Maybe we missed it the first time, so Mark, evangelist of few words, repeats it, just in case – let us go away to a quiet place and be by ourselves. It didn’t work out, and maybe that is a telling lesson for us all, by the time they got to the quiet place, there was a not very orderly queue forming, waiting to see Jesus. We have gone from the desert of the temptation to the Jordan valley of the Baptism, back into the desert, and still, the people are crowding in.

The desert is where many things are learned and it is where the sheep are likely to get lost. The prophets spoke about the need for a new kind of shepherd. In today’s first reading, Jeremiah says that God will set shepherds over them who will care for the sheep. Ezekiel says that God himself will come to seek out and to look after the straying sheep. The same desert, where the lost sheep wander, and from which they need to be rescued, is also where Israel will learn again what it means to be faithful to her Lord. Is Jesus here setting a trap for the Apostles in order to teach them something about teaching? Just before this, in sending them out two by two, he had not told them to teach or to preach, but to call people to repentance, which comes naturally first, before anything else – if you want to be near me,, if you want to hear me, then repent first. Hard lessons!

Leading them away to a desert place by themselves brings them slap bang into the middle of human distress: a great throng awaits them, whose need evokes in Jesus the divine compassion. Jesus sets about teaching them many things and then says to the Apostles, ‘you give them something to eat’. Their impotence is clear for all to see. They do not know what to do. They are unable to meet the needs of the people and have nothing to offer. They cannot be the teachers they want to be. They cannot be the shepherds the people need, they are as dependent on Him as the crowds, and that was no doubt a body blow to their egos.

So what is going to change for them? They are, and continue to be, very poor quality disciples, as they go on to lose faith, betray Him, deny Him, ask for better seats near Him and all the rest of the stuff that we hope for ourselves but are destined not to get – what we yearn for is equality with each other in Christ, but the way we picture it may be with some a little more equal than others, maybe. They have to learn the lesson of the Cross, as do we. That is what changes them – that and the descent of the Holy Ghost, that forms them into effective witnesses, and agents of change.

Jesus is the ‘righteous branch’ foretold by Jeremiah who makes peace between Jew and Gentile. He did this by preaching peace to those who were far off and peace to those who were near, the second reading says (Ephesians 2:17). That peace, shalom, is made up of wisdom, justice and truth. What made his preaching effective when the preaching of so many others remain ineffective? It is because his is ‘a love-breathing word’. The lesson he enacts on the cross contains the power of its own being learnt, because in dying he ‘breathed forth his spirit’, the spirit of truth who leads those who follow him into all truth, the spirit of love poured into human hearts.

The lonely place where the scattered sheep are finally gathered is around the cross of Jesus, not this desert today, but a greater, more capacious desert wherein we all can find a home. The lonely place where ‘many things’ are learned is at the foot of the cross of Jesus. The lesson is about love and truth — but not just as ideas, as realities. Love in practice.

The healings that Jesus performs after the Gospel today point to how the kingdom of God upends the economy of this world. When Jesus and his apostles land, the people, as noted above, rush about “the whole region,” bringing the sick to wherever Jesus is. “And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, … and all who touched him were healed” (Mark 6:56). The word “marketplace,” agora, refers to a public space in which legal hearings, elections, and debates took place, in addition to the buying and selling of goods. Thus the marketplace was the political and commercial centre of a city or town.

By healing the sick, the weakest and most vulnerable members of a community, in this space, Jesus is subverting the economy of this world through the very inauguration of God’s kingdom. While the marketplaces of the world belong to the rich and powerful, in the kingdom of God this most political and commercial of spaces is occupied by those with the least. In the age to come, Jesus proclaims, “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first”. That age is now breaking into this age; we who seek to live God’s kingdom here and now must follow Jesus’ subversion of worldly power and wealth, and to find our seat at the foot of the cross.