16-B Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Jer 23:1-6; Eph 2:13-18; Mk 6:30-34)
Spencer, July 21, 2024
We encounter the Lord Jesus in today’s gospel first of all as the shepherd of his own disciples. Returning from the mission Jesus had sent them on, the disciples are eager to tell their Master what they have accomplished. We see Jesus here gathering his disciples together and uniting them into a community around himself. This action starkly contrasts the evil shepherds in Jeremiah who, rather than gathering, violently scattered [the Lord’s] sheep and drove them away. Then Jesus listens attentively to the stories the apostles tell him about how their mission had gone. This exchange between Jesus and his disciples shows that authentic Christian mission cannot consist only in “doing and teaching”. Those who are sent also need to communicate their experience of mission to Jesus so as to internalize it, but above all in order to make sure their sacred mission remains centered on the person of the Savior and his service, and does not degenerate into one more enterprise of the self-serving ego.
This process of intimate dialogue between Jesus and those he’s called to himself is really a form of intense prayer. In this context, the disciples’ pastoral and personal experiences create an opportunity for something they urgently need in their formation: namely, to be both consoled and corrected by Jesus. Proclaiming the Gospel, bearing living witness to Jesus the Lord, is a laborious process that every Christian has to learn by patient trial and, at times, embarrassing error, but always as a result of intimate contact with the person of the Lord. Only communion with Jesus’ nourishing presence—never mental analysis alone—can guarantee the disciple’s spiritual growth.
We are also here struck by the fact that, in his dealings with his followers, Jesus does not show himself at all interested in the success of the mission. Jesus is no hard-nosed “pragmatist”! First and foremost he cares about the persons of those he has sent out. He truly acts as the good shepherd who knows his sheep by name, that is, intimately, individually, in each one’s uniqueness. The “success” or “failure” of the mission, as the world defines success and failure, seem to matter very little to the Lord. As he listens to the stories the apostles recount, the Master is sensitive to their fatigue. So he invites them to go off with him to a remote place away from it all so that he can personally tend to their weariness. How can we fail to be moved by the tenderness of such a Master who, like a mother hen, seems to anticipate his followers’ every human need?
Mark’s text continues: There were many crowds coming and going, so that [the apostles and Jesus] no longer even had time to eat. Could the disciples at this point be suffering from the typically modern phenomenon of activism? Jesus continues to act as good shepherd by exhorting his exhausted disciples to rest. Jesus cannot here have in mind only physical and mental rest, but rather contemplative repose. He awakens in them the responsibility to stop all exterior activity now and then and make time to enjoy this silence and this solitude in their friend Jesus’ company. There is always deep wisdom in an alternation of modalities. God is not the slave-driver our own obsessions sometimes make him out to be! The Father, rather, has sent Jesus in order to restore us to health, to wholeness, to the integrity and dynamic fullness of our human nature as he created it in the beginning. In the Book of Wisdom we hear this beautiful praise: You spare all things, because they are yours, O Ruler and Lover of souls (Wis 11:26).
And so, here, Jesus seems to be addressing his busy disciples as if they were so many Marthas, saying to them: ‘Stop your frantic activism! Come here and sit by my side and learn how to simply be. Don’t become alienated from your own true being, and therefore from me, your Creator, by your compulsive need to be always doing, doing, doing…. Don’t be so intent on impressing me by your deeds of service that you end up overlooking my person and thus impoverishing your own souls by denying both you and me the mutual delight I came to establish between us!’
Next, Jesus turns from the intimate circle of his disciples to the vast, anonymous multitude. When he had disembarked to go to a deserted place with the disciples, Jesus saw the large crowd that had gone ahead of them on foot, and he felt compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Compassion is clearly the foundation of all of Jesus’ pastoral action toward every person he meets. We might say he is “disembarking” in this world from his native homeland, which is the Father’s compassionate Heart; and he comes to our desolation humbly, quietly to offer humble yet potent remedies: his comforting presence, his wisdom, his goodness, his healing and, ultimately, his very Body and Blood.
Just as he had seen the need of his disciples for contemplative rest in his company amid their labors, Jesus now sees the need of the crowds to be shepherded, brought into his merciful embrace. He does not send them away as if they were an obstacle to previously decided plans. Was it not, in fact, precisely to engage in such compassionate caring for the needy that he had come from the Father in the first place? The substance of Jesus’ life as Incarnate Word is clearly to give himself as Eucharistic gift to a starving and wretched world, especially to the powerless and marginalized who seem to have been abandoned by the powerful.
Jesus also perceives these people’s hunger for God’s Word, and he began to teach them many things. Graciously, he allows himself to be put upon, and he commits himself to the arduous task of preaching. In this way he is teaching his disciples that spontaneous availability to the needy, without advance warning, is a primordial Christian virtue: “Eucharistic availability”, I would call it—becoming bread for others, since “we are what we eat”. The gaze of Jesus the Shepherd is powered by the light of the Word of God that indwells him. In this light he sees in the crowd an opportunity and invitation to obey the word of Scripture that bemoans God’s people having become “a flock without a shepherd”. Jesus is so much the Shepherd after God’s own Heart that he is eager to lay down his life for his sheep. This Shepherd is no other than the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Lamb in whose blood you who once were far off have been brought near. In the Book of Revelation we see how, in the glorified Jesus, the images of shepherd and lamb converge into the One who leads all his disciples in the resurrection dance: These follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb (Rev 14:4).
For us disciples to follow the Lamb implies not only our being shepherded by the Lamb but also for us, in turn, to become loving and caring shepherds to all to whom the Lamb sends us. By our close association with Jesus our Teacher and, above all, by our interior union with Jesus as oblation in the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, we have been transformed into envoys of the Lamb of God. Popes, bishops and priests are shepherds in a formal, hierarchical sense; but all Christians are by nature “shepherds” in an even more fundamental sense by virtue of Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist, which communicate missionary energy. This is the indispensable energy that the Holy Spirit infuses into our souls along with the life of the Blessed Trinity. The Christian vocation as such necessarily draws all of us into the pastoral mission of Christ himself, whether in a more eye-catching or in an utterly hidden form.
Not many of us may spontaneously think of ourselves as “shepherds”; and yet this is precisely what we have been made to be by the grace of God-like compassion that the Christ-life activates within us. We are to shepherd everyone we encounter into the circle of our mutual delight—holy delight in Christ and in each other.
