Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-44
When Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee with His disciples in search of a quiet place for them to rest, He met a crowd that had raced ahead of them in order to intercept Jesus. While we may have reacted by avoiding the crowd in order to keep to our plan for rest, Jesus engaged the people whom He saw as being like “sheep without a shepherd.” He couldn’t turn them away and He couldn’t flee from them because He had compassion for them.
Jesus’
compassion for the people stands in contrast to his disciples’ attitude toward
the crowd that had gathered. As the day grew long they became concerned about
the large number of people who needed to eat. But their concern wasn’t as much
for the welfare of the people as it was for the burden that these people had
become for them. The disciples rightly understood that they had a
responsibility for the people whom Jesus was hosting. Recognizing the great
cost of meeting that responsibility (they had already calculated an amount
before approaching Jesus on the matter), they come to Jesus asking Him to
dismiss the people and rid them of their responsibility to feed them. In doing
so, the disciples were behaving in much the same way as the spiritual leaders
of Israel who ended up “destroying and scattering the sheep” of God’s pasture,
driving them away instead of “bestowing care on them” (Jeremiah 23:1-2).
Jesus’
response to the disciples echoes in our time and circumstances. “You give them
something to eat” is His call to show compassion to those who are helpless and
harassed, the multitudes in our world, nation, and community who have no one to
feed them the good food of God’s Word and have looked elsewhere for spiritual
nourishment. We were once in that same terrible and hopeless situation. We were
far away from Christ and His compassion, but now we have been “brought near
through His blood” (Ephesians 2:13). Having been gathered into the Church, the
pasture of Christ’s compassion, we are called to gather His scattered sheep and
give them good spiritual food to eat. It may cost us eight months’ wages or
even more in time, personal sacrifice, or worldly possession, but we gladly pay
whatever it costs us to gather the scattered sheep so that they will enjoy the
compassion of Christ that has brought us life and peace.
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