I think I made everybody laugh at Bible study when I candidly asked around if, by the time you retire, you end up being less busy. When they stopped laughing, someone said to me: “Oh, we find other things to do!“
Busyness is really a disease of our time…or maybe it’s not? Because my sense is that’s the world of the Gospel too. A reality Jesus and his disciples knew really well, and it is especially well depicted in Mark’s Gospel. Remember what I told you about the meaning of Capernaum where most of the action in Mark’s takes place: It’s indeed a “big mess”, it’s rich and full of life, yes, and it can be overwhelming too. Too much to do to help all the people, no time to sleep, no time to eat and also maybe too many needs, too much suffering.
Today, Jesus reminds the disciples the importance of rest. I was wondering if it would be relevant to talk about it since most of us in our congregation have retired but from what I gathered on Wednesday it looks like it’s still relevant! So what about rest? There may be some misunderstanding about it.
To rest, we can do two things in things world: We take a nap, we crash in front of our TV, or we go on a trip or do fun things. We stop doing anything or we look for entertainment. In both cases, we break our cycle of activities and are looking for a way to recharge. The rest Jesus offers is different though. It’s not about doing nothing of what we usually do, or doing a lot of something else. It’s about being, being by ourselves, and being with God: “Come away to a deserted place, by yourselves“ says Jesus to his disciples. We remember that the God of the Jews is the God of the Sabbath. A God who takes time to delight in his creation on the 7th day. And to honor the Sabbath is the third commandment, it comes before anything else we can do…It seems very worth thinking about it if you are like me, most of the time afraid of displeasing God by being lazy, never thinking we may actually irritate God with our constant activity!
What we need to understand though is that rest is not about taking a nap or watching TV or going on a trip or going to a party. Resting in our context is a spiritual discipline of intentionally being with God. When we rest, we are reminded that God calls us to be, to be with God, to be for God, and far from being laziness it’s an act of love and it’s an act of humility.
– It’s an act of love because when you love someone, you don’t want just to do things for them, you want to be with them and just enjoy their company. I think this is one of the reasons why children love so much their grandparents. Parents are always too busy doing things for their children, but grandparents take the time to just be with their grandchildren, to teach them things, to talk to them, to share their activities like gardening or fixing something around the house. Well God is like that too, so it seems. God wants to be with us and Jesus spent much time like in our Gospel today talking to people, teaching them something, sharing what he was doing. That’s the purpose of resting, God can’t do that with us if we’re always running around doing something for him.
– Then resting is also an act of humility because it means we acknowledge our limitations and our dependence on God. We often hear the saying of Teresa of Avila that Christ has no hands but ours, no feet but ours, and we take it to mean that we have to do all the work in this world, that, if you will, we need to replace Jesus, but it’s not what it means at all, it means that he acts through us, as he acted through the disciples he sent first, and so each time we’re done we have to go back to him, not just to regain our energy, but so he can mend our hearts because there are so many needs in this world and around us this is really heart breaking.
Mark tells us today that Jesus’s motive for helping people was his compassion (He had compassion because they were like sheep without a shepherd), and so compassion should be our motive as well, but we have to acknowledge that if we do too much without being grounded in God’s love our compassion will fail because our compassion is limited when it seems that the suffering in this world is never ending and overwhelming.
Have you ever had the sense that it was just too much? Too many needs, too much suffering, so little time? We call that compassion fatigue these days and a lot of people seem to suffer from that.
I talked about that recently with my sister who is a teacher. At the end of the year, she told me she couldn’t bring herself to leave her desk and go just talk to her students and help them with the work they were doing. She said she felt terrible, I told her she was just tired. But it can be real for all of us when we try to help others, and if we don’t take the time to mend our hearts, it can take a terrible turn. We often hear about how residents in Assisted Living facilities are mistreated by the caregivers. I don’t think it’s because these people are cruel to start with, they want to help to start with! But they end up overwhelmed, they don’t have time and they run out of the fuel they need the most to help others in their job: Compassion.
So if you’re in this place where you just want to run away, because it’s just too much, well Jesus tells you: Yes, you should do just that. You should run away, for a little while. Be aware of your limitations and be aware of your own needs, for the rest of your body and also for the restoration of your soul. And maybe that’s why we love so much Psalm 23, it acknowledges the need of restoration for our souls. It acknowledges our own need of being fed, nurtured, honored, taken care of. How would it look like for you today to have someone taking care of you? To have God doing something for you? It’s not bad to think about that, it’s right there in the Bible!
Again, we are in this paradox I already mentioned once or twice I think: We need to imitate Jesus but we also need to let Jesus be Jesus. We are the sheep, we are not the shepherd. We listen to his voice, we follow and do what he asks us to do and then, like the disciples, we come back and we let him take care of us.It’s also the sense of our healing rite: bringing our weary, broken hearts to the altar, and ask him what we need to feel revived, to feel whole again, we put in his hands our suffering and we put also in his hands the suffering of the ones we love because we cannot carry it by ourselves. To paraphrase Teresa of Avila: He may have no hands but ours, not feet but ours, yet we have no compassion but the one he gives us.