GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
MARK 6:6b-12
Then Jesus went out to the villages, preaching in a circle. 7 Calling the Twelve to him, he sent them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits. 8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff– no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. 9 Wear sandals but not an extra tunic. 10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. 11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them.” 12 They went out and preached that people should repent.
What is true repentance? To repent is to change your heart, to turn around, away from sin and back into the arms of your loving God. Repentance begins with a kind of grief– we often say “contrition,” terror or sorrow over sin. Sometimes this looks a little different from our point of view. Sometimes it’s grief because we’ve hurt our loving Jesus. We’re sorry because we love him, and we know what he’s done for us, and we realize that the sins we commit are like a child kicking at his mother or yelling at his father just because he’s frustrated or tired or confused or not getting his way. So for some of us, for some Christians, repentance begins with grief and being sorry about what we’ve done because we love God.
But it isn’t always that way. Sometimes this sorrow is terror– fear of being separated from God. This can be like the fear of a child who’s become separated from his parents, the fear of a child who is lost and has no idea of how to get home again. This is the sorrow of fear or terror. This sorrow feels the nature of hell and desperately wants to get out of it.
Maybe throughout your life you’ve mostly felt one way about your sins, or the other. But whether it’s been grief or terror, it’s the same contrition, the same beginning to repentance.
In our text, Jesus sent out his disciples two by two for the first time without him. The purpose of their journey was to preach repentance, but was it only to preach that people should either be sad or scared because of their sins? No, it was more than that. Jesus also gave them the authority to do miraculous things as a testimony to the truth of what they were preaching, and to draw people in to listen to their message. And what was their message? Just as the miracles meant healing from the burden of sickness, healing from paralysis, and healing from demon-possession, so also their message was the gospel message of healing from the burden of sin, the paralysis of guilt, and of the all the afflictions of the devil in our lives.
The Greek word for this act of sending them out is apostello. We get our word “Apostle” from this word. It means to send someone out with the authority to accomplish some errand. When I was a boy, my mom used to send me two blocks away to the store with two dollars to buy a gallon of milk. That was a specific errand, and the specific means to carry out that errand. That’s what the disciples had from Jesus. They were still Jesus’ followers (disciples) but now they also were sent out with this authority as Apostles on this specific errand.
Jesus sent his apostles out two by two, in “pairs,” the very expression Moses uses to describe the coming of the animals into Noah’s Ark. But Jesus didn’t pair up the disciples to bring them in and save them, no, he paired up the disciples and sent them out two by two, to save us! The storm of the judgment was coming, and it was time to rescue mankind through the preaching of the gospel.
But more than this, let’s go back and notice Jesus’ own pattern for preaching. In Mark’s Greek text, Jesus “went out to the villages preaching in a circle.” That is, he preached in Capernaum, then Bethsaida, Cana, Nazareth, Nain, and back to Capernaum again. And this was Jesus’ regular custom at least in the early part of his ministry: Going out to the villages and preaching from village to village, in a circle.
Later, the Apostle Paul picked up on Jesus’ pattern, and once Paul had preached in a village or a city, he would come back again later and preach there again. Paul even began to send letters to these cities and their congregations. Why? To bring these people the Gospel along with the message of repentance.
The very act of going again and again and again to the same people with the message of repentance is a gospel act, taking the forgiveness God offers to us and offering it, handing it out there to be grasped and embraced by people, again and again.
This is all because faith is the other part of repentance. Repentance isn’t possible if there is only fear or grief over sin. Fear and grief stop us from sinning momentarily, but they are the tools of the law, and the law only condemns us, only makes us afraid, only makes us sorry about our sins. But faith is what grasps God’s promises and the gospel of forgiveness, and that’s what pulls us back to God.
Faith is like an extra organ in your body, an organ that receives God’s promises and God’s grace. However you want to think of it, and people have thought of faith as this organ that receives things from God in different ways. It’s like a weak and miserable hand with no strength, but which can at least receive what God places in it. Or faith might be like the mouth of a baby bird– a mouth that can receive food from it’s parents, but which can’t actually catch that food by itself. Or faith might be like a third ear somewhere on your head, the ear that God speaks to, the ear that’s created by baptism and that grows as faith grows.
That’s why Jesus kept going around, village to village, in a circle– to offer forgiveness and to strengthen faith so that people would grasp it, grow in it, and be rescued. So he sent out his disciples and turned them into apostles so that they would do the same thing, preaching village to village. The miracles the apostles did were done to show the truth of their message, and to be wonders that would wow the crowds to pay attention to their preaching.
Jesus wanted his disciples to trust that God would provide everything they needed. The order not to take extra food, extra money, or even a cloak to use as a bedroll, wasn’t to discourage us from doing planning or from packing a lunch, but was to show the apostles that the results of their preaching didn’t depend on how good or clever their preaching was, or on what style of music they sang while they walked along the roads, or anything else except the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the word of God itself.
This is the powerful message that causes our grief over sin, and this is the powerful message that plants and strengthens our faith, the faith that finishes our repentance and turns us back to God.
Repentance also has fruits, ways of showing that we no longer sin. These fruits will always be a little bit different from one person to another.
Three thieves all repent of what they’ve stolen and ask God’s forgiveness. They each show their repentance. One thief, with a strong faith, gives back everything he stole and pays back extra for the damage he’s done. Another thief, also in faith, cannot pay back everything right away, but works hard to be sure that she does pay back everything she took, although she doesn’t pay any extra, and her conscience does not bother her about that. The third thief has spent some of the money he stole before he repents, and he simply gives back what he has left. Is his the best example of repentance? No it’s not. But if it’s done out of faith, it’s still repentance, and that’s what God wants. Our God offers us forgiveness through Jesus’ blood on the cross, and by the grace of God, we receive that very forgiveness every time we hear the Gospel, every time we read the Gospel, every time we hear the absolution spoken to us in public or in private, and every time we take the Lord’s Supper.
Praise God for continually circling back to you, again and again, to give you and me the thing we need the most. Repentance without faith is just fear. But with faith in Christ and his forgiveness, it is true repentance.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Mark 6:6b-12 true repentance