It is good that Jesus has all that power—because the alternative is Herod, and Herod will always be a weasel.
Central Image
The shepherd: Mark paints Herod's birthday dinner as a bleak little supper while the picnic Jesus throws in the wilderness reads like a coronation banquet—green grass, party groups, everyone full. The contrast answers the question before Jesus ever gets in the boat.
The Turn
The question Toby raised at the start is whether we should be worried that one man holds this much power. The sermon exposed the real problem: we've been imagining the wrong man. Once you see Herod, you know exactly why Jesus having all of it is not a threat—it's a relief.
Outline
The bookends of Mark 6
The chapter opens in Nazareth, where Jesus marvels—the only time that word appears—at the sheer absence of faith. Nobody pressed through. Nobody showed up. He didn't do many miracles because nobody came with enough faith to ask for one. The chapter closes with disciples who watched him feed ten thousand people and then panicked when he walked out on water, because they didn't understand about the loaves. Two groups who should have known better bracketing everything in between, and Mark puts them there on purpose so the reader feels the weight of the middle.
Sending out the twelve
Jesus gives the twelve a staff and little else, then tells them: stay in the first house that welcomes you, don't work the social ladder. Those aren't logistics instructions—they're character instructions. A flim-flam man shows up and upgrades his accommodations once the crowd likes him. That's not why they're going. They go, they preach repentance, they cast out demons, they anoint the sick and heal them. Mark counts five things because Mark always counts five things.
The Herod sandwich
While the twelve are out, Mark cuts to Herod's birthday dinner. This is deliberate. Herod's gathering is described with the blandest word for an evening meal there is—not a banquet, just supper. Meanwhile, Jesus feeds thousands in the wilderness using language borrowed from a fancy Roman dinner party: symposia, garden rows, reclining, everybody full. Herod is led around by his worst impulses, makes stupid oaths he doesn't have to honor, and has a righteous man beheaded because he's embarrassed in front of his guests. He's not a shepherd. He's why these people had no shepherd to begin with.
Feeding the five thousand: Psalm 23 in real time
Jesus sees the crowd and has compassion because they're like sheep without a shepherd—that one verse interprets everything else in the chapter. He teaches them all day. When the disciples want to send everyone home to find food, Jesus says: you feed them. They have five loaves and two fish and approximately no good ideas. He blesses it and tells them to pass it out—and to their credit, they shut up and do it. Ten thousand people (five thousand men plus women and children) eat until they're full, sitting in party groups on green grass, with twelve basketfuls left over. Mark is writing Psalm 23 out in an open field.
Walking on water: what they missed
Jesus sends the disciples ahead by boat and stays behind with the crowd—the big man dismissing his roadies so he can tend to the thousands of ordinary people himself. When he sees the disciples struggling against the wind on the lake, he walks out to them. They think he's a ghost. He steps in; the wind stops. Mark says they were amazed "because they didn't understand about the loaves, and their hearts were hardened." If they'd understood who had just fed ten thousand people in the wilderness—who had sat them in green pastures and set a table before them—they wouldn't have been shocked when the waters went still. Still waters. That's where the shepherd brings you.
Casual trust: the dad story
A six-year-old going into genuinely rough places on Saturday with his father, never once afraid. Not because he was too young to understand the danger—he knew those places were dangerous—but because the trust in his dad was total and it never occurred to him to question it. That's the shape of faith Jesus is trying to build in the twelve while he's still right there with them in the flesh: not emergency faith, not crisis faith, but a casual trust that runs in the background in any circumstance. You can only develop it by walking through situations where it gets tested. You give them something to eat. You get in the boat. You find out.
The Landing
The call is to grow into people—individually and as a church—who carry that same shepherd-shaped compassion out into the community around us, because the people with no shepherd still need one, and Herod is always the other option.
Questions to Think About
- When have you been genuinely relieved to find out that a specific person—not just anyone—was in charge of something that mattered to you?
- Mark interrupts the twelve's mission trip with the story of Herod's birthday dinner. What is he doing by cutting those two stories together like that?
- Toby said the disciples "didn't understand about the loaves." What were they supposed to understand—and how would that have changed anything when Jesus walked out on the water?
- The kid going into rough places with his dad wasn't oblivious—he knew those places were dangerous. The trust wasn't naive. Where in your own life do you have full knowledge of the danger but not the trust that should come with having the right person there?
- Herod liked talking to John, knew John was righteous, but still had him killed because he was embarrassed in front of his friends. When have you known the right thing but couldn't do it because of who was watching?
- Jesus couldn't do much in Nazareth because nobody showed up with faith to ask for anything. If that's how it actually works, what does it mean for us when nothing seems to be happening?
- Jesus looked at the crowd and saw people with no shepherd—and it moved him before he did anything. Who are the people around this church, in Chester, in our actual lives, who are in that situation right now?
- Name one specific person or situation this week where you can show up with shepherd-type care—not good thoughts or prayers from a distance, but something that actually costs you something.