Rejection and Authority

Sunday, July 7 – Gospel, Mark 5:21-43. Also  Ezekiel 2:1-5, Psalm 123, 2 Corinthians 12:2-10, Mark 6:1-13

How do you handle rejection?

I must admit that I don’t handle it well. I’ve felt rejected so many times over the years that whenever I feel like it might happen again, I just want to curl up in a little ball.

A while back, I was really inspired by a woman on YouTube who had over 200,000 subscribers. She was sharing spiritual content and doing it in a way that had become a good business financially. I thought what she was doing was very creative and wanted to try it for myself.

I started a channel called Deeper Rhythm and made several videos that I thought were pretty good. I didn’t expect immediate success or to have a thousand subscribers overnight. But when I saw that people weren’t even sticking around for more than a minute or two of my 15- to 20-minute videos, I felt so deflated that I just gave up.

Now I know better than that. I know that no success comes when you give up too soon. But I was bullied a lot as a kid, and my learned response to danger was just to collapse or freeze in place. It’s something I’m still working to overcome.

Our gospel for today has some interesting things to say about rejection. But before I get into it, let me talk a little bit about the Gospel of Mark, the first gospel written. Unlike the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark does not have a birth narrative. It doesn’t say anything about how Jesus was conceived, or any give us any other details about his birth.

In Mark’s account, Jesus enters the scene as an adult who comes to the river to be baptized by John. He must have already been following John and was moved by his teaching. According to Mark, it’s not until he is baptized that the real story about Jesus begins.

But it begins with a bang. At his baptism, Jesus has a vision of the Spirit of God and is anointed by that Spirit, and then he’s driven into the wilderness. There, we usually hear that Jesus is tempted by Satan, but another way to think about it is that Jesus is tested and cleansed of any ego-driven desires to manifest his own power in the world.

He walks away from fame, fortune, and earthly power and walks right into the heart of human life and need.

Mark is a simple and straightforward gospel. We see this in the way that Jesus’ authority is questioned by those in his hometown community.

You see, his old neighbors didn’t know anything about that baptism, that vision, or that wrestling in the desert. They didn’t know anything about the changed man that walked out of the desert. They only know about the kid who grew up in their village.

We can see in the way that Mark writes their questions, that maybe Jesus wasn’t thought of so highly. They ask, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”

You see, Jesus lived in what is called an “honor-shame” culture. Meaning that some people were held in especially high esteem and others were not. Whether you carried honor or shame mostly depended upon your station or the conditions of your birth and family. And being a patriarchal society, a person’s lineage was determined by their father.

So, the fact that Jesus is identified as the “son of Mary” indicates that there might have been a perception in the village that Jesus was illegitimate. His also being a manual laborer, and not a priest or other high-station person, put Jesus in the lowly group.

But like I said, Jesus was now a changed man.

Leading up to this first verse in the sixth chapter of Mark, Jesus had just calmed the storm, healed the demon-possessed man, healed the woman who had been bleeding 12 years, and raised the dead daughter of Jairus.

It was crystal clear that something radical had happened to Jesus and he was no longer the simple carpenter that walked into the river Jordan to be baptized by John. He was now a powerful prophet and agent of the living God.

And still, his own people rejected him. For them, he carried no authority because they couldn’t see past their preconceptions and earlier judgments. Jesus is so shocked by their unbelief that he can’t do the deeds of power he’d been able to do elsewhere. He may not have collapsed entirely, but he faltered a bit.

But he doesn’t let that rejection stop him. He doesn’t give up on his ministry just because people stopped watching his videos. Why is it that he can go on in the face of rejection that might cause the rest of us to collapse?

I think it’s because Jesus knows the truth about his being from his own immediate experience.

It’s not just something that he read from a book or heard from another teacher. He’d met the Spirit of God and he knew that God worked through him.

After that rejection, not only does Jesus continue with his own ministry, but he empowers others to carry it even further than he can take it by himself. He pairs up his disciples, so they can support each other, and sends them on a mission of healing and teaching. He trusts God and he trusts the power that God has given him, and then he shares that healing power with his followers.

They’ve witnessed Jesus’ acts of healing and power. They’ve also heard the parables about how sometimes the word falls on deaf ears. And they’ve seen Jesus be rejected in his own hometown.

He sends them off without money or food and tells them they should basically depend upon the kindness of strangers. If you think about it, it’s as if he’s sending them right into the jaws of potential rejection. But Jesus also tells them that if they are rejected, they should shake that town’s dust off their sandals and keep going. Shake it off and keep going.

Spread the word knowing that it won’t root everywhere, but it will root somewhere and bear good fruit. Don’t let the haters win. Just trust in the power of God and keep going.