“Take nothing”
says Jesus to his disciples. All they are to have as they go out with his
message is the clothes they stand up in and a stout stick to lean on.
It’s a timely message, because this is the time of year when
many people, including me, are thinking of packing for holidays or days out.
Travelling light sounds like a great idea in theory, but when we actually come
to the point, most of us find it very hard in practice. Books have always been my downfall. God bless
the person who invented the Kindle, which has reduced my packing considerably,
but I’ll confess that I still pack one “real” book, just in case the batteries
fail, and if we’re going by car it will often be my one volume “Complete Works”
of Jane Austen! The book addiction is in the genes, I’m afraid. When my brother
went on a teenage exchange visit to France his school rang my mother, concerned
about his luggage. There were six books in it, they said, taking up most of the
space in his suitcase. Mum was baffled at their concern. Six books seemed quite
a modest amount to her for a week or two, as it does to me…
Maybe for you it is something else ; clothes or shoes or
gadgets perhaps, or, if you have small children the piles of stuff they seem to
need, but most of us struggle to whittle down the load to fit the baggage
allowance, never mind “taking nothing.”
To make it worse, of course, Jesus isn’t talking about
holiday packing here. He’s sending his disciples out on a far more serious and
challenging mission, to preach and to heal in his name ; it’s not going to be a
holiday! Jesus has already encountered
opposition, and his disciples are likely to encounter it too. But it’s probably
going to be just as hard to cope with those who are for him as those against
him.
He’s been healing people. Miracles have been happening. He’s been
besieged by desperate crowds. What if they come to his disciples with the same
high expectations? If I were one of the
disciples, I’d be worrying that they would feel they were getting the monkey
rather than the organ grinder. What if I couldn’t come up with the goods?
These disciples have no experience, no training. They must
feel they need all the help they can get; at the very least a manual and some
emergency supplies. But Jesus tells them that even what they have, even the
small comforts, the props , the money, the bread, the spare clothes, all have
to be left behind. If it all goes
pear-shaped, they won’t even be able to buy a pint to drown their sorrows, or
hire a donkey to make a quick getaway... The things we pack “just in case” are usually
there because we are afraid – of boredom, of the humiliation of not having the
right clothes, of being stuck somewhere, helpless and alone, of not being able
to look after our children and loved ones, of people judging us because of it… The
disciples were surely no different.
And maybe that gives us a clue about why Jesus might have
thought it was so important for them to leave all that stuff behind – the money
and the bread and the spare tunic. It may seem cruel, but if they don’t have
the stuff they normally rely on, they will have to rely on God, and open
themselves up to the people they encounter too. They’ll have to look beyond
themselves for help, and that’s a lesson Jesus knows they need to learn.
“Take nothing”,
says Jesus.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever thought about nothing, so
to speak, but nothing is an interesting concept, if you get my meaning. It’s also
often been a tricky one for people to get their heads around, though. The
Greeks and the Romans, didn’t really like the idea of nothing. They struggled
with it philosophically. They didn’t have a symbol for it in their mathematical
systems and neither did anyone in Western Europe until the Middle Ages. How
could nothing be something, said the Greek philosophers? How could you add and
subtract and multiply and divide with it if it was nothing? And if you couldn’t
why try to write it down? The symbol for
zero actually came to us from India, where, for complicated religious and
philosophical reasons, they didn’t seem to worry so much about this, . It came via
the Islamic world in the early Middle Ages along with the rest of the Arabic
numerals we now take for granted. Zero was only adopted reluctantly though. Medieval
Christians were very suspicious of it. After all, God had created the world out
of nothing so anything that was still nothing was surely against God’s will.
There was a great deal of scepticism about the possibility that there could
ever be a complete vacuum, a place where there was nothing – fortunately they
got over that, or we wouldn’t have hoovers and thermos flasks. But modern
science still has big questions about nothing – apart from anything else for something
truly to be nothing it would also have to be nowhere and at no time…
Anyway, let’s stop before our heads explode thinking about
it. Suffice it to say, that Western cultures, those that were shaped by the
intellectual world of Greece and Rome, have always tended to prefer presence
over absence, activism over passivity, speech over silence, something over
nothing. Maybe it is because Greece and Rome were go-getting civilisations, empire
builder, with big ideas for themselves, and Christian Europe inherited that.
Power was important. Ambition was lauded. Might was right. You couldn’t conquer
the world with nothing.
And yet, that is exactly what Jesus is telling his disciples
to do here, to take nothing, to go out without the protection of “stuff”, whether
that’s the tangible things like money
and spare clothes or the intangible things like experience, skill, knowledge, reputation,
status. Leave it all behind, he says. Take nothing. That might seem negative,
even cruel, but we can also look at it positively. What if Jesus is saying, “Instead of carrying stuff, carry space, space to encounter something
you haven’t yet thought of, space that lets God get a word in edgeways, space which
enables the gifts of others to grow?” What
if Jesus is saying, “as long as you rely
on what you have, you can’t be open to the things you don’t have- yet - which
may be the very things you most need?” As long as we think we have it all covered,
that we’re prepared for everything, that we can do it all under our own steam,
we can’t discover the riches of God’s grace. Empty hands are open hands, hands
ready to receive.
I don’t think it’s an accident that this strange instruction
to “take nothing” comes straight after
the story of Jesus attempting to minister in his own home town. It wasn’t a
happy experience. Jesus had been teaching and healing to great acclaim
elsewhere, but when he comes back home to Nazareth, he is met with disbelief
and ridicule. “We’ve known you since you
were in short trousers” they cry. To them he’s not the Messiah, just a very
naughty boy, to borrow a catchphrase. What’s worse, buried in their response is
a darker suspicion about his family. “Is
not this the son of Mary…?” they ask. Normally people would have called a
man the son of his father, but Mark
never mentions Joseph. There are no birth stories in this, the earliest Gospel.
And, whatever people thought later about virgin birth, this reference to Jesus
being the son of Mary suggests that in his lifetime, people may have thought he
was illegitimate, that he had no known father. Whether that is true or not,
it’s clear that though he’s been welcomed and honoured and listened to by
crowds in other towns, in his own home town his wisdom and power are dismissed.
. The upshot is that, though in other towns he’s been welcomed and honoured and
listened to by crowds of people, here he can do very little. People know what he’s done and said elsewhere,
but it counts for nothing. Even though
he does heal people in Nazareth, he is treated as nothing, of no account, a man
with no father and no particular standing, maybe not even quite respectable, and
who is getting ideas above his station.
In a way, this is the story of his earthly life. He will
eventually end up nailed to a cross, alone and humiliated, treated like rubbish
to be discarded outside the city walls, someone his executioners think will be
wiped from history. At that point he
will truly be able to take nothing, because even what he has will have been
been taken from him. He’ll have no power, no followers, no freedom and
eventually no life. But God will take his “nothing” and bring out of it the
glorious “something” of the resurrection. Where there was no life there will be
life everlasting. Where there was no dignity there will be the glory of the
kingdom of heaven. Where there were no companions there will be, eventually, a
vast army of people embracing his message, trying to live it and to take it out
into the world.
“Take nothing”. I
wonder what the somethings and nothings in our lives are today? We may have material riches, achievements we
are proud of, abilities we rejoice in, the respect of others, an answer for
everything - and there’s nothing wrong with any of that in itself. But if
that’s what we rely on for our sense of self-worth, if that’s what we rely on
to fulfil our calling, firstly we’ll be on shaky ground, because all that stuff
can vanish in an instant, but more importantly, we’ll miss out on the strength
and affirmation God wants to give us.
God calls us to learn to be at home with nothing too, to trust him when
all we seem to have is weakness and failure, disability, doubt, need, hunger, when we don’t know what we’re
doing, or how to do it. Only then, can he have room to move in us, space that
he can fill. Only then can he surprise us with his grace and lead us on a path
we haven’t known, into a kingdom that is beyond our imagination.
“Take nothing”,
says Jesus, because our “nothings” are often the gateway to God’s blessing, a
beautiful gift which those who are cluttered with “somethings” can never
receive.
Amen
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