Our text marks the end of the meteoric and, arguably, unprecedented rise of David from youngest son to Israel’s king, from his dad’s pastures to Israel’s throne. It’s the climax of the kind of "underdog" story to which people often find themselves drawn. That’s why gospel preachers and teachers try to keep peoples’ attention focused on the Lord, the true Lead Character in this remarkable story. By doing so, they follow the implicit lead of the text’s narrator.
After all, from the beginning of Israel’s monarchy, the Lord has guided the story of Israel’s monarchy. Of course, the Lord wanted to be Israel’s only king. When Israel demanded that Samuel appoint a king, the Lord recognized this as a rejection of God’s rule over them. Yet it’s the Lord who finally gives permission for Samuel to anoint a king for Israel.
When King Saul later repeatedly disobeys the Lord, it’s God who calls Samuel to anoint a new king for Israel. Israel’s second king is, of course, a highly unlikely candidate. He’s the youngest of eight sons who’s little more than a boy when the Lord tells Samuel to anoint him to be Israel’s second king.
Not surprisingly, of course, tensions quickly escalate between Saul and David. No throne, after all, has room for more than one king. So while Israel’s king initially appreciates his young successor, things quickly deteriorate between them. Saul repeatedly attempts to kill the young man whom he recognizes as a threat to his rule. Only God’s direct, if sometimes implicit, protection of David spares Israel’s second king.
The tension may seem resolved when the Philistines kill Saul and his sons in battle. The way may seem clear for the Lord to finally fulfill the Lord’s promise to make David Israel’s king. In fact, the people of Judah even anoint him as their new king. However, Saul’s commander, Abner, makes Saul’s son, Ish-Bosheth king over all but Judah. This triggers an intense and bloody civil war between Saul and David’s families.
At this point political intrigue may seem to finally clear the way for David to become Israel’s next king. However, II Samuel’s readers who have heard the Lord’s promise to make David king know better. Of course, Saul and Ish-Bosheth’s commander, Abner, is murdered by David’s commander after defecting to David’s side. Two of David’s men also murder Ish-Bosheth.
Yet our text at least implies that the Lord uses these events for God’s good purposes. God, after all, protects David from shedding any of that blood. In fact, David pronounces a curse on Abner’s murderer and vigorously punishes Ish-Bosheth’s killers. What’s more, even before all this intrigue unfolds, others predict, as Patricia Dutcher-Walls points out, that David will somehow become king. Both David’s wife Abigail and even Saul himself forecast that he’ll be Israel’s monarch.
On top of all that, even "the tribes of Israel" that come to try to convince David to become their next king seem to recognize that God has chosen him for that role. Ironically, of course, as Walter Brueggemann notes, Saul’s former commander who’d abandoned Ish-Bosheth to ally with David, had wanted to unite Israel under David’s rule. However, David’s commander had killed him before he could carry out his plan.
Now all of Israel comes to David to beg him to lead her. There’s no bargaining, no preconditions for David’s leadership. Israel simply pleads with David to become her new king. He isn’t, after all, as Hans Wilhelm Herzberg notes is, just the only viable candidate for Israel’s throne. David is also what Israel calls her "flesh and blood," even though, ironically, he comes from rival Judah. David has a long history of standing with Israel in her battles against her enemies. Israel also claims that even when Saul was her king, David was her real leader. He, to use Eugene Peterson’s vivid imagery, "really ran the country." David did what kings like Saul normally did. In fact, even Israel’s enemies, the Philistines recognized that David was Saul’s most effective soldier whom they feared most.
Yet the tribes of Israel explicitly recognize God’s role in elevating David to their throne when they remind him that, "The Lord said to you, ‘You will shepherd my people Israel, and you will become their ruler’." By doing so, Brueggemann points out, Israel makes it clear that she’s not making her own, personal appeal to David to become king. She’s claiming to only be acting on the Lord’s behalf.
As Brueggemann goes on to write, Israel pleads with the man who started out tending his father’s sheep to shepherd the "sheep" that are the people of Israel. This, of course, sets a very high expectation and standard for the rule to which Israel invites David. Ezekiel 34, after all, insists that a good shepherd exists for the sake of his sheep and their comfort. It also labels as a bad shepherd one who behaves as if his sheep exist for his welfare.
And generally, of course, David will rule over Israel for her well-being. He will rule wisely, according to God’s will. David will also help make Israel more militarily and politically secure. However, he will also sometimes act as if Israel is there for his own well-being. In the case of Uriah and Bathsheba, for instance, he will act as a bad shepherd. In fact, the prophet Nathan will condemn him for that predatory behavior using the image of a sheep and its shepherd.
This metaphor of a good shepherd, of course, as Brueggemann points out, finds its highest expression in David’s descendant who will refer to himself as the Good Shepherd. Jesus is, after all, the shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep, self-sacrificially fulfilling his role as Israel’s true Shepherd and King. It’s a standard neither David nor any other human shepherd can ever reach.
Even Israel’s leaders seem to recognize the temptations David will face to be a bad shepherd. In verse 2 they quote God as promising that David will become not Israel’s "king," but ruler. Do, they as Brueggemann suggests, want to leave room for God’s kingship? Do they perhaps worry about creating the king of royal monster about which Samuel had earlier warned? In any case, Israel’s leaders make a compact, a covenant, a treaty with David to serve as their king. While Abner simply "made" Ish-Bosheth king, Israel’s elders anoint David as their new king.
Within the framework of his agreement with Israel’s leaders to be their new king, David actually flourishes. In fact, as Bruce Birch notes, David, who’s a surprisingly young leader by our standards, actually rules for a long time, at least by ancient standards. He generally successfully leads Israel into relative stability and security. In fact, he, arguably, leads Israel to the zenith of her nationhood.
Yet the obstacles to that security are both immediate and daunting. Biblical scholars insist that the report of that first obstacle is nearly as daunting, grammatically and exegetically at least. Birch refers to verses 6-9 as "a text fraught with many problems of translation and interpretation."
The basic storyline, however, is fairly clear. The newly anointed David marches with his men, not "the men of Israel," on Jerusalem in order to attack the Canaanites who live there. The Canaanites, whom the Scriptures refer to as the Jebusites, are secure in their fortress. In fact, they’re quite arrogant. They don’t believe David can conquer their city. Does their confidence stem, perhaps, not only from Jerusalem’s geographic security, but also David’s relative youth? The text simply reports that the Jebusites believe that Jerusalem is so secure that even physically impaired people could successfully defend it. In one short verse, however, the text simply reports that "David captured the fortress of Zion, the city of David."
In fact, parts of the subsequent text may prove more difficult to understand than Jerusalem was for David to conquer. First, there’s the issue of the enigmatic "water shaft" (Hebrew sinnor). It’s a term used only one other place in the Bible, where it’s generally understood to refer to a "waterfall." Jerusalem’s "water shaft," as Birch posits, may be a particularly vulnerable spot to attack because it’s the source of Jerusalem’s water.
The second difficult and more sensitive issue revolves around the text’s references to the "lame and the blind." Verse 6’s use of it seems to refer to the ease with which the Jebusites assume they can defend Jerusalem. They appear to assume that Israel couldn’t conquer it even if only physically limited people were defending it. So it may be a kind of taunt the Jebusites direct at David.
More pastorally problematic, however, is verse 8’s assertion that "they say, ‘The blind and the lame will not enter the palace’." Is David perhaps referring to the access he denies to his palace to the figuratively blind and lame Jebusites who’d claimed he’d never conquer Jerusalem? Or is he, more troublingly, denying access to his palace to disabled people? No one is sure.
People are far surer, however, that David makes Jerusalem his home. He calls it his city. He builds up the area surrounding Jerusalem. He is what Brueggemann calls "now fully settled in his own safe place." He has assured Jerusalem’s central place in the life of the future Israel.
Yet II Samuel insists that while the fortress that is Jerusalem is now David’s home, its security is not the secret to his success. The Canaanites had, after all, been wrong to trust that Jerusalem would be strong enough to protect them. So David will grow more and more powerful, not because his home or job is secure, but because "the Lord God Almighty" is "with him."
Yet as God points out in II Samuel 7, God didn’t just "move in" to be with David when he took over Israel’s throne and Jerusalem. The Lord has, in fact, been with him from the very beginning. In II Samuel 7:8-9 God, through Nathan, tells David, "I took you from the pasture and from following the flock to be ruler over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you." In fact, God promises David that even long after he has died, God will stay with his descendants. David’s house and kingdom, the Lord adds, "will endure forever before" the Lord.
Of course, nearly all of David’s descendants will spiritually and morally falter even more substantially than he does. But Israel has hope. David is, as Dutcher-Walls notes, the "anointed one" (Hebrew mashiach). David, however, cannot save Israel. Yet his anointing links him to his descendant, Jesus Christ, who is Israel’s true "anointed one," appointed by the Lord to be Israel and the world’s genuine king. He brings the deliverance that is God’s salvation to the Lord’s people. God is not just with this Son of David. God is also, somehow, this Son of David. And in this anointed descendant of David, God is even with us always.
This lection from Mark 6 provides a curious set of contrasts as well as a wonderful irony. First, we twice read the word “amazed” here: first in verse 2 and then again in verse 6. Jesus here is doing what he’s been doing ever since Mark 1 and 2 when he began his public ministry of authoritative teaching and wondrous miracles. This time, however, he’s doing this work back home among people who “knew him when.” And so although we are told that they were “amazed” at his work, this is a different Greek word than the one used in verse 6. The people are, in Greek, ekplesso, a word that contains more than a hint of incredulity. This kind of amazement is not the fall back in awe sense of wonder you have when something amazes you in a delightful way but more the astonishment you feel at something you’re not 100% is even real. Sometimes people amaze me by what they say but a good portion of the amazement I feel stems from my disbelief that ANYONE could ever think in so odd or illogical a way!
For his part in verse 6, Jesus’ amazement is from the more common Greek word thaumazo, which is the kind of astonishment that contains little doubt but that bowls you over with power. When a gifted violinist whizzes through a series of arpeggios in a Bach violin solo, I am amazed, blown away, simply left speechless at the wonderful thing I just experienced. That’s how Jesus felt: he had no doubts as to what he was seeing before his eyes, it just took his breath away that the situation was what it was.
Jesus’ amazement stems from their dubious amazement as to what Jesus was saying and doing in their midst. The reason is that the crowd can’t quite believe what they are witnessing. This has to be some sort of conceit, some trick, some chimera that is not what it appears to be at first glance. Notice how they move themselves from dubious astonishment to a wholesale impeaching of what arrested their attention in the first place.
Literally translated, here are the people’s collective comments in verse 2: “What’s all this now? Who gave this fellow such wisdom? What kind of (miraculous) power is this that flows through his hand?” These comments are peppered with vague words of the “how now?” and “wassup?” variety. The Greek is littered with tiny particles and interrogatives of a general and generic nature. But precisely by stating and framing things just this way, the people are implying that the obvious conclusion—viz., this is all from God himself—cannot be the right conclusion. SOMEthing is up, but who can say just what it is? All their “whither” and “whence” queries darkly hint at the possibility that the source for all this is something shady, something underhanded, maybe even something evil. It’s almost as though they are sputtering, casting about for some explanation, ANY explanation, other than the obvious one.
They then further back this up by mentioning Jesus’ pedestrian origins in a simple family from their community. Who does he think he is anyway? He’s parading himself around as someone great, but everyone in his hometown knew better than to accept that at face value! And so they rather quickly manage to transform their initial (albeit dubious) astonishment at Jesus’ words and deeds into a scandal—a hometown scandal. In verse 4 the Greek skandalizo—literally to be tripped up by someone—is the word translated as “offense” in some versions of Mark 6. They found Jesus to be a stumbling block, a cause of falling down instead of a source of inspiration that could lift them up.
Jesus could not do much for or with people who viewed him that way. Doubtless there was a little envy going on here, and as we all know (and see the Illustration Idea on this text), once you are the target of envy, there is little you can do to defuse that envy. You’re rendered powerless by those who envy you—anything you do to try to get around their envy merely deepens their suspicion.
In a wonderful twist, however, Mark shows us that Jesus turns right around and far from being undone by the treatment he received at the hands of his fellow townsfolk, he actually EXPANDS the mission by sending out the disciples (who will soon be referred to as “apostles” for the first time ever in verse 17 of this same chapter) armed with more power over disease and demons than they ever had before. That’s the great irony here. The more the world tries to tamp Jesus down, impugn his character, hinder his ministry, the more the Holy Spirit responds by sending out more workers to do even more miraculous teachings and deeds!
Why couldn’t Jesus do many miracles? Just how dependent was his power on the faith and attitude of the people around him? At first glance, it appears to be a simple formula: no faith, no miracles. In other places in the gospel, Jesus says words to the effect, “Your faith has healed you.” But at other times Jesus’ power clearly breaks through to people who have little or no faith (or at least to some people whose level of faith is unknown). So it does not seem to be the case that you can make a neat 1:1 correlation between the presence of faith and Jesus’ ability to work wonders. That is to say, Jesus’ own power surely cannot be contingent on anything else.
So what is the sense of verse 5 when we are told he couldn’t do miracles there in his hometown? Perhaps it means less that he COULD not and more that he WOULD not. And perhaps that was so for several reasons. First, verse 4 told us that he had become a scandal, a spiritual trip hazard. Hence, the more miracles he did, the more he was causing people to fall flat on their faces, which was not exactly what he was there to do! We’ve all been in situations where the more we try to make things better, the worse we make things. A child who got caught doing something very, very wrong—and caught red-handed at that—does not improve his lot by explaining more and more and more (usually compounding the lies or excuses the longer he talks). “You’re just digging the hole deeper for yourself, young man,” a parent may warn. “If I were you, I’d hush up now!”
In Mark 6 Jesus was not doing anything bad. BUT . . . because of the effect his words and miracles were having on people, there was a sense in which the more he did, the more he was digging a deeper hole into which people were tumbling as they tripped over the stumbling block/scandal he had become in their eyes.
In the New Testament—as made preeminently clear in John’s Gospel but really everywhere—miracles were “signs” that pointed beyond themselves to the reality of God’s coming kingdom. Miracles were about far more than solving a problem in the short-term or providing titillation and excitement. Miracles were meant to be part and parcel of what makes the gospel GOOD news. They whet our appetite for the kingdom of God. When, however, miracles become a source of anger, doubt, and scandal, then they have no positive function worth talking about and may as well not be done at all.
Were Jesus here today, one could wonder whether he would do miracles on televangelist shows where the main purpose for purported miracles relate to bolstering the credibility of the evangelist proper (and, just so, encouraging financial donations from viewers). It seems unlikely that Jesus would do miracles were they mostly a kind of “performance” or show designed to elicit cheers from the audience any more than he would do them in a setting of deep doubt in which people were essentially DARING him to make their eyes pop. Because when people dare you to do something, the odds are good that nothing you manage to pull off will actually have any effect (beyond giving them more to doubt, that is!).
As noted above, the Greek of this text contains some interesting clues as to how to interpret what is going on here. First, there are two different verbs in verses 2 and 6, even though in many English translations both get rendered “amazed.” But the people’s amazement in verse 2 (Gk: ekplesso) contains a whiff of incredulity and doubt. Jesus’ amazement in verse 6 (Gk: thaumazo), on the other hand, is the more usual sense of being surprised at the situation before him. Speaking of the people’s doubt-tinged amazement, the “offense” that the people take at Jesus as reported on in verse 4 is in the Greek skandalizo, which is literally a stumbling block. This could even give you a title for this sermon: “Hometown Scandal.”
In his story “Abel Sanchez,” writer Miguel deUnamuno nicely highlights the nature of envy and why it that the envied person is often trapped. In this retelling of the Cain and Abel story from Genesis 4, the Cain character is played by a skilled surgeon who has for years secretly envied his friend, Abel Sanchez, a skilled artist. At one point in the story, the doctor is scrutinizing one of Abel’s paintings. This particular painting is a depiction of the Cain and Abel story itself from the Bible. At first, the doctor is convinced that the face of Cain in the painting is modeled on his own face. And he becomes furious! How dare Abel Sanchez use HIM as a model for envy? The gall! The nerve! The implied accusation! But then, upon closer inspection, the doctor decides it’s not his face after all. Does this defuse his anger, however? By no means! Instead the surgeon becomes irate that Abel Sanchez did NOT deign to use him in one of his famous paintings! How dare Abel NOT use his face!
DeUnamuno’s point is clear: when you are the object of envy, you cannot do a blessed thing to make the situation any better. Try to be extra kind to the one who envies you, and this kindness will get written off as condescension and charity. Try to rise above things by ignoring the one torn up with envy and you will be written off as arrogant and rude, thereby merely confirming the envier’s low opinion of you. Neither approach nor avoidance can help the envied one.
It’s difficult to know how much of a role envy plays in Mark 6 but surely the sneering attitude of Jesus’ fellow townsfolk revealed at least a smidgen of envy-driven sentiments. Maybe this had something to do with his inability/unwillingness to do miracles there. He was doomed no matter what he did. Do more miracles, and the people write him off as a showboat (and/or as someone drawing off power from dubious sources). If he refused to do miracles, maybe a few would say, “What now?! We’re not good enough for ya, not WORTHY of your wonder-working power!?”
Perhaps the only thing left to do was leave town and go to other villages, from which Jesus sent forth his disciples-cum-apostles to do wonderful work in places where it could be unalloyedly appreciated.
"Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching", Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Calvin Theological Seminary, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, July 6-17, 2009
"From Text to Sermon", F. Dale Bruner, Fuller Theological Seminary; and Scott E. Hoezee, Calvin Theological Seminary, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, July 20-24, 2009
"Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching: Snow Mountain Ranch Seminar", Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Snow Mountain Ranch, Colorado, June 21-25, 2010
