"Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place and rest a while"
Knox, August 28, 2011 © Scott McAndless
Mark 6:30-44, Psalm 84, 2 Kings 4:42-44
If you haven’t realized it by now after we’ve been reading it again and again this summer, I am going to say it clearly: The King James Version of the Bible is not always easy for us to understand. There are two very good reasons why that is so. The first reason is pretty obvious: the book was written 400 years ago and the English language has changed quite a bit in the last four centuries. Thou hearest not, in these latter days, the manner of speech that hath been used betimes within the court of good King James.
But there is another reason why this particular translation gives us trouble. There are, in fact, many expressions to be found in this book that were certainly not heard on the streets of London 400 years ago – that were not part of the common speech anywhere. This is because the translators of the King James had a very particular approach to the task of translation. When they translated from the original languages of the Bible – the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New – they went word by word. Every English word in the King James Bible corresponds precisely to a Greek or Hebrew word in the original.
This is not the ordinary way to translate any book. Usually translators will provide a phrase in the new language that corresponds to the meaning of a phrase in the original language. And most modern translations of the Bible (including the Bibles we have in our pews) use this phrase by phrase method. The problem with a word by word translation is that it never quite sounds natural in the new language. Expressions and sayings that made perfect sense in the original language just sound weird in the new language. Imagine, for example, that I said something like, “I’ve got a little something up my sleeve that’s going to leave you with egg on your face,” and you took it and translated it word by word into another language. You would end up with gibberish. Well, you have phrases that are very much like that in some places in the King James Bible.
Of course, sometimes when the translators had finished their word by word translation the result was just gibberish and they had to add some extra words just so it would make a little bit of sense. But whenever they did this, they marked it by putting the extra words in italics. This was their way of saying to their readers, “This is what we think the intended meaning was, but you can judge for yourselves.” So, for example, in that verse in the psalm we read this morning, it says, “They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.” By putting the words “every one of them” in italics, the translators are telling us that what the original Hebrew text says is, “They go from strength to strength in Zion appeareth before God,” and that was their best guess to try and make sense of what is actually a very difficult Hebrew phrase.
Their highest priority, therefore, was to produce a translation that was as faithful to the original text as possible and they were willing to sacrifice readability to achieve that. This very thing that makes this Bible so hard to read also makes it an excellent tool for study. Think of it: when you are reading this particular translation, every word that you see on the page (unless it is in italics) corresponds directly to a word in the orginal language. Yes, it may be hard to read quickly (if you want to do that I would certainly recommend other translations) but when you slow down and reflect on the meaning of each word, you can sometimes gain great insight.
E.g., in our reading this morning from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus meets with his disciples after they have been out preaching the gospel, ministering and healing in various towns and villages all over Galilee. They have returned and are excitedly reporting to him about what they have done and said and seen. And then Jesus looks at them and says, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.”
Who talks like that? Well, nobody really. That English phrasing was just as awkward 400 years ago when this Bible was published as it is today. People did not come up to their friends on London streets back then and say “Come ye yourselves apart into Yorkshire or Devonshire.” The reason that it sounds so odd is that every word in that verse is a direct translation of a word in the original Greek.
What that means, of course, is that that was how Jesus said it – or, at least, it was Mark’s best rendering of what Jesus really meant into Greek. Jesus looked at the disciples and said, “Come ye yourselves apart.” That is a little bit different than somebody saying “Hey, guys, why don’t we go for a little camping trip.” The focus is clearly on the disciples here: “Come ye yourselves.” Jesus is speaking out of concern for them. It is not only that they have been working hard and they need a rest, although, of course, that is true. It is as much about what they have been doing. They have been doing God’s work – ministering to the people, preaching and living out the reality of the good news about God – and now they need to come out alone but together.
Of course, the other handy thing about seventeenth century English is that they could make a distinction between the second person singular and the second person plural, something that we have since lost in English. So, if you were talking to one person alone 400 years ago you would have called him or her thou. If you were talking to more than one you would have said you or ye. So the other thing that the King James Version of this verse makes very clear is that Jesus is talking to the entire group of disciples and not to any individual and saying that they need to come apart but to do it together. When you realize that, you recognize that “Come ye yourselves apart,” is, in fact, the invitation to these disciples to be the church.
A lot of people wonder today whether there is really any need for this institution that we call the church. After all, they say, you can pray and worship God anywhere and you don’t need the church to do the kind of good work in the world that God is calling you to do. This is true enough (though I would argue that by working together as a church we can accomplish much more in the world than just by us each working on our own). But these things are not really why Jesus calls us to be the church.
Jesus calls us to be the church because we need a way to come together when we have been his disciples in the world – when have been doing the work of spreading the good news about Jesus in word and in deed, when we have been healing the broken and ministering to the weak and heavy-laden. We need to come apart together for a while so that we can remember why we do these things, so that we can be refreshed and rearmed. Otherwise, we will find, we cannot be very effective as his disciples for very long. That is the lesson that I find in these few words in Mark’s Gospel.
So this passage is about what it means to be the church. But we also see that, when the disciples do come apart together in a desert place, something unexpected happens. The place does not remain a deserted place and the disciples find that there are a lot more than just they themselves before very long. The people that Jesus has been ministering to find out where he has gone and they follow him. And it says that “Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd.”
What this means is that, although we come together apart as the church to refresh and rearm ourselves so that we can go back into the world and continue the ministries that God has given to us, the world doesn’t necessarily oblige us and allow us to stay in a desert place by ourselves apart. The concerns of the world follow us. And we will necessarily find that, like Jesus, we are moved by compassion by all the people who are “as sheep not having a shepherd.” So the church is also essential to our Christian life because it helps us to come to terms with the concerns of a very needy world.
As a result of all of this – of the church coming together to be apart from the world and then being surprised by the needs of the world coming upon them, we have the story of the feeding of the five thousand. It is a story that is rich in meaning and in symbol. It is a reminder of the many stories of God’s miraculous provision for his people like the manna in the desert (which is why, of course, this story is so careful to point out that they are in a “desert place”) and the story about how Elisha fed one hundred with just a bit of bread and flour. This story is written in such a way as to remind us of these amazing stories and so it is also a promise of God’s ongoing provision in the future.
This, then is the third teaching about the nature of the church that we find in this story. The church is not only a place where we come together apart – come away from the demands of ministering in the world – to be restored so that we can continue the work that God gives us to do. And it is not just a place where we come to a deeper understanding of the needs in the world around us. It is also (and perhaps above all) a place where we can experience God’s miraculous provision like nowhere else in our lives.
Jesus lived in an age of economic crisis – at least it was a time of crisis for the vast majority of Galileans that he met. People were out of work, were losing their livelihoods and their family farms. Of course, there were a few people here and there who were doing very well – who were making out like bandits in fact – as they profited from the misery of others. That is, of course, how these sorts of economic crises have always gone.
In the midst of all of that poverty and want and that unequal sharing of the world’s resources Jesus gave this feast as a sign that in God’s kingdom things were different. It is still a sign of God’s kingdom for the church. All sorts of things can happen in the world. The DOW and the TSX may rise and fall, the dollar may reach the highest heights or the lowest depths and the gross domestic product may fade away into dust but the church will still be a place where God’s people will know abundance – not necessarily in material goods, of course, but in the things that really matter.
So what is the church? It is a place where you can “come ye yourselves apart.” It is an odd phrase, of course, but one that, for me, rather explains well what we are all about.