Caution: disciples at work

Every three years those of us who follow the Revised Common Lectionary will listen again to an unremarkable passage from the gospel of Mark, chapter 6.  It begins with tired and hungry disciples, completely skips over the miraculous feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water, and concludes with Jesus healing all the people swarming around him.

I call it unremarkable because we usually get a good miracle, a pithy teaching, even an obscure exorcism.  With this selection of scripture we get ordinary, plain vanilla healing.  Ho hum.

But of course to those folks who live on the fringe of society, touching the fringe of Jesus' garment and experiencing the healing power of the Lord of Life was anything but Ho Hum.  It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  It was their own particular miracle, their own particular encounter with the power of the Living God. All it took was Jesus delaying his time away; pausing to teach and to walk among them, allowing them to reach out and experience the powerful presence of God in their midst.

I wonder, however, where we are in this story?  What is God's message to us in this peculiar cut and paste of Mark's gospel?  What are we supposed to do with this?

Here is one possibility.  When I was learning how to bake bread from my mother, we got to the part called 'kneeding the dough'.  It's an important step and it takes practice. My mother tipped the dough onto the generously floured surface, sprinkled flour over the top of the dough and said, "You do it like this."  After a couple turns of the dough, she put her hands on mine and we pushed and pulled and turned together until I got a rhythm.  Then I was on my own.

Later in the story Jesus will tell his disciples to care for his sheep.  Today he gave them a lesson on what that looks like.  As he walked among the needy and desperate you can almost hear him say, "You do it like this."

As followers of Jesus, we walk among our neighbors and bring with us the powerful presence of our Lord. Right?