July 21, 2024

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle B

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

In many situations, the words manager and leader essentially mean the same thing. The person managing an organization, whatever its size or purpose, should also be leading it, and most people would use the two words interchangeably. But I remember a lesson someone taught me years ago which has stuck with me since about a possible difference in the two words. Suppose you are in charge of a group of people that need to get through a dense jungle to a camp. According to this theory, if you are a good manager, you will make sure that the people chopping away to make a path through the jungle have their machete sharpened regularly, that members of the team take turns at the front with others resting, that they have adequate water and food to keep up their strength, that sort of thing. This will ensure that you make good progress. However, if you are a good leader, you will climb the tallest tree available and yell down: “Hey everyone, we're going in the wrong direction. Turn left!” Progress, no matter how fast it is, is worthless if you are going the wrong direction, if you are not going toward your objective. As I’m driving, I sometimes see drivers with out of state license plates race past me, only to see them make a U-turn and then race back the other way or dart across three lanes of traffic to make a sudden turn. I’m never sure where they are going, but then again, I’m never sure that they know where they are going either.

Now, you won’t find this distinction between leading and managing in a dictionary, but we can use this idea to get at a lesson from today’s Gospel. In last week’s Gospel, we saw Jesus sending out the apostles in groups of two. He gave them clear direction: preach repentance, drive out demons, and cure the sick. He gave them management instructions about a walking staff, footwear, food, that sort of thing. In this week’s Gospel they return and share their experiences with Jesus and one another. Jesus then tells them to rest a while with him in an isolated area. We could say that this was good management advice from our Lord: rest up from your trip; recharge your batteries for the next one. If all that was to happen was taking a long siesta, maybe. However, I would argue that this was a great leadership move. If the apostles were to take time with Christ, sharing with him their successes, their failures, their hopes for the future, their needs when dealing with people, then I would suggest that they were doing the equivalent of climbing a tall tree to take stock of where they were going. And they needed the help of our Lord to help them gain the clarity they needed to fully understand the situation.

This has important implications for our own lives. We too are sent out as baptized Christians to do the Lord’s work in our lives. I think everyone here is trying to do this, whether it is active evangelization of others or simply trying to live by Christian standards in a world that rejects them all too often. Just by coming here to church this morning, we must believe that we are not just putting in the seat time required by a deity who comes up with arbitrary rules about Sabbath keeping. That would be the equivalent of hacking away at the jungle brush, doing something that gets us somewhere. Where? I guess the old adage applies that states, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” But I hope the Sabbath means more than this, that you come for something bigger. In fact, this concept of rest comes back into the picture: on the seventh day of the creation, God rested. For this reason, on the seventh day, we too are to rest and keep it holy. So hopefully we come here to take stock of our lives, review the progress that we’ve made, but also sit with Jesus in this place and find out where we need to go from here. It is not a deserted place, but hopefully it is an oasis from the busyness of life that it allows us to take some time each week to get our bearings on what really matters.

Now you can say that it was easy for the apostles in the Gospel: they had a face-to-face relationship with Jesus. However, we too can also have a personal relationship with Jesus – in fact, if our faith is not a personal relationship, it is not true Christianity. And it must be an ongoing conversation in an ongoing relationship. To use our analogy once more, even if we are going in the right direction, climbing a tall tree can let us see obstacles in our way that we will need to go around. God has promised throughout scriptures that he will be there for us, that he will guide us in our journey. The first reading and psalm today tell us that he will be the shepherd that will keep us safe. He doesn’t promise us that there won’t be wolves, that there won’t be storms, that there won’t be pitch-black nights, that there won’t be dark valleys. He does promise that he will be walking there beside us, helping us to know what way we should go. However, we need to listen to what the Holy Spirit is telling us as we lay out our struggles to God. This is also what Paul tells us in the second reading: “for through [Jesus] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father” [Ephesians 2:18 NABRE]. But first we must rest, still our minds from the frantic pace of our daily lives, take stock of what we’ve done, and then bring it to God to work out where we should go in the future.

As we continue with the Liturgy of the Eucharist, may we see in this Blessed Sacrament a visible, tangible sign of Christ’s presence in our lives, wanting to be with us as we go through our lives. May we take the time to be with Jesus, acknowledging him as our shepherd, guiding us “in right paths for his name’s sake” [Psalm 23:3b]. Let us all make sure that, in the busyness of managing our lives every day, that our actions are leading us on a path that takes us to the Kingdom of God.