This morning’s Gospel reading is Mark 6:30–34:
The apostles gathered together with Jesus and reported all they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” People were coming and going in great numbers, and they had no opportunity even to eat. So they went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted place. People saw them leaving and many came to know about it. They hastened there on foot from all the towns and arrived at the place before them.
When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
In last week's Gospel, Jesus sent out his disciples to preach salvation and work wonders through His authority. Today we read about their return from their evangelization, but not with any direct description of what they did. The intervening verses from Mark between this week's Gospel and last week's detail the execution of John the Baptist and Herod Antipas' worry that John "has been raised from the dead" after hearing of the disciples' mission through Herod's puppet kingdom.
Herod's puppet kingdom would come to an end not long after Jesus' resurrection, part of a power play by Agrippa in Rome to seize Herod's kingdom. Caligula would exile Herod to either Gaul or Hispania, according to two different histories from Josephus, and die shortly afterward.
This has remarkable parallels to our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah and his life during the destruction of Judea and Jerusalem. Jeremiah, known as the weeping prophet, repeatedly warned Judeans about the wrath of the Lord for its refusal to trust in His leadership. Rather than fulfill its mission as a nation of priests to the world, Judea (as the northern kingdom of Israel beforehand) chose to trust in shifting alliances and worldly power to aggrandize itself and then to protect itself from its rapacious neighbors.
In those days, the kings of Judea believed that the Lord wouldn't abandon His temple, no matter what the Judeans did. As a result of this idolatry and more like it, the shepherds of Judea led their flocks into rejection of His law and scattered them among the nations. In his prophecies, Jeremiah warned so often of the destructions that the Babylonians eventually wrought that the kings tried to silence him.
Jeremiah warns in today's reading about the consequences of leading the Lord's flocks astray. He also presages their return under new shepherds, and the promise of a Messiah that will restore the Lord's plan for salvation (Jeremiah 23:1-6):
Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the LORD. Therefore, thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, against the shepherds who shepherd my people: You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them, but I will take care to punish your evil deeds. I myself will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands to which I have driven them and bring them back to their meadow; there they shall increase and multiply. I will appoint shepherds for them who will shepherd them so that they need no longer fear and tremble; and none shall be missing, says the LORD.
Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up a righteous shoot to David; as king he shall reign and govern wisely, he shall do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah shall be saved, Israel shall dwell in security. This is the name they give him: “The LORD our justice.”
In Jeremiah's time, this prophecy comes to pass in the Babylonian captivity. In three waves, the people of Judea get expelled from their lands and taken captive in Babylon. The third wave sacks Jerusalem and the temple and ends the Judean dynasty. The Hebrews spend seventy years in exile, mainly in Babylon, Jeremiah included, where he began prophesying about the Lord's forgiveness and an eventual return of the faithful to the Promised Land. Eventually, Jeremiah would be taken against his will into Egypt by Johanan, still preaching about faithfulness in the Lord and a restoration to come after an era of punishment for disobeying God.
Again, this parallels the political situation in Jesus' time. Herod the Great and his descendants (Herod Antipas among them) chose worldly power rather than obedience to God. Their alliance with a series of Roman emperors and their divisions and ambitions in competition with each other would lead to their destruction. In parallel, armed revolts against the Romans over several decades in an effort to achieve a military liberation and temporal restoration of a kingdom in Judea would eventually result in yet another mass exile from the Promised Land and the destruction of the second temple along with it.
Now contrast all of that with Jesus' mission and the mission of the disciples. We may not know precisely what the disciples did in this period from Mark, but we do see the results. After Jesus sent His shepherds out to the flocks, the flocks heard the Word of the Lord and followed these shepherds back to Jesus. They followed in such great numbers, in fact, that Jesus and His disciples could not escape them. Mark goes on to say that Jesus took the opportunity to teach the multitude, and then work the miracle of the fishes and loaves to feed them when the hour grew late.
This fulfills in a microcosm what Jeremiah prophesied to the corrupted Judean hierarchy. The Lord destroyed the false shepherds and sent new and faithful shepherds to find and rescue His flocks. And in doing so, He raised up the "righteous shoot to David" in Jesus Christ, king and savior.
This also foreshadows what will come as Jesus completes His mission; it is the prototype of the Great Commission. His order to evangelize in Mark 6 prepares the disciples to become apostles, bolstered with the Holy Spirit to find all of God's children and call them to salvation through His Word. The church Jesus founds after the resurrection will use His authority to make disciples of all nations, and to establish His authority over all others across the world rather than just in the Promised Land. The shepherds will go out and call all of the flocks, and those who hear the call will follow the good shepherds back to Him.
As Paul writes to the Ephesians in our second reading, "In Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have become near by the blood of Christ." Through Christ and His shepherds, we reverse our exile from the Lord and return to Him as joyful and repentant children, resting in His authority and leadership rather than suffering in rebellion to it.
Jeremiah foresaw this, too. And despite never seeing it in his own lifetime, he never despaired of the love of the Lord. We only need to do what Jeremiah did -- listen for the true Word and follow it back to the Lord.
Previous reflections on these readings:
The front page image is “Sermon on the Mount” by Cosimo Rosselli, c. 1481-2. On display in the Sistine Chapel. Via Wikimedia Commons.
“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.
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