“The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a quiet place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” (Mark 6:30-31)
We are in Mark chapter six today and both Jesus and his friends are tired. They’ve been fighting the good fight, running the race, healing the sick, caring for the poor, preaching the Gospel of grace, and they are looking for a break, and when we read this I think many of us immediately find ourselves in the story – I know just how they feel!
Perhaps many of us are feeling that way right now? Certainly that’s why some of us make the journey to church each week, in part at least. We are tired in spirit as well as in body, and we look to our time in church as a source of rest and refreshment, yet we turn up to find that Jesus is more tired than we are!
I’m tired! I returned yesterday from just over a week in Syria and it was almost certainly the most non-stop schedule I’ve ever participated in!
We arrived on the Wednesday evening of last week and Thursday morning we started training with the Syrian Olympic boxing team, and those boys train hard! They were lovely kids, all in their twenties, I think, but of course I wasn’t going to let those young guys show-up the old man!
They’d say ‘Are you tired, Father? Would you like to take a break, Father?’ And of course I’d say ‘Me, tired? I’ve barely warmed up!’ (even when the internal dialogue was saying something altogether different). I was representing my country after all! I wasn’t going to let these young Syrians have it over me (though I really should have).
So when they said ‘Do you want to come back and train again with us this afternoon?’ I said ‘yep!’ And when they said ‘are you coming back again tomorrow morning?’ I said ‘absolutely!’ And when they asked about the afternoon session on the following day I said ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world!’ And when the Syrian light-heavyweight champ let me know that he wanted to spar with me (which he indicated by making punching motions at me with one hand while making a throat-cutting gesture with the other) I said ‘Let’s do it!’
That’s how the week began, and then it started to get really busy! We drove north to Lattakia where we trained with literally hundreds of young people over two days – many of whom were displaced persons living in UNICEF-supplied tents that were ringing the Lattakia sports stadium. From there we went south to Tartous and sparred with more young people in another stadium, not as swish as the one in Lattakia which had been built for the regional games, but a gym which shared the key characteristic that we found in every gym that we trained in in Syria – namely, that it had no air-conditioning (and it’s the middle of Summer there at the moment)!
We also opened a new boxing gym in Tartous before heading back to Damascus and starting the diplomatic suit-wearing end of our mission. We met with various Bath Party officials, we met with the Minister of Sport, the Minister of Health, and the Minister of Information.
On our last day in Damascus we met with the national swimming squad, visited a school and an art gallery and then met with the Prime Minister and then finally with my friend the Grand Mufti before having a wonderful farewell dinner, held in a beautiful setting in the middle of the swimming complex, overlooking the Olympic pool, though I fear that some of us may not have fully appreciated the occasion as we were having trouble keeping our eyes open!
We also squeezed in an afternoon in that refuge on the outskirts of Yarmouk that I’d visited earlier this year, where we distributed money and sports gear to needy families. I don’t remember exactly when we did that as it’s all a bit of a blur to me now but I know we did it as I’ve got the photos to prove it!
Jesus was tired. The disciples were tired. I know how that feels. We all know how that feels! The only thing that might differentiate us from Jesus and the Apostles in this respect is how we reach our respective states of exhaustion.
“They ran all over the countryside”, we are told, “and began carrying the sick on their cots to any place where they heard he was” (Mark 6:55). The ‘they’ in this case are the good people of ‘Gennesaret’, recognizing Jesus and seizing the opportunity to make the most of His presence among them.
That’s how our story ends, at any rate, and it begins in a very similar fashion with Jesus and His team unable to enjoy breakfast for, we were told, so many were coming and going that they “had no leisure even to eat” (6:30-31). And so it is at this point that the invitation is given by Jesus: “Come away to a quiet place all by yourselves and rest a while.” (Mark 6:31)
I want to pause there for a moment and reflect on what a beautiful invitation from Jesus that is – ‘Come away with me to a quiet place by yourselves and rest a while.’
Jesus recognises the tiredness of His disciples and He invites them to rest with Him! ‘Come away with me’ he says, ‘to a quiet place, and rest a while’.
I don’t know whether any of us have ever sensed, in our exhaustion, that invitation from Jesus, to disappear for a while and go somewhere quiet and rest for a while with Him. I must confess that for some years now I have yearned for that. And it’s not that I haven’t felt the urgings of Jesus within me to take that break. I just never seem to be able to find that quiet place that Jesus speaks of.
And this of course is the irony in our story from Mark chapter 6 too, for despite the fact that Jesus takes the initiative in leading His disciples to that quiet place, He doesn’t seem to be able to find it either!
“And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd” (Mark 6:32-34a)
Evidently the quiet place Jesus had in mind was not a secret place. It’s not obvious how the crowds worked out where Jesus was going, nor why these people had so little respect for Jesus’ privacy. What is clear is that this first attempt at finding rest is a failure, and if we didn’t know Him better we might assume that Jesus would have been mightily cheesed off with the crowd that waited for him on the shoreline, but of course this was not the case.
“As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” (Mark 6:34)
This seems to have been how the day was spent, with Jesus teaching the crowds and no doubt doing a bit of healing and deliverance work as well.
When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; 36send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” (Mark 6:35-36)
It was the disciples this time who took the initiative in trying to get away from the crowd, pleading with Jesus that He might dismiss these people and send them home for dinner, but Jesus pushes them to take on the problem themselves and feed the crowd, and this despite the fact that He knew that His disciples were both under-supplied and already over-worked!
We know this story well, or at least we know the stories (plural) of Jesus miraculously feeding hungry people well, as there are a number of accounts like this in the New Testament, and I’d say that if you want more detail on this story just refer to the massive stained-glass window at the front of our church building except that our window doesn’t depict the same miracle as the one in Mark chapter six which evidently took place in the dark (which would be rather hard to depict in a stained-glass window).
The hour was ‘very late’ we are told (Mark 6:35), which leads me to envisage the whole scene as being quite eerie, with the disciples tripping and stumbling about in the moonlight as they try to organise all these people into groups!
At any rate, another inexplicable miracle happens there in the darkness. The people are fed and the left-overs are gathered up, and Jesus then retakes the initiative in sending off his disciples, so that they can get a break, while He dismisses the crowd, after which He goes to get a break.
“Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. After saying farewell to them, he went up on the mountain to pray.” (Mark 6:45-46)
And so Jesus finally finds His quiet place, even if alone this time, and I imagine that He envisaged spending the rest of the night there in solitude, except that it turned out that He couldn’t escape His responsibilities so easily!
“That evening the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.” (Mark 6:47-48)
It’s another miracle, and I won’t say more about it here except that Jesus’ plan for rest was frustrated this second time for the same reason it was frustrated the first time. He had compassion (on His disciples this time). He can’t rest while they cannot rest and so He has to come and bail them out (so to speak).
“When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was.” (Mark 6:53-55)
Jesus had evidently sent His disciples to the other side of the lake in order to give them some space after an exhausting day’s work but now, having worked all day and rowed for their lives all night, they find the shore far from empty!
And so the story ends where it began. Jesus is tired, the disciples are tired – indeed some of them must have been close to requiring hospitalization – and all noble attempts to get a break from the frenzy of activity have failed.
This in itself gives us to pause for thought. Why was it that He who was able to do what no one else could to – to preach the word of God, to feed a multitude with only a few loaves and fish, and to walk on water – couldn’t manage to do what most of us who are not the Son of God do manage to do? Why couldn’t He take a break?!
We know that the answer to that, of course. He had compassion, and Jesus’ compassion for those who were desperate trumped his own need for rest, and even trumped His plan to give rest to those most close to Him!
It’s not that Jesus didn’t take the need for rest seriously! Jesus’ recognition of the need for rest is indeed the framework within which this entire narrative takes place, and rest does come eventually for the exhausted disciples! It’s just that the need for rest is not always our greatest need, and it’s often trumped by other more important needs, of ourselves and others!
It’s tempting to speak of ‘finding a balance’ here except that no one could ever accuse Jesus of having a ‘balanced’ lifestyle! Jesus lived life to the extreme, and He seems to expect His followers to push themselves to extremes too!
Even so, rest is promised: “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest!” (Matthew 11:28) says Jesus. And indeed the great greeting we wait for on the other side of Divine judgement is exactly that – ‘enter into your rest’! And I don’t think we have to wait till we die to experience that rest. Sometimes moments of rest come when you least expect them. That was certainly my experience yesterday!
I mentioned that I returned to the country yesterday from Syria. What I didn’t mention was that I’d started my return journey more than two days earlier!
Since people had donated money to pay for my air-tickets I purchased the cheapest flights possible, even though this meant shuffling between five different airports on the way home, with a stop-over of twelve hours in Dubai and then another six in New Delhi. I can tell you that by the time I came to board the plane for the final leg back to Australia I had well and truly had enough of airports and airport lounges!
I was therefore horrified when I came to the front of the line and gave my boarding-pass to the attendant so that he could place it on his scanner and generate that familiar ‘beep’ sound, indicating that all is well, before allowing me to board, when my pass generated instead an unfriendly thud-sound, indicating that there was a problem with my boarding pass.
The boarding line stopped and we all waited while the attendant started pushing buttons on his computer. “Is there a problem” I asked. The attendant said nothing for a while and then finally looked at me and said “You’ve been upgraded to Business Class”!
It’s as if I could hear the voice of Jesus – ‘Come away with me to a quiet place and rest a while’.
I had a lovely rest on that last leg home! That’s where I wrote the core of this sermon. I’m not seriously suggesting that it was really a divine miracle, though I have no idea how it happened. I appreciate, at any rate, that it’s not on par with the loaves and the fishes miracle. Even so, it was exactly what I needed at the time. Certainly I felt then that Jesus was having compassion on me?
St Paul says “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:19) He will meet all our needs! Experience tells us of course what our Bible passage today confirms – that this doesn’t mean us having everything we want whenever we want it, but it does mean that God does ultimately cover all our needs, including our need for rest!
I’d suggest that the best strategy for us to follow is just for us to leave all those needs in the hands of God while we concentrate instead on that which should be our primary focus – namely, on having compassion.
Yes, it’s true – a life of compassion is a recipe for exhaustion! The templates left to us by Jesus and the Apostles are not designed for the easy-going and the softly-spoken. Even so, our God will supply all our needs, and those who labor and are heavy-laden will find rest!
Have compassion, as Jesus had compassion, and soon enough we’ll hear that call: ‘Come away with me to a quiet place, and rest a while’.
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 26th of July, 2015.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
