"The Loving Shepherd."

Dr. William Willimon

Psalm 23; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

"Everyone's got a hungry heart."

-- Bruce Springsteen

Great preacher and literary critic of scripture, Thomas G. Long, has noted that, in certain biblical texts, as we are reading we come to "literary speed bump," something inserted into the passage which acts as a sort of speed bump to slow us down, cause us to take notice and to reflect. Long says that an example of a "literary speed bump" is found in Mark 6:39. In Mark 6:31 we are told that Jesus has led his disciples into a "deserted place." Long notes that in 6:32, Mark reiterates that this is a "deserted place" where they are by themselves. When it "grew late," his disciples note that this is a "deserted place" (6:35). This place is really deserted! It's a real desert. Something like Odessa, Texas.

Mark says that Jesus and his disciples have come willingly to this deserted place. They are exhausted from ministry among the needy multitudes. They are seeking rest, retreat, a July vacation from the rigors of their work. Yet when they get to the deserted place, it is quickly filled with the multitudes who come clamoring after Jesus. The multitudes have not come, like the disciples, in order to get away from life; they have followed Jesus here because they are desperate to survive life. Jesus looks on them and quickly sees that they are harassed and helpless, "like sheep without a shepherd." Here are the oppressed, the hurting and the poor, come out to this desert hoping for a blessing from Jesus.

Jesus' command to his disciples to "give them something to eat" (6:37) is made all the more incongruous since (as Mark as told you three times) this after all -- a deserted place. Where in the world are you going to get food out here in a desert, the disciples want to know.

When the disciples protest, he "ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass" (6:39). I said, the green grass. The what? Green grass in a desert? There, on this strange green grass in a desert, Jesus enables his disciples to feed the hungry multitudes.

Tom Long notes that much of Mark's gospel is in black and white. Luke may enjoy painting his pictures with great detail, with artistic, vivid coloration. But not Mark. Mark tends toward a no nonsense approach to story telling. Just the facts. But here, at this "speed bump," suddenly all is Technicolor. The dull, ashen desert has become a lush, gorgeous green. Isaiah 35 tells of a day when the desert breaks into blossom. When Messiah comes, the desert shall spring into bloom and all will be luxuriant and good. It's like Eden all over again.

In Psalm 23, today's appointed psalm, do you recall where the good shepherd leads the sheep? Among the green grass. Jesus sees the hungry multitudes as those who are harassed and helpless sheep in need a shepherd. Here, as the desert springs into blossom and the hungry, deserted ones are fed, Jesus is the good shepherd.

You know this story. There is the desert, that lonely, dry, deserted place. And I'm not talking Texas. I'm not talking geography. Nothing grows there, no green thing. You know that place.

"'Annie,' she said, 'I have to tell you about Matthew. It's bad news, honey. In fact, it's very bad.' Her voice had a terrible force behind it, a blunt tenderness that could not be refused or run from. And it just kept coming, pushing the truth toward me as if the truth were the greatest kindness...that afternoon, she said, Matthew and his father had been clearing underbrush in the lower new ground. Matthew drove the tractor with the bush hog attached. He drove the tractor and mowed the filed, and then he looked back over his shoulder, which is something he knew better than to do. Matthew had grown up on a tractor....He knew that you had to stay alert to avoid slopes and uneven ground.

"But he looked back and he ran up onto a stump, Mother said. The tractor turned over on top of him. We had been married for twelve years, since we were both twenty....

"'Annie,' Mother said that night, as though she were trying to slip a message through a closing door, 'he never knew what happened and he didn't suffer, it was so sudden.'....I knew what had happened to Matthew. Annihilation happened, oblivion happened. A bomb went off in my head, a soundless rush of light that rose and blew things to pieces and left the pieces drifting there, suspended in the chaos of their breakup. And that is the day when I felt the power of death move over me. The power to empty, to take everything from you and leave the world intact and unchanged, just to show you that the place where you'd lived so confidently -- as though it were the whole world -- was in fact so minute a fragment of this larger world that its destruction caused not even a wince, a shudder, or a pause. Since that day, I had been a citizen of this larger, more indifferent world, and once I knew how small I was...."

(Pam Durban, The Laughing Place, New York: Picador, 1993, pp. 14-15.)

Thus Pam Durban describes here entry into the desert.

Alone, bereft, deserted, dead. The desert encroaches at any time, killing everything, stripping the once green earth and making of it a wasteland. It doesn't take much to make a desert. A phone call in the night, a voice saying, "I've got some bad news to tell you," that will do it. You are deserted.

And today's gospel says that's when Jesus has compassion upon us. When we become lost, in the desert, like sheep who know not which path to take or which way to turn, he comes to us. He teaches us, speaks, feeds us.

For some of you, it has happened here. You came here as if you were wandering in a desert, living in a lonely, deserted place. You came empty. Then, at the words of scripture, in the music of the hymns, joining your voices with others, or even in the sermon, you heard a voice. Flowers blossomed forth. You came forward, you reached out your empty hands and there was food, eucharist. The Shepherd, the one who leads you beside the still waters and into green pastures, had come to you, spoken to you, and the desert becomes a garden.

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NOTES:

I suppose that the lectionary severs today's pericope in the middle, leaving out verses 35-52 because we will have a virtual repeat of this feeding story in Mark 9. However, we shall take the liberty of reading and preaching from the entire passage as Mark relates it.

Today's appointed psalm (Ps. 23) suggests that the shepherd motif predominates in this gospel text. In the sermon we shall share a literary-critical insight from Tom Long who helpfully calls our attention to the contrast between the "deserted place" and the "green grass." These are not too meaningless details in the story -- in good stories, details are hardly ever meaningless. In this talk of green grass and shepherding we hear an echo, an allusion to Psalm 23 where the shepherd leads the sheep amid the green pastures.

Jesus has compassion upon the multitudes by teaching them. A sermon on Jesus as teacher could be profitable, yet we have already dealt with that theme (see Pulpit Resource for Feb. 2, 1997).

Jesus also shows compassion for the multitudes by feeding them. Even though that miraculous feeding is omitted from today's lection, we shall refer to it as an aspect of Jesus' shepherding.

The crowds are perceived by Jesus as "sheep without a shepherd (verse 34, compare to Numbers 27:17). Here in this lonely, deserted place Jesus teaches and feeds the multitudes, thus providing them guidance and sustenance even in their deserted, lonely place. Picking up on these evocative images, today's sermon will be a reminder to the congregation of the shepherding of Jesus, particularly in those times when they feel like lost and helpless sheep in lonely and deserted places.

'God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world,' Robert Browning wrote, and the psalm is not saying that any more than you or I can say it either. Whoever wrote it had walked through the valley of the shadow the way one way or another you and I have walked there too. He says so himself. He believed that God was in his Heaven despite the fact that he knew as well as we do that all was far from right with the world. And he believed that God was like a shepherd.

When I think of shepherds, I think of one man in particular I know who used to keep sheep here in Rupert a few years back. Some of them he gave names to, and some of them he didn't, but he knew then equally well either way. If one of them got lost, he didn't have a moment's peace till he found it again. If one of them got sick or hurt, he would move Heaven and earth to get it well again. He would feed them out of a bottle when they were new-born lambs if for some reason the mother wasn't around or wouldn't 'own' them, as he put it. He always called them in at the end of the day so the wild dogs wouldn't get them. I've seen him wade through snow up to his knees with a bale of hay in each hand to feed them on bitter cold winter evenings, shaking it out and putting it in the manger. I've stood with him in their shed with a forty watt bulb hanging down from the low ceiling to light up their timid, greedy, foolish, half holy faces as they pushed and butted each other to get at it because if God is like a shepherd, there are more than just a few ways, needless to say, that people like you and me are like sheep. Being timid, greedy, foolish, and half holy is only part of it.

Like sheep we get hungry, and hungry for more than just food. We get thirsty for more than just drink. Our souls get hungry and thirsty; in fact it is often that sense of inner emptiness that makes us know we have souls in the first place. There is nothing that the world has to give us, there is nothing that we have to give to each other even, that ever quite fills them. But once in a while that inner emptiness is filled even so. That is part of what the psalm means by saying that God is like a shepherd, I think. It means that, like a shepherd, he feeds us. He feeds that part of us which is hungriest and most in need of feeding.

-- Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, Harper, San Francisco, 1992.