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Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

This Is No Chicken Soup for the Soul

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Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

This Is No Chicken Soup for the Soul

Health, wholeness, healing, reconciliation, peace – the common people flocked to Jesus because they knew in their hearts, and by his deeds among them, that He came from God and that He knew how to love them. They were not possessed of religious scruples, or questions, which they had to have answered before coming to Him. Their need was too great to wait until their religious leaders could put Jesus into perspective for them. They didn’t want Jesus to fit into their heads in a tiny little place where he would fit, perfectly.

So, they fled to Him, from all over the region, and Jesus had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. He touched them, He healed them, and he taught them many things. It was important for the people to learn. Jesus was a great teacher and He spent as much time teaching and preaching as He did healing.

Anyone who would claim that Christianity is only a matter of the heart and that “head knowledge” is irrelevant, hasn’t looked into the life and ministry of Jesus. Those whom he healed have all died, because no matter how many times we are healed, we will die, one day. But His Word, His teachings and His guidance live on, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings the Lord’s teachings to life in us. Through the Holy Spirit the Lord’s past deeds become present in us, and through Him we have a context for under-standing, as well as for feeling, praising and worshipping.

Before we can begin to learn what the Lord has to teach us, we respond to the One who has touched our hearts first, who has called us to Him, and who has given us hope. We come to Him, like the people in today’s gospel. He touched their hearts and their imaginations and they were on fire with hope – the hope of a better life in this world, and the hope of a life in the hereafter.

If we want to know Him, we do not come to Him with reservations, with scruples, like those who were learned in His day, nor with the sense that He better give us what we want, first, before we will accept what He has to offer. Those kinds of attitudes will only lead to our exile, and we will continue to be like sheep without a shepherd. In other words, we come to Him poor in Spirit, filled with a sense of humility – with a deep recognition of our own need and of His righteousness.

We come, like beggars, to the throne of grace. The question is, what kind of beggar are you? Are you a pushy beggar? Are you an angry beggar? Are you a beggar who feels entitled to the fruits of everybody else’s labors? Are you a greedy beggar, like the rich young man who wanted it all, without having to give up anything to follow Jesus?

Although we don’t see him in today’s gospel, I believe scripture gives us a picture of the perfect beggar in the story of the two men in the temple – one thanked the Lord for all that He had given him, and for making him such a wonderful, righteous man of God. The other could not even bring himself to raise his eyes heavenward, but he prayed, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He is a perfect example because he believed that God is merciful. If he didn’t believe that he would n ot have asked for mercy. He is also a perfect example because he knew himself to be a creature, an imperfect man, guilty of many sins. He was faithful, because He went to God with his confession of his unworthiness and he went to God with his hope that the God of Mercy would have mercy on him, a sinner.

 

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With the Lord’s forgiveness and compassion, there comes peace. Jesus gives peace to those beggars who humbly receive it. Jesus, throughout the gospels, can be found offering His peace to a troubled people. Sheep without a shepherd have no peace. They don’t know which way to go, where to turn – at any time, but especially in times of trouble. In Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians we see that Jesus Christ is God’s peace plan for troubled individuals and for a troubled world. We might say He is the incarnate peace of God, just as He is the incarnate Word of God. When storms are raging at sea, He sleeps peacefully in the boat, while his disciples display everything but peace. Or, he takes a stroll on the stormy sea as if walking through a quiet garden. When the disciples are sitting terrified in the Upper Room, afraid for their very lives, Jesus walks into the room and says, “Peace.” The flip side of this word, peace, is the phrase, ‘Be not afraid.’

The Lord brings peace to a world at war, a world that will be at war until the final battle of Armageddon has been fought. But in the meantime, in the very mean time, He rules the world through the peace filled people He is raising up, through the worldwide living temple of believers, about whom Paul speaks so beautifully in today’s epistle.

In today’s Psalm, the 23rd Psalm, the Lord prefigures the way He would offer His peace to the world through His church. For the church He established in the way He has chosen to dispense with, or to offer and deliver His gifts. Listen to what He says, through the Psalmist, in v. 5: “You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me; you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.” The translation I grew up with says, “You have prepared a table before me, the presence of mine enemies.” The table is the Lord’s Supper, where the incarnate Peace and Word of God transforms the bread and wine, as well as the blood, sweat and tears of earthly existence into heavenly food, the bread come down from heaven, the body and blood of the risen and victorious Lord. If He is peace, light and life, then His body and blood is the peace and light and life of God which we feed upon when we come before His altar in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. This is no temporary fix for troubled minds and emotions – this is no chicken soup for the soul – this is the divine feast – the body and blood of God Himself.

This is the marriage feast of the Lamb, and come to Him as a bride and groom come into the bridal chamber. The bridegroom enters the bride and gives her all that He has to give, and the bride offers herself to the groom, and gives Him all that she is. In this heavenly chamber, we receive the Lord into ourselves, with all that He has to offer, and we give to Him all that we are – we put our hopes and our dreams, our sorrows and disappointments, our sinfulness and faithlessness – our bitter grief – our salty tears. He takes all that we have and joins Himself, with all that He has, to us – and the two shall become one, and what the Lord has joined together, let no man, let no man, put asunder.

Copyright 2006, Curtis Tilleraas. Used by permission.