars and the lepers: to bless those whom they encounter. Paul, years earlier recounts in his 2 letter to the Corinthian church today, the vision by which God called him to go out and plant the seeds of the Gospel despite rejection. This passage is one of the most remarkable in his writings, providing us with both an intensely personal glimpse into the apostle’s own experience, along with a major theme in his theology, his understanding of God; “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

Not only does this verse go to the heart of Paul’s mission, but it is the word of the Lord given to him personally-a divine revelation he shares with the Corinthians and us. To keep him from being too elated, a thorn was given him in the flesh. A “thorn” given to him by Satan, not God: God does not cause his affliction but God is present even in the difficult things, and God’s grace was made visible through his affliction and can be made visible through the afflictions of life. God’s grace prevails over sin, weakness, and hardship. Paul sees this thorn as a reminder that his power does not come from himself, instead, it comes from the Lord.

As is so often true of faith, there is a paradox here: the love, power, and glory of God are made visible through the good we are able to accomplish in spite of our weakness. “For the sack of Christ whenever I am weak, I am strong.” For God’s strength reveals itself most clearly through our human weakness and frailty. Therefore we, like Paul, can rejoice at what God is able to accomplish through our lives.  Unless there had been those who persisted with the mission of the early church under all kinds of circumstances, the ministry of Jesus would have died.

Early Christians did not survive as a movement of faith just because they survived persecution and criticism from a hostile rejecting environment: they survived and grew because the church had a purpose to vigorously and intellectually engage its culture and win it over for Christ. And yet, the good news for us today is that we are not held responsible for the response to our ministries in Christ’s name, but only for our faithfulness to go out and proclaim the truth of God’s grace, God’s love, from our hearts of love, in our own words, and never be ashamed to show and speak the gospel of Jesus.