Mark 6

An exhausted Jesus responds to the crowd with compassion. I think that’s a miracle.

Who knows what took place in Herod’s guilty heart after John’s death?

The disciples want to know who Jesus is. The people from his hometown do not.

Throughout scripture, human bodies are not an obstacle to righteousness; they are its location.

We may all be in a phase of reorientation for a while.

According to Josephus, Herod Antipas desperately wanted to be called “king.”

Is this passage more than a cautionary tale about the tendency to stuff a suitcase to the gills?

The apostles are on fire in this Gospel passage. I don't always get along with people like that.

Put your ear to the ground. You will not detect a single note of good news in the story of Herod, Herodias, and John.

The final lesson in Discipleship 101: learning to fall

“Many were coming and going, and they had no leisure, even to eat.” I think of the many lunches spent at my computer with a sandwich.

As a young minister in my early 20s, I was often admonished by the senior ministers to keep a guarded distance from laypeople. To get too close, they would say, is to become too familiar with a resulting loss of one's ministerial authority. They thought authority was protected by distance and diminished by relationships.

I like Mark’s frequent mention of how people felt. In this week’s text, Herod is greatly perplexed about John the Baptist.

As Jesus prepares to send the Twelve, his experience of failure seems to color his instructions.

Jesus listens patiently to the disciples. Then he tucks them in for a nap.

Reading through the gospel for this week is sort of a horrific treat. The beheading of John the Baptist is nothing if not a great story—drama, intrigue, tension, conflict, resolution. Even as a flashback (“John, whom I beheaded, has been raised!”) to explain Herod’s response to Jesus’ ministry, it’s the kind of story one doesn’t want to read and yet cannot stop reading. But compelling as it is, I don’t necessarily want to preach about a head on a platter.

Once I finished working with this week’s gospel text, I went back into my files to see how many times I’ve managed to preach on it in my seven circuits through the lectionary. I found that I’ve missed it more often than not—no surprise there, as it falls at a convenient time of year for that. And when I have preached on it, the sermon has always been on one half of the text or the other—either on the scene in the Nazareth synagogue or on the sending of the disciples. I have never written a sermon that dealt with both stories.