Mark 6:31
“He said to them, “You come apart into a deserted place, and rest awhile.” For there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.”
Where this sits
The apostles have just returned from being sent out in pairs, full of reports. In the same chapter, John the Baptist has been executed.
Reflection
Mark gives the reason in the second half of the sentence, and it is startlingly ordinary: they had no leisure so much as to eat.
Not a crisis of faith. Not sin. A schedule so full that meals were being missed. Jesus looks at men who have just come back from successful work, in a week that had also brought news of a friend's execution, and the instruction is not push on while the momentum lasts. It is come apart and rest awhile.
Three things in that instruction are worth separating. Come apart — physical distance, away from the crowd, not merely a better attitude in the middle of it. Into a deserted place — somewhere with nothing in it, chosen for its emptiness. And awhile — a defined stretch, not a permanent retreat. This is a pause with an end, which is why it can be taken without guilt.
What happens next is almost comic, and Mark clearly intends it. The crowd sees them leaving, runs around the lake on foot, and is waiting when the boat lands. The rest is interrupted. Jesus does not scold them for it; he teaches, and then feeds five thousand people.
So the passage is not a promise of undisturbed rest. It is something more useful: evidence that the one giving the instruction understood the conditions it would have to survive.
- Theme:
- Rest
- Book:
- Mark