For July 5, 2015 – Mark 6:1-13
All Jesus does is go home for the weekend and teach in his childhood synagogue. How could this upset anyone? Yet it does. “Where did he learn to speak like this, with such wisdom?” they say. “How can he do such deeds of power? Isn’t he just the carpenter’s son, Mary’s boy? His brothers and sisters are ordinary people living right here among us. Who does he think he is?” Jesus isn’t surprised by their reaction, saying, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”
Jesus knows how it feels to be seen as a failure, to be mocked by family and former colleagues, unable to be who he really is when he is with them. He uses his own experience to teach the rest of us how to respond. After leaving his hometown, he sends his disciples out in pairs, with no visible means of support, to anoint and heal. He doesn’t prepare them for success so much as for failure: “When a place does not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, shake off the dust on your feet as you leave.” Most life-strategy courses focus on how to avoid failure, or at least how to recast it so it can be called success. That makes sense—who among us doesn’t prefer to move only from success to more success? But Jesus seems to suggest another way.
Jesus says, you don’t have to fear failure. Wherever you are, you can give what you have the capacity to give; you can receive whatever comes. Enter where the door opens; be there for as long as you are there. When you are not welcomed, leave. No regrets. The whole world is your family. Move on. To fear means I am still trying to rule my domain, still trying to make things go a certain way so that people will like me, respect me, yet not demand too much of me. Fear makes me clutch and control. Jesus offers me a much easier yoke to wear. Side by side, we can carry a weight we could not carry alone. We can be channels of the Spirit in ways we could not be alone. What we have called rejection and failure are only catalysts to move us on.
