NOTES for Mar 6:1-13

Today's passage is devoted to the description of the preaching of Jesus and the apostles in Jesus' homeland, that is, in Galilee (v. 1). Paradoxically, it was precisely in Jesus' hometown that His preaching had, as it appears, the least success and trust (vv. 2-6). But this is not surprising: quite often it is external closeness, and especially family closeness, that prevents people from seeing a person's true greatness and the events that take place with his participation. This evidently happened with Jesus as well: for His household, as for the residents of His hometown, He was merely a well-known fellow townsman and relative, and in His homeland they evidently did not perceive Him in any other capacity. It was at this time that Jesus sent the apostles to preach, and the main theme of their preaching was to be a call to conversion (v. 12). At the same time, however, the most important fact was that the apostles preached not in their own name but as Jesus' disciples, and all their preaching thereby became testimony to Him as the One who had given them the power to do what they did (v. 7, 13). The ban on taking provisions on the road (vv. 8-9) recalls the custom of the ancient prophets, who likewise took no provisions with them on the road, relying on the hospitality of those they would have to pass by. Jesus commanded His apostles to act in the same way (v. 10). But of course there could be no question of imposing one's testimony on anyone: in case of rejection, Jesus commanded the disciples simply to leave the house or city where they were not received and forget about it (v. 11; "shake off the dust," that is, shake the dust from one's feet after leaving a house or city, was in the East a symbolic gesture meaning that the person who did this no longer wanted to have anything to do with that house or city). Such preaching undoubtedly had to make Jesus known throughout all Galilee.

It is not surprising that Jesus cannot work a miracle where people do not believe Him. After all, every miracle is nothing other than a manifestation of the Kingdom that He brought into the world. And the Kingdom is not forced on anyone; it can be accepted and entered only freely, by trusting the Savior.

But if there is no trust, one may fail to notice the Kingdom at all, even while being physically in the same space with it. Spiritually, the person who does not trust Christ will be in different dimensions from Him, and therefore will also be in different dimensions from the Kingdom. But why is Jesus not accepted in the town of His childhood, where He grew up, where everyone knew Him from the time He was a boy?

Perhaps, paradoxical as it may sound, precisely because they knew Him too well. Of course, when some world-famous celebrity, or at least someone famous locally within his own country, returns to his hometown, especially if the town is small, it is always a celebration for the town and a reason for legitimate pride. But the point is that Jesus was not that kind of celebrity, and the inhabitants of Nazareth sensed this perfectly well.

Jesus' renown was already somewhat scandalous, although He did everything He could to avoid a popularity He did not need at all. Such renown could bring the inhabitants of Nazareth no benefit. But even that was not the main reason for their rejection. The main thing was that to acknowledge Jesus as the One He truly is meant also acknowledging His obvious and unquestionable superiority over themselves.

For provincial mediocrity, such acknowledgment is completely unbearable. Then a psychological mechanism is switched on that changes one's point of view toward a great person, making one ignore what matters most and focus on secondary details that have nothing to do with the issue.

And so there arises the illusion of understanding, of knowing "reality," familiar to everyone who has ever said of some great fellow citizen, "Come on, we've known him since childhood," then adding several of the vulgarities usual in such cases. It is not surprising that such a view of a person, whoever he may be, completely excludes any possibility of real, deep relationship. And in the case of Jesus, it also completely excludes any possibility of sharing in the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world.

The principle followed by the inhabitants of Galilee, and which each of us has experienced for ourselves, sometimes reflects a very sad phenomenon in our spiritual life. The essence of this principle is that when people think they know something or someone very well, they become unable to see in that person more than they are used to seeing. Unfortunately, we ourselves often find ourselves in the place of Jesus' countrymen, except that, in addition to calling Him the son of Mary and the brother of James, Joses, and others, we also call Him the Son of God. But this lofty confession does not prevent us from closing our eyes to what we have not yet grasped and have not yet grown into. Like those Galileans, we think we are sufficiently familiar with our Savior from Scripture, from the works of theologians, and from the stories of mystics. But there is one irrefutable argument that shows how little we know Him and how little we believe in Him: spiritual slackness, despondency, life not lived at full strength, weakness in prayer, the inability to see His action in our life, to trust and hope only in Him. No wonder He performs so many miracles neither in our destinies, families, nor communities. What should be done here? That is a question for each of us...

There is only one real barrier between a person and God: distrust. More precisely, there are many barriers, but only this one proves truly insurmountable. Everything else can be overcome, if not by the person, then by God, through the joint effort of two wills seeking a meeting. Distrust, however, is insurmountable precisely for God. If a person persists in it, the wall between him and God becomes absolute.

God could enter a person's life and even his heart without asking for human consent at all, but such an entrance would simply destroy the person as a free personality, as the image of God. Not wanting that outcome, God, if a person does not trust Him, simply steps aside, removing Himself from the life space of the one who does not want to see Him. Or, as another version, who wants to see Him only as he wants to see Him. Of course, no human being can see God as He is.

There is, however, a significant difference between natural human limitation and the limits a person arbitrarily chooses for himself. God as a person sees Him is one thing; God as a person imagines Him for himself is another. For a person in a fallen state, it is at times not so simple to distinguish one from the other. A convenient picture of a convenient "god" often hinders communion with God even more than open unwillingness or obvious sin. The same is true with Christ: whoever does not want to see Christ in Christ sees in Him the kind of person he is used to seeing in life.

This danger is especially great in His hometown, where Jesus is "known" especially well, and judging by the evangelist's account, no one is going to revise that knowledge. This is understandable: if they revised it, they would also have to revise their own lives and their relationship with this Man who seemed to have been familiar for so long. It is easier to leave everything as it is and not trouble oneself. This desire to leave everything as it is leaves no room for a miracle, just as it leaves no room for the Kingdom.

Jesus sends His disciples to bear witness when they were still far from ready for such witness. Indeed, even after they return to Him rejoicing over their successes, many things happen that clearly show the apostles still did not understand very much. In essence, they still did not understand the main thing. They did not yet truly know what the Kingdom was, and still less did they know what price their Teacher would have to pay for this Kingdom to enter the world. They will understand some things after the Resurrection, but they will truly become inhabitants of the Kingdom only after Pentecost. And yet Jesus sends them when He sends them, at a time when their ideas about the Kingdom are still quite vague and indefinite, when in essence they are still not very different from the popular ideas widespread in those days.

Why, then, does Jesus act this way? One could, of course, suppose that in a certain sense this was a forced measure: witnesses of the Kingdom were needed; people had to hear about it even before His death and resurrection, at least in Palestine. And yet the matter is probably not only the need for witness. It is also that otherwise, apparently, the disciples would never have learned what the Kingdom is. Of course, while they were beside Jesus, they felt its power and its breath upon themselves. But the Kingdom is not limited to the range of Jesus' immediate visible presence. It is much greater; it exists wherever there are people who preserve their connection with Him, even at a distance.

Jesus, as we can see, wants to let the disciples feel that they too are inhabitants of the Kingdom, that being connected with Him does not mean always and necessarily following right on His heels, and that being His disciples and coworkers means a high degree of independence and, so to speak, spiritual autonomy. Of course, without relations with Christ there can be no question of remaining in the Kingdom. But this connection depends neither on physical space nor on physical time. The disciples absolutely had to feel this, to live through it in their own experience. And they understood it: they went out to preach on their own, without their Teacher, and the power of the Kingdom remained with them, accompanying them everywhere they went. Of course, this was only the first lesson, the first step in the Kingdom. Ahead of the apostles lay many other steps, far more difficult. But the beginning of the path had been made.

All the Synoptic Gospels mention the instruction Jesus gives His disciples when He sends them out to preach. In Matthew it turns out to be the most detailed and vivid; in Mark, as in Luke, we see more of a retelling of the Savior's words than the words themselves as they sounded. Of course, with regard to the Gospel of Matthew, one can also speak of editing, but here the color of Jesus' Jewish speech is nevertheless better preserved.

Thus, in Matthew Jesus tells the disciples to take "neither sandals nor staff" for the road, whereas according to Mark He tells them, on the contrary, to take only a staff for the road and to wear simple sandals. This difference obviously presupposes Mark's interpretation of the Savior's words. By forbidding the disciples to take a travel bag, sandals, and staff, Jesus is allegorically comparing their mission to standing before God in the Temple court: when entering the Temple court, one had to leave the travel bag and staff at the entrance, along with the sandals.

Jesus calls His disciples to remain constantly in the same inward standing before God in which a person should be near the altar during sacrifice. This inward standing before God was the main meaning of their ministry. Only in such a state could they fulfill the chief task entrusted to them: to reveal to the world the breath and power of the Kingdom. It is no accident that the Savior endows the apostles with power to do the same things He Himself does.

Only in this way could people be made to understand, or at least to feel from their own experience, what the Kingdom is. Words alone about the Kingdom, which, as Jesus Himself says, "has drawn near," were not enough here. Theological arguments do not work in such cases; witness is needed. And the possibility for Jesus' disciples to manifest the same power of the Kingdom that their Teacher manifests became the witness that the Kingdom really had "drawn near."

If it were otherwise, no one except Jesus Himself could have manifested its power, and no one else could have performed either miracles or healings. The Kingdom would have remained the possession of the One who brought it into the world, and of no one else. Meanwhile, in practice it turned out that the most ordinary people could share in it, provided, of course, that they were ready to entrust themselves to the One who brought the Kingdom into the world. Such witness spoke better than any arguments, because it was truly living and effective.

The mission of the disciples was connected first of all not with preaching as such, but with those manifestations of the power of the Kingdom that everyone could understand without words. In antiquity both pagans and Yahwists paid far more attention to real manifestations of power than to words and explanations, not to mention abstract theories. Of course, there were exceptions: intellectuals existed if not in every age, then in almost every age, and they always trusted an elegant concept and a vivid theory more than practice.

So it was among pagans and among Jews, and Plato's Academy in this sense was no different from the Jewish academies where learned rabbis and interpreters of the Torah taught. Jesus, however, sent His disciples not to theological academies, but to ordinary people who, as in old times, trusted manifestations of power more than fine words.

Of course, such faith was not always a guarantee that the experience was spiritually sound: power in itself is ambivalent, and it can be connected both with God's action and with the action of those created powers that are not only disobedient to God but directly oppose Him. And yet the Kingdom was first of all precisely a manifestation of power, and only then a manifestation of love. From within the Kingdom, of course, everything looks the other way around: first come the relationships of love that bind the inhabitants of the Kingdom to one another and to God, and only then, as something derived from those relationships, comes the power that changes the universe.

From outside the Kingdom, from the fallen world, however, power appears to be the main characteristic of the Kingdom. The fallen world knows love only very little and in part, but it knows power very well. Besides, this world respects power, while it treats love at best with condescension and at worst with contempt. That is why the reality of the Kingdom, which, according to the Savior's word, "has come near," was best demonstrated at the beginning precisely through manifestations of power. This was, of course, only a first step, followed by others, but it was an absolutely necessary step.

Death. People are ready to believe in the miracles Jesus performs, that is, to acknowledge His tremendous power. But when the word "death" appears, there is no more reason to trouble the Teacher. Death is the end. Even the most terrible disease still leaves hope, but death is everything.

Yet this is precisely what turns out not to be true. Resurrection takes its place alongside the other healings. Disease and death turn out to be phenomena of the same order. Death is not something beyond the world, something we cannot fight because it is immeasurably greater than we are, nor is it something sacred in that sense. No, death is only the end of a chain of diseases that testify to the corruptibility of this material nature.

That is why the two stories of people being raised from the dead, Lazarus and Jairus's daughter, do not have a special style compared with the miracles of healing. Yes, death is a very important event. But birth is far more important, because death is only a passage. To our earthly eyes, death and birth are events of the same order in the strength of the experience; only the sign of that experience differs. And for our earthly feelings, this is how it should be. It is frightening when people do not weep at funerals out of some false religiosity. But when the soul weeps, the spirit must quietly and calmly learn new paths of connection with the beloved person now that there is no material connection between you. This is possible only if we are filled with the spirit of today's reading.

Death is not an impassable wall. There is One who always gives our dead back to us: the Lord Jesus Christ.

Again, as in the other miracles described by Mark the Evangelist, we see that the Lord performs a miracle by His word alone. People who have the gift of miracle-working or who claim extraordinary abilities appeal to another will: saints to God, shamans to the power of magical spells. Jesus, however, simply expresses His will, and it works a miracle, as it created this whole world. In this His divine authority is manifested. But it is no less important for us to know that the will of the Almighty is that people be healed of diseases and delivered from death. Jesus' request that no one know about this especially emphasizes it: He performs the miracle not to attract adherents to a new religion, but to deliver a specific family from death and grief.