Really Jesus?

An imaginary dialogue with a troubling text.

Mark 6:1-13

First, Jesus, you're rejected. Then you send your disciples to do the same work. Thanks a lot, they'd say. We would. Is this what we are to look forward to as followers of the Way?

Your homecoming really does argue against all those songs and images handed down to us: Come home. “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling ... you who are weary come home.” Home to a reception like you got? Another home altogether might work perhaps – I guess that's how it's mostly be dealt with – home in another world. But here in the Bible, you are not talking about another world, a totally separate place. You're talking about God's kingdom for real here where we are.

You seem to have been surprised by the home town scepticism – amazed at their unbelief. I guess you were still learning as you go. Not so much learning to be God's son (Mark's key point, we realise): you knew how to do that, to show us who God is and what God is like. But you were discovering for the first time how people react to God's way being put into action.

Because, no, it was not your failure that the healings didn't happen among the home people. Healing, you have taught us, is a relationship. We experience that with good nursing and good friends. Healing that helps make well in the physical sense and that bigger sense of healing – restoring meaning regardless of how the body is and will be.

God's power, what God is like and how God-power works, that's the really hard thing to catch on to; and therefore what it's like to be home with God. Not the expected security and slotting into the family dynamics in whatever role we each might have (e.g. the hero, the rescuer, the scapegoat, the loner, the doer, the clown, or the saint). I can feel for your family. In conventional (non-Kingdom) terms, you were not playing your part. And you were embarrassing them with your free spirit, your God-centredness, rather than family-centredness which normal people expect.

When you went to other communities, you were welcomed as a visiting expert. They are easy to cope with. But a local, someone dependent on the local community, and still a local in terms of his human genealogy: hard to see as worth listening to. We're inclined to get stuck with our own preconceptions about who or what can bring knowledge and really life-changing options. Not the person next to me surely.

And on top of that regular blindness to “prophets among us”, you were falling foul with the powers-that-be, the powers we depend on for living an ordinary life. You don't help us at all to get on better in life, to access the power the world works with. And we can't imagine doing anything, improving anything, without the standard requirements of money and influence etc etc.

Would I be among those you then sent out into the local community to do exactly as you had been doing? Will I say yes?

The Great Reversal. That's what they call your mission in this first half of Mark's gospel. I must remember it: the Great Reversal. This is the Kingdom Way. Upside down values, and understanding that's upside down to the world's way. I need to remind myself that the world's way is in fact bankrupt. Bankrupt and dealing death more than giving life.

If I do as you ask and go out among our own community here, travelling light, not protecting myself from rejection, I sense that I'll learn what you learnt: that God's kind of healing – God's loving – depends on the other in a relationship. It works through simply living compassionately in interaction with others. Slow living it's been called. Local, vulnerable living.

Your ancestor David was a pretty good king. He was a shepherd but then as a king he got mixed up with the powers-that-be and was as much the wolf as the shepherd. The power of armies and taxes. Weapons of destruction. You, son of David, got it right – at last. The power of relationship, and the most powerful “weapon” of all – conversation.

Jesus, you know that God speaks through God's creation and the language used is love. You're doing it. So, yes, you're calling us to speak that way too.