NOTES for Mar 6:7-13
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.