Teaching as Ministry
Ordinary Time XVI; July 23, 2006
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Those who created the lectionary took a huge chunk out of Mark 6 to make today’s reading, but I think I understand their logic. These two pieces of the story show how Jesus responds to the needs and desires of the crowd; the piece in the middle tells two stories about the glory of Jesus and those stories are the reading for next week.[1]
I hope you remember the reading from two weeks ago. Jesus has sent off his disciples in pairs, to preach repentance, to heal and to cast out demons. Then Mark gives us a side-bar about the killing of John the Baptist. In today’s reading the disciples come back and start telling Jesus about all that they have done and experienced. You can feel their excitement. Imagine that Matthew and Thomas were one of the pairs; Matthew is trying to tell Jesus how they found a woman who had been tormented by a demon for two years and they had exorcised it and Thomas keeps interrupting to correct him on the details. And the whole time a bunch of sick people are crowded around Jesus; Matthew tells about one of the symptoms of the woman’s possession – perhaps shrieks of rage without provocation – and Thomas is trying to remember her exact words and Jesus is laying his hands on a man with a twisted left arm, healing him, and muttering to Matthew, “Yes, I see. Now, who’s next? You, there, with the goiter.”
Side comment: I wonder who was paired with Judas Iscariot. I’ll bet it was Simon Peter.
Anyway, with all this bustle, Jesus and the Twelve simply cannot catch a break. So, the Boss says, “Let’s get into a boat and go to someplace we can be alone and talk.” And off they go. The Sea of Galilee – or Lake Gennesaret – is not all that big: if you look at the map out in the hall that compares the Holy Land to this part of the Midwest, you can see that the Sea of Galilee stretches about the distance from New Market to the BNSF mainline, and is about half as wide. So from the hills around the lake, the people could watch Jesus’ boat and figure out where he was going. And the crowd goes there.
There are two things about Jesus’ response when he gets there that absolutely amaze me. Things like this remind me why I try to follow Jesus. First, when he and the Twelve get to the place where they would like to be alone for a while, and discover a mob of people there waiting for them, Jesus doesn’t get annoyed. He doesn’t say, “Can’t you give us one afternoon alone?” No, he has compassion on them. In his gut, he feels for them.[2] They are like “sheep without a shepherd,” wandering aimlessly, leaderless.
The second thing that amazes me is what he does with his compassion. He sits down and begins to teach. Now, what do you expect him to do with his compassion, with his sense of their being lost? When you find a mob of people, aimless and leaderless, what do you try to do? Organize them, perhaps? I have one of those personalities that grow terribly impatient with disorganization. Somewhere recently I saw a comment to the effect that the greatest retardant to the progress of civilization was the invention of meetings. That’s wrong; meetings are an effective tool for accomplishing goals, when they are well-run. But poorly-run meetings are effective only at annoying everyone who participates. So when I’m part of a crowd that is supposed to accomplish something but has no direction, no leadership, I tend to take over, even if I have no ambitions to do so, and start getting things organized.
Jesus was not much into organization. With his following, he could have organized a pretty effective force for change, or even a political movement. We’ll save for another day discussion of what result that would have had. The wonder and the joy is that rather than organize this crowd of leaderless sheep into a flock with goals and a committee structure, he teaches them.
What does he teach? Read the Gospels. Jesus teaches them to trust God, to respect others and themselves, to be generous, to care about relationships more than about property, and much more. And he does so by telling marvelous, unforgettable stories.
Jesus feels in his gut for the well-being of these people, and his response is to teach them. That suggests that he realizes their deep hunger for learning, their desire to know things they had not known, to have a better understanding of themselves and of God.
That’s a real gift for a teacher, to be aware of the hunger for learning and to respond to it. Aristotle begins his great work Metaphysics with the maxim, “All human beings by nature desire to know.” But what do we desire to know? I suspect that gimmicks and incentives are less effective than the gift of discerning the hunger for knowledge.
The Library of Congress has an engaging online exhibit called “African American Odyssey.”[3] It includes an 1863 watercolor of an elderly black man reading a newspaper.[4] The text accompanying the picture notes that in states with slavery, it was against the law for slaves to be literate. Therefore, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the percentage of African Americans who could read and write was very low. By the turn of the Twentieth Century, a majority could. Teachers of the time commented that their classrooms were filled with young and old; there would be grandfathers, their children and their grandchildren all in the same class, all eager to learn.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, a hunger to understand Islam swept the United States. Books about Islamic heritage and beliefs were snatched up, as Americans were awakened to the complexity of a religious tradition we did not know much about. The hunger was there; some responded to it well and helpfully, and others, I’m sure, simply capitalized on it to make some bucks without doing much real good. So be it.
By teaching the people, Jesus no doubt explodes some of their prejudices and challenges many of their ideas. Teachers of all sorts may feel compelled to hold back, to fail to tell the whole story, out of concern for causing offense or perhaps fear of lawsuits. Most of my experience of that, of course, is in the Church. My previous Presbytery frequently used Administrative Commissions to help churches in trouble. I served on three of those commissions and helped with several others. Those that succeeded were the ones that told the truth, taught the people of the churches about the causes and symptoms of their difficulties. Those that failed were the ones that held back, afraid they might hurt someone’s feelings.
Those of you who teach school and college may have had a similar experience. If you teach your subject thoroughly and with honesty, you may ruffle feathers but you will have a long-term positive effect. If you hold back, not wanting to offend anyone, then you succeed only in giving gruel to people hungry for meat.
Well, I could go on with commentary about distinguishing truth from opinion, and lots of related things, but a more important point occurs to me. Jesus not only teaches the crowd out of compassion for their hunger to learn, and not only tells the truth, but he knows what he is talking about. In that respect, those of us who teach about the Kingdom of God are dependent in ways that he is not. We teach the Word of God in the Bible; Jesus is the living Word. We teach about the coming of the Kingdom of God; Jesus incarnates the coming of the Kingdom of God. We teach about compassion, forgiveness, love and hope; Jesus is compassion, forgiveness, love and hope.
Of course, at the end of the story Jesus’ compassion also moves him to heal the sick. And in the middle of the story – which we’ll read next week – Jesus feeds the hungry. I have no intention of dismissing or discounting those critical aspects of the ministry of Jesus and of ministry in the name of Jesus. Yet in an age in which learning is often devalued, in which teaching is not sufficiently respected, I am in awe that the first thing Jesus does in response to his deep sense of compassion for the crowd is not to organize them into a movement, not to initiate a mission to help them, but he teaches them.
In the Way of Jesus, to teach people about their life in God is a true act of compassion.
Our faithful God, you have opened to us the wealth of knowledge in the Way of Jesus Christ. Teach us to follow Christ and to learn from him and one another. Amen.
Robert A. Keefer
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Clarinda, Iowa
[1] Although, for some reason, the creators of the Revised Common Lectionary have chosen to tell next week’s stories from the Gospel of John, rather than from Mark.
[2] The root of the word translated “had compassion” means “entrails” or “guts.”
[3] http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html
[4] Henry L. Stephens, “Elderly black man with spectacles reading a newspaper by candlelight.”