What the Galileans Received from the Son of God
Mark 6:53-56 – 53 When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored to the shore. 54 And when they got out of the boat, the people immediately recognized him 55 and ran about the whole region and began to bring the sick people on their beds to wherever they heard he was. 56 And wherever he came, in villages, cities, or countryside, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and implored him that they might touch even the fringe of his garment. And as many as touched it were made well.
Mark 6:53-56 will serve as a partial review of some of the things we have already discussed in the gospel of Mark, namely with regards to the kingdom Jesus was inaugurating evidenced by his miracles. This review will make sense as we discover that today’s passage can be classified as a summary of Jesus’ Galilean ministry. We will, once again, see widespread fanaticism for the Son of God, but this desire and passion for Christ is severely deficient, especially in light of who Jesus has revealed himself to be in the previous two stories of Mark. They want him because he can make their current lives better and perhaps even free them from a foreign government’s control. Essentially, they wanted all the benefits of being kingdom citizens in the here and now; they expected all of God’s promises to come to pass at their present time. In fact, when Christ rejects the people’s plan for him to be king in John 6, they end up rejecting him. Due to having their minds set on temporal things, all they received from Jesus was deliverance from their diseases and not from their sins.