Sermon for July 7, 2024

July 7, 2024

by Kristin Berkey-Abbott


Mark 6:1-13


Last week, we saw Jesus as a powerful catalyst for healing. Power flows out of him when a woman touches his garment, and his Divine power allows him to bring a dead girl back to life. So when I read the text for this week, verse 6 jumped out at me: “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” Something has robbed Jesus of his power.

One of the advantages of following the lectionary is this opportunity for something new to leap out at us. I’ve read this passage dozens of times through the years, as the lectionary comes back to it, and as I’ve taken classes, and I’ve focused on the part that comes both before and after it: the hometown folks who reject Jesus, and Jesus sending out the disciples, telling them what to do if they, too, are rejected, the famous shaking the dust of rejectors off your feet and moving on.

This past week, however, I kept coming back to that image of Jesus being limited. He can still do a bit of healing, but if someone’s beloved daughter died, this week in the life of Jesus might find the father out of luck. I read forward in the text, and I’ll say more about what I discovered next week, when our Gospel reading does not skip ahead in the text. We are in the middle of a meditation on power, its manifestations and its limitations.

In the earlier parts of Mark, we’ve seen Jesus fully able to control all the elements of the world: he’s driven out demons and forced the storm and the seas to calm down and healed the sick, and even raised the dead. And now, he finds his power constrained? How do we explain that?

In other words, you’re telling me that demons obey him and the sea obeys him, but a little thing like human unbelief keeps him from doing much beyond a bit of healing here and there? The answer seems to be yes.

Notice that he’s not simply refusing to do miracles. It’s not like Jesus says, “Well, if you feel this way about me, then I won’t help you, even though I could.” The text says that Jesus could not, not Jesus would not. And what is the element that is binding him? Many Bible scholars say that Jesus cannot act because of the people’s unbelief. One aspect of this unbelief, if we dig down into the Greek word, is a withholding of belief in the power and promises of God. It’s a much deeper issue than simple doubt. It’s quite a contrast to the people in last week’s Gospel.

If we look at last week’s text, we see that the people in need of miracles, the bleeding woman and Jairus, father of the dead girl, have faith, which looks like fierce hope or maybe desperation. They are in need of intervention, and they know it, and they put aside all that they have thought might be possible or impossible.

Last week, on our way home from Bristol, Carl and I talked about faith and hope and miracles. He pointed out that even with the strongest faith, a person might not get a miracle. But without faith, we can be sure that we won’t get a miracle. We talked about any number of doctors that we know who have told us the value of faith and hope in making a recovery, even if the recovery doesn’t mean healing but means learning to live with a disease.

Jesus has a very different experience in this week’s text. The people in his hometown are so constrained by what they’ve been trained to think that they seem to have lost their hope in the possibility of something different.

They cannot believe what they have seen. The people in Jesus’ hometown have seen what he has done, the miracles he has performed. It’s not like he went off to Rome, did miracles there which no one in the home town witnessed, and then came home. He’s been doing these miracles in their midst. Why do they have trouble believing?

We see in this Gospel that the familiar can be constraining. The people in Jesus’ hometown reject him because he is so familiar that they cannot conceive of him in any other way than son of Mary (a specific slur about legitimacy in a patriarchal society to refer to the mother rather than the father), than as a carpenter, a worker of low social status. Those questions about family, status, occupation, education—these are still questions we ask today, and they are questions that can undercut us all, from the smallest member of our communities all the way up to God Almighty.

Like so many people today, the people in Jesus’ hometown are people who are invested in life as they have always known it, so invested, it turns out, that they cannot imagine that anything might be different. And their closed minds affect Jesus. Today’s Gospel shows us how essential it is to maintain our hope and our faith, not just for ourselves, not just for our communities, but also for God’s ability to work in the world.

Throughout the Gospels, we see the trait that keeps people imprisoned is their inability to break free of what they have always known. Here we see that this inability has even broader implications—the inability to conceive of life in any other way keeps God from acting too.

Earlier this year, my Systematic Theology professor said something similar. He said that God has a vision of the world, a vision of how creation should be, and God is always moving towards that vision, no matter how many roadblocks humans put in the way. God invites us to be part of the vision, but even if we say no, God is going to find a way to continue the creative work that needs to happen. But if we say yes, oh how much easier a time God will have. Our radical hope in God’s vision can be the fuel that helps it to happen.

All week, I’ve thought about the way that Jesus feels power drain out of him when the bleeding woman touches his hem and how this week, Jesus is like a drained battery. Would we live our lives differently if we thought of ourselves as God’s battery charger? Would we commit to radical hope each and every day?

Where are we stuck in our preconceived notions of how society should be and what redemption looks like? Where do we need to shake dust off of our feet and move on? Where might God lead us, if we can just learn to trust, hope, and act?