Proper 11B. July 18, 2021
2 Samuel 7:1-14a. I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day.
Ephesians 2:11-22. He came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56. You give them something to eat.
Precious Lord, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
I hope that some of you noticed that our Gospel portion for this morning is quite long for a reading from Mark. Our lectionary assignment leaves out nineteen verses and acts like nothing happened, but I’ve added them back in. These verses, in my view, are essential to the story, so I’m chagrined that they never get read in church, not next week or any week. Next week we will begin a series of five readings from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John and hear a different version of a feeding story!
I think these omitted verses from Mark tell an important story, and it seems theologically dishonest to me to remove them from the middle of this reading, because they contain critical evidence of the disciples’ struggle, their failure to understand, and their hardness of heart. If we don’t hear those stories, then when any of us experiences struggle with our faith, failure to understand, wanderings of mind or hardness of heart, it can seem like a reason to back away from religious practice rather than something that’s perfectly normal for Jesus’ allies. Our passage for today begins with the twelve, who had been sent out (which is what “apostle” literally means), returned, and gathered around Jesus to tell him all they had done and taught. He saw their exhaustion and said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while, because many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”
That always sounds so nice to me when I get this close to my annual August vacation! But no sooner do Jesus and his friends embark on their much-needed retreat than the crowds see where they’re headed and beat them there on foot. If there’s scant wind on the Sea of Galilee, that is surely true. The “Sea” of Galilee is actually a small lake, and it’s easy to see across and walk around to the other side. It’s a scene that I often think of when stuck in traffic, and I say, “We could get there faster by walking”.
So the crowd that Jesus’ friends were trying to get away from met the boat. Jesus had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd, so he began to teach them many things. (Not one of those many things is listed, however, not one.) What do you think he said to those lost sheep that made them lose track of time and stay well past suppertime? I went back through the first five chapters of Mark to look for hints; they’re obscure. He was proclaiming the good news that the Holy One reigns supreme, and Jesus was calling people to turn around toward, rather than away from, a spirit of holiness. He was teaching people to recognize and pay attention to God (Who is Love) and respond appropriately.[1] Jesus was teaching people to respond by claiming and insisting on their own dignity. Jesus was teaching people many things about responding to God by honoring the dignity of others.
I would lose track of time listening to someone teach me about my own dignity and the dignity of others. I would, and the people did. But the twelve were tapping their feet, still hoping for a rest. That’s the part that gets left out of the lectionary assignment. That’s the part where disappointment, anger, and desperation come in for Jesus’ closest friends.
“When it grew late, his disciples came to him”. Disciples are learners. (Think: disciples breathe in teachings; apostles breathe out teachings.) The disciples said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late. Send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy $36,000 worth of bread and give it to them to eat?” (Well, they didn’t say 36,000 US$, but that’s about what 200 denarii equals at today’s minimum day-labor rate.) And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” The story doesn’t say how long that took; but it says, “When they had found out, they said, ‘Five and two fish.’” Can’t you just see their eyes rolling? Then Jesus ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. I love that detail. It’s the only mention of the color green in the whole New Testament except for the Book of Revelation, which mentions green grass and a pale-green horse.
The disciples got the people to sit down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. (I always think that’s the miracle in this story.) “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and, he divided the two fish among them all. All ate and were filled; and, they took up twelve baskets full of leftovers. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.”
I once heard Sister Simone Campbell, leader of the Nuns on the Bus movement, tell of how annoyed she used to be that the story was that this miracle happened for five thousand men. Then, she said, she concluded that, for the men, it was a miracle. The women knew all along! Sister Simone compared it to Thanksgiving dinner in her family, where the women cook while the men watch football. When they are called to the table, the men proclaim that it’s a miracle!
But I digress; back to the story in Mark. Jesus got the disciples back in the boat to go to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd and went up the mountain to pray. Later, from the vantage point on the mountain, from the vantage point of prayer, he saw that, in the boat, the disciples were straining at the oars against an adverse wind. So he walked across the water, intending to pass them by (huh?). But they saw him and thought he was a ghost; so he answered them and got in the boat with them, and the wind ceased. Then Mark says another curious thing: “They were utterly astounded for they did not understand about the loaves, and their hearts were hardened.” Jesus has just walked on water and calmed a storm, and the disciples are still grumbling about the loaves.
Jesus was trying at every turn to teach his disciples about the many and deep ways that they could participate in his authority, in his compassion, and in the abundance that results from compassionate authority.[2] He was doing what he could to calm the storm around and within them, but their hearts were hardened. I feel for them. I also rejoice that somewhere along the way, their hearts softened up, because between the year 30 or so (when the disciples knew Jesus) and the year 70 (when this story got written down) they figured out how to communicate the message of the Love of God that Jesus had taught them. Somewhere along the way, they learned about what J.R. Briggs has called, “the wild grace of Jesus.” “Despite [their] mighty falls, tragic events, slow leaks, and burn-out”, they figured out about the grace that keeps affirming God’s abundant, more-than-enough blessing.[3] Somewhere along the way, remembering how hard their hearts had been (the way any of us might look back at a time in our lives when we just didn’t get the grace of God, which was right in front of us all along), they figured out how to tell the story. Can you remember back on a time when grace made a very rough place smooth even though you didn’t know it at the time?
They got out of the boat at Gennesaret, which is not Bethsaida, but probably right back where they’d started from the day before. Back to square one, no more mention of a retreat or a rest, time alone with Jesus. Again rushing to meet the boat, the crowds began to bring sick people on mats to wherever Jesus was. Wherever they found him, they begged that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and, all who touched it were healed. What do you think it means to touch the fringe of his cloak? Why is this lesson edifying for an audience toward the end of the first century (when Mark was written), more than a generation removed from the time of Jesus? I ask because I wonder why it might be edifying for us. Why, for example, do some of my stoles have fringe? This one doesn’t, but the one I usually wear in Lindsey Chapel does.
Starting with something really basic, the fact that Jesus had fringe on his cloak meant that he was observing a requirement of the Torah, which commands that threads hang from the corners of a cloak as a reminder that you belong to God. The proper response to this reminder is to behave well, to be holy for your God. Remember the commandments of the LORD and do them. Joseph Telushkin, author of Jewish Literacy, calls the fringe, or the tzitziyot, an “ethical string-around-the-finger.” It’s a piece of a uniform that reminds the wearer (and anyone else who sees it) of allegiance – in this case, allegiance to the Holy One.
Here’s what I think about the metaphor of fringe. It reminds us that we don’t need to get our heads wrapped around the idea of Jesus, or wrap our arms around him and hold on tight. Just a glancing brush of the fringe, the slightest touch, can be enough to heal, to reconcile, to remember our dignity and the dignity of others, if we are paying attention to God and responding accordingly, if we are recognizing love and responding appropriately to expand the definition of family, to expand the mission field, to expand the access to the feast, to remember our own dignity and the dignity of others, to have compassion for the crowds. Hear this good news: when your heart is hardened and you don’t understand, or you fail in tests of faith or creativity or compassion, join the crowd and share in the abundance of Jesus’ creativity and compassion! Jesus is faithful.
- J.R. Briggs, Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2014), p. 62.
- Bible Workbench 22(4): July 19, 2015, quotes Herman Waetjen’s A Reordering of Power: A Socio-Political Reading of Mark’s Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).
- Briggs, p. 52.