The Gospel for this Sunday, the 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the latter part of Chapter 6 of St Mark’s Gospel and sees the return of the Apostles from their first missionary journey and what happens next. In between the sending of the Apostles and their return to Jesus, the martyrdom of St John the Baptist has occurred.

The Apostles return to absolute bedlam; it seems that everyone is clamouring for Jesus and for help as they begin the process of repentance. Reading between the lines, this means that those two by two apostolic journeys were wildly successful AND that people are looking for a new anchor because the news of the death of St John the Baptist has reached them (with all the accompanying grief, consternation, panic, and bewilderment that goes with it).

So it is surprising that Jesus says, ‘let’s get some peace and quiet’? No.

Would you, too, be running after the only person left who has all the answers and can make sense of this mess, whatever it took to do so? You betcha.

When they all converge on this lonely, deserted spot, Jesus has deep compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

What does a sheep without a shepherd look like? Good question.
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Something like this:

According to internet reports, this is how a sheep looked after about 5 years on its own.
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A well cared for sheep should have looked something like this:

A wild sheep would survive in a natural habitat of good grazing combined with rocky surfaces to keep hooves from growing too long. Domesticated sheep have been under generations of breeding selection for wool yield, meat yield and even milk yield.

So should a domesticated sheep go missing it is going to be a lot heavier and with much greater wool growth than the wild version.

Unshorn wool is heavy, dirty and usually full of parasites. Without the premium grazing, a sheep is going to be eating what it can, and will be at more than usual risk of internal worms. Without regular care, hooves become infected, and knees become inflamed, making mobility difficult. Less mobility means less food, and weakened ewes will not produce enough milk to nourish lambs. Without the usual husbandry separations, inbreeding will occur with other uncared for sheep. More wool than usual will also be more wool over the eyes, reducing visibility.

A sheep that has been a few years without a shepherd is either dead, or a very sorry sight indeed.

Jesus saw these crowds as they were, overburdened, unhealthy, hurting and uncomfortable on the inside and on the outside (and unable to scratch the itches, and unable to rid themselves of the external and internal parasites), lame, blind, grieving over little ones who shouldn’t have died young, malnourished, and totally miserable.

But Jesus also saw them as they were supposed to be, quick, nimble, healthy, frolicking, joyful and contented, and producing lots of quality wool, milk and lambs.

And Jesus, the master good shepherd, knew exactly what was needed, and started the lengthy arduous task of bringing them back to full health, to the best that He knew it was possible for them to be – the best the Father had destined for them from the beginning.

He started that tasking with teaching, with teaching them the truth, and helping them to apply it to their regular lives.

It wasn’t all He did, Jesus also nourished them through the miracle of the multiplication of food, as the verses after Mark 6:34 tell us. But for the next few weeks we are going to be reading from St John’s version of this miracles and its implications in his Chapter 6.

The take away from this Gospel passage is that Jesus sees us, and He fully understands the bedraggled state we are in. But He also sees us in the fulness of what He created us to be. He alone knows how to get us from our current state, to that happy, healthy and productive state.

But to get from here to there, but we will have to fully trust Him and His process. Some of it won’t be very nice (shearing, sheep dip, worm removal medicine, hoof clipping, knee splinting, times of segregation from other parts of the flock, internal and external examinations etc) but we will feel and look so much better afterwards.

The challenge is, will we say Yes to Him and to His process?

Or will we begin for a while, and run away before it is completed?
Or will we just run away and attempt to take care of ourselves again?

Remember, very few survive going it alone without a shepherd, and they don’t thrive.

May He please help us to say a committed, and enduring, Yes to Him.
May He help us to remain, and not resist and kick up a fuss, when the processes are awkward and painful.
May He, in His great mercy and compassion, bring us to the fulness of health and well-being that He has always wanted for us.
Amen. Amen. Amen!

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the last half end of Chapter 5 of St Mark’s Gospel and contains the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter and the healing of the woman with the haemorrhage.

Both Jairus and the woman are in desperate situations, and both of them know that they are exposing Jesus to the risk of becoming ritually unclean, and of Jesus having to go through the various processes to become ritually clean again. To be ritually clean was a pre-requisite for public worship of God.

Anything or anything touching a woman with a haemorrhage would be unclean until evening; and anyone who touched a dead body would be unclean for 7 days and have to go through two ritual washings with lustral water.

But they are both desperate.

We are told Jairus begged Jesus earnestly, and the word used is ‘parakalei’, which is very close to ‘paraclete’; (giving us a visual image of the work of the Holy Spirit), and he begged Jesus many times. Like the widow in the parable of the unjust judge, Jairus does not stop pleading until Jesus agrees to visit his daughter. So in this desperate situation Jairus wasn’t concerned about making a pest of himself, nor about what his public expressions of desperation would do to his reputation.

This poor woman had suffered greatly with this haemorrhage, and despite treatment by many doctors, and the depletion of all her monetary resources, she was no better, and in fact her troubles had become worse, more severe and more aggravated by the various treatments. Apart from the physical pain, the woman would have suffered from ostracism by the community – who would want to become ritually unclean by associating with her? Any husband she may have had would have left her and formally divorced her; any children she may have had would have been kept far from her. The depths of her desperation were greater and had gone on far longer (twelve years) than Jairus’ acute desperation.

However Jairus can approach Jesus publicly and openly, this suffering woman cannot. To even be among the crowd would have necessitated some form of disguise. She can’t even ask in private for help, due to the constant experiences of rejection that are her lot in life. But what she can do, she does; and it takes a similar kind of bravery to Veronica on the way to Calvary for this woman to work her way through the pressing crowds around Jesus to get close enough to touch His outer garment.

Immediately she is healed completely, and immediately Jesus is aware that a healing of magnitude has taken place.

Can you imagine the terror she goes through when Jesus asks ‘Who touched My clothes?’ She isn’t supposed to be out in public, and if she tells the truth…..

But she is still a woman of great courage, so in fear and trembling she tells Jesus the whole horrible truth, (how easy would it have been to hide and say nothing?!) and Jesus doesn’t tell her off. He calls her, ‘My daughter’, when He could easily have called her ‘woman’; publicly acknowledging that her faith and her courage are worthy of membership in His family, and publicly confirming to all that she is healed completely, and that there won’t be any adverse consequences, so she may depart in peace under His protection.

Poor Jairus, these delays must have been agony for him. Then he gets the unwanted news that all hope is gone, his daughter is dead. Healing is no longer possible.

Yet Jesus reassures him, and continues on His way to Jairus’ residence, but with only a chosen few disciples. What is going to happen, is going to happen in private. Was she asleep (in a deep pre-death coma), or was she truly deceased? Jesus still restores her completely and immediately back to health.

What does this teach us?

That no matter how dire, nor how lacking hope our desperate situations are, Jesus can immediately and totally fix them. Even if they are even beyond all earthly hope.

Nothing is beyond the power of Jesus.

But if we are honest, we also ask, why did God permit things to get so very dire before He stepped in?
An easy answer is, ‘to display the divine power of God, when all human help was decisively proven useless’.

But why did they have to suffer so much before God stepped in?
Was it as simple as ‘Jesus hadn’t passed by near to them yet’?
Well then, why didn’t God send Jesus sooner?

And here we meet the same inscrutable wisdom and providence and timing of God that Job, and Tobit, and Naomi, and Jeremiah, and many other holy ones wrestled with.

He is God. We are not.

Therefore everything He does is done perfectly and with perfect timing; even if we can’t see or comprehend the reasons why. (Frustrating, isn’t it?!)

But let us place our trust in Him afresh.

Because He alone can fix everything; fix it totally, fix it perfectly, and fix it immediately.

Nothing, but nothing, is beyond our hope in His almighty power.

May He give us the grace to live this truth, and to never forget it. Amen.

O great God of mercy and compassion
we bring before You the many desperate situations
we feel we have been importuning You about forever.
You have not forgotten us,
even if everything else screams the opposite.
In particular we bring before You our most impossible desperate situations
and entrust the timing, and the complete and perfect fixing of them to You.
We expect from you spectacular and immediate miracles worthy of these Gospel accounts.
You are the same God today, as you were back then,
and as you will be forever.
You can do it again in our time.
You can do it again today, if You so will.
Please remember how human and limited our patience and endurance is.
Please send us Your reassurance,
lest fear cast out whatever little faith we have left.
We entrust all of it to Your capable hands and Your loving Heart.
Take care of everything, especially our most desperate situations, as only You can.
We decide today, to trust in You,
​with a deeper trust than we have ever had before.
Please help us by the power of Your Holy Spirit to live in that level of trust and to grow in it.
Jesus, I trust in You.
Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the end of Chapter 4 of St Mark’s Gospel after Jesus has been teaching a series of parables to the crowds. It narrates the story of Jesus calming the storm.

Following on from Jesus teaching the parables of the wheat and the mustard seed which invited us to trust God’s process and God’s timing, we seem to have a parable in this event of the massive storm that invites us to trust in Him even in the worst of times.

What comes after this passage is the deliverance of the Gerasene demoniac, which seems to be where Jesus was headed to on the other side of the lake of Galilee. Is this massive storm an attempt by the forces of evil to prevent this deliverance? It does seem likely.

We do know that Jesus set out deliberately for this locality on the other side of the lake, and plenty of witnesses joined Him in other boats. We know that it was evening before the lake crossing even began, and that they only set out after the crowds had been dismissed.

Jesus was already in the boat before they set out, and we know that at times He preached from Peter’s boat close to the shoreline. There doesn’t seem to have been any prior preparation or planning for this journey; and in all likelihood the seamen among the disciples would have expected a rather swift crossing – no more than an hour or two, with landfall before it got pitch dark.

But we see this sudden, intense, physical opposition to their journey’s progress; and they feel they are facing it all on their own because Jesus is in the back of the boat asleep.

The usual translations we read, do not do the original Greek justice, and water down the intensity of the crisis the disciples in the boats faced. What we often read as storm or great gale can also be translated violent wind-storm, squall, whirlwind, hurricane. They are hard enough to deal with in daylight, but in fading light and darkness it must have engendered extra terror.

So violent was it, that the waves were breaking over and into the boat, so that it was filled entirely. Any efforts to bail out the water were proving to be futile. The boat was beginning to sink.

At this point, like them, we are asking, where is God in all this?

How acutely they must have felt the absence of His reassuring presence! They could have also asked; Why is God permitting this to happen to us? What did we do wrong? Where did we go wrong?

‘Teacher, teacher, we are perishing. We are at the point of being fully and totally destroyed.’

And Jesus gets up, commands ‘Silence!’, ‘Be still!’, and the immediate calm that happens is as great as the storm was.

'megale’ is used to describe both the storm AND the calm.

This supernatural calm overwhelms the disciples with fear, awe and reverence.

Only God.
Only God Himself is able to transform utter disaster, turmoil and chaos into perfect peace and order in a single moment. No one else and nothing else can.

And what does Jesus say to them (and to us)?
Why are you so frightened?
Have you no faith?
Have you forgotten Who is in control?

Ummm. Errrr.
We’re still terrified, before and after, and it is human to be afraid.
Gulp. Obviously not as much faith as we thought we had. At all.
Yep. Completely forgot. Utterly failed that one….. Sorry.

May God help us to remember that even in the worst of times, that He is still completely in control.

May God help us to remember that especially in the worst of times, we can be expectant for His sudden divine action to happen to fix everything perfectly– and thus not despair nor become despondent.

May God help us to remember that nothing is going to stop us carrying out the mission we have been given by Him, even if it has been delayed by enemy tactics – and to expect far more spectacular results if there have been delays and opposition.

In our darkest moments may God send His holy angels to remind us of this Gospel event, and through it to remind us that He is completely in control, and that the end He has in mind is far more amazing and more glorious and stupendous than anything that currently terrorizes us.

Amen. Amen. Amen.
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He alone is worthy of our trust.
Let us place our trust in Jesus.
Let us renew our trust in Jesus.
Let us massively increase our trust in Jesus.
Amen.