Word to the Wise
Thursday, January 21, 2016 - Thursday in the 2nd Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Sam 18:6-9; 19:1-7 and Mark 3:7-12]"He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, so that they would not crush him.' [Mark]
The image of Jesus teaching a crowd of people from a boat has always intrigued me. When I was on a tour of the Holy Land in 1988, the Franciscan guide pointed to the place that tradition identifies as the location of that incident. We are told in the Gospel of Luke [5:3], in the account of the calling of Simon Peter as a disciple, that Jesus had Peter row one of his boats out from the shore and Jesus sat down and taught from the boat. Sitting down was probably a practical thing to do but it also identifies Jesus as a teacher because that was the position a teacher was entitled to take. [Cf. also Matthew 5:1] A teacher sat down and the pupils sat at his feet.
There's no question that it might be difficult to teach while standing in a rocking fishing boat, but the image suggested an interesting irony. There's an old Broadway musical song, (I think it is from "Guys and Dolls," but experts in the Beloved Congregation can correct me), "Sit down, sit down, sit down, you're rocking the boat!" It was precisely when Jesus sat down and started teaching that he was "rocking the boat" in the sense of disturbing the status quo. This is part of the building tension in the Gospel of Mark between Jesus and the religious authorities of his day.
Once more I call attention to Pope Francis and his leadership. There's no question that he is "rocking the boat" and there are people who wish he would sit down. They should remember what happened when Jesus sat down! We might remember our own reluctance "to rock the boat" by speaking of matters of faith. One of the traditional images of the church is the "bark of Peter," and we are all passengers! Where does that put each one of us? AMEN
config
view
logs
3840.0 KB
99 ms
4
