Compassionate Shepherd

Harvest Pointe Methodist Church

To the gospel according to Mark, chapter six. The Gospel of Mark, chapter six. And you may be thinking to yourself, possibly, oh, we've been in mark six for a few weeks now, and that would be correct. We have been. And so grab a Bible there. There should be one in your, in the seat in front of you, or at least on that row that you're on. If you would just grab a Bible and just crack it open to Mark, chapter six. And when you found that, go ahead and stand with me. And then we're going to start reading at verse 30. And you can see that this is right after our lesson from last week, our scripture reading from last week with John and Herod. So notice these words as found in Mark, chapter six, verse 30. The apostles gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile. For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now, many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things. Then, if you will, drop down to verse 53. Now, when they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities or arms. They laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak or the hem of his garment. And all who touched were healed. Jesus, thank you for your holy word. We pray now that the same holy spirit who inspired these words would speak to our hearts this morning. Lord, we need your voice in our life. Speak to us now. We pray in your name. Amen. You can be seated. Now, we've been all over chapter six, and in fact, we've read almost the whole chapter except for 17 verses. All right. I counted them up this morning and I said, interesting, what 17 verses here are we missing? And it really is between the space that we skipped over here. We read from 30 to 34, and then we picked up again 53 to 56. But is there anything that happens here, what we miss in these 70 verses? And most of the time, I would say that probably not much, you know, because sometimes when you're reading through there's just this moving here, moving there, whatever. But interestingly, today the church has us reading these particular verses. I say the church because the lectionary readings are hundreds and hundreds of years old. All right? And so it's not like I designed them to be matching right here today in this way. But rather they've been given to us and they're on a three year cycle like we always talk about. And these come about but they skip over 17 verses in chapter six. So we read the whole thing except for these 17 verses. And I said, what in the world are we missing here? And I thought to myself, probably not much, but in fact it's actually kind of a lot here in these 17 verses. You know, what happens is once he has compassion on them they then realize there's nothing to eat and no one has enough money to buy everybody food and cater it in. So what are they going to do? So Jesus, as you know, takes a little lunch, right? And he multiplies it. You remember this feeding? 5000 mendinh. Okay, now note, 5000 men. That means there's way more than that because the men are with their wives more than likely and with their children. Okay? So we're talking over 5000. But this is known as the feeding of the 5000. And then right after that, they get in a boat and guess what happens? Jesus is seen walking in the middle of the night when the sea is troubled on the water. So you have the feeding of the 5000, which