Mark 6:1–13
What do you take when you go on a trip? It is an odd time for such a question, but pre-COVID, most of us have moved or travelled or visited relatives at some point. What did you take? What was important? What was for comfort? What did you have just because?
When Jesus sends out the disciples, he prepares them for what is going to be required of them. They don’t need to bring food or extra clothes or really much of anything at all. Jesus, in fact, orders them to carry nothing except a staff. They don’t know how long they are going to be God. They don’t know how they are going to eat or drink.
This asceticism is shocking today. Nothing? Really?
But they lack of luggage is not the shocking thing but what they do, and Mark lists it clearly in verse 12: So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent, or convert. Metanoia. The disciples don’t need anything save the word of God that goes with them.
The church today, in most places, has grown complacent. We pay more in HVAC bills than support for our neighbors in need. As well, the church needs to repent for the way we have become complicit in the prison-industrial complex. We need to repent in the way we have sold out the Good News of Jesus. We have focused more on respectability and responsibility than the possibility that God may be making something new right here and now. We don’t need to wait around until people are ready. Like Jesus send the disciples, we don’t need anything other than the word of God to change the world. Prisons are not more powerful than God’s love. Respectability is not more powerful than God’s love. The status quo of injustice will not last forever. May we dust our feet off at its door.
Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.