Real Life & Death Lessons

This week, from Mark 6:1-30, we hear of Jesus being rejected at his hometown of Nazareth, his sending out of the apostles and the death of John the Baptist. Elsewhere we read, "the fields are white for harvest," and "the harvest if plentiful," and yet here the disciples learn that the reaping of any such harvest is done in the context of unbelief, rejection and even death. These are life (and death) lessons for the disciples, for Mark's early readers, and for us today. Just as the earlier Parable of the Sower taught us, not all the scattered seed of the Word is received and bears fruit. And yet we are sent out in to the harvest. And it is the very nature of the seed of the Word.., of the kingdom and its King, that death is required so that it might bear much fruit.