Together, the Impossible Is Possible: Mark 6:32-44
Third Sunday in Lent
Sanctified Art series "Tell Me Something Good"
32 They departed in a
boat by themselves for a deserted place.
33 Many people saw them
leaving and recognized them, so they ran ahead from all the cities and arrived
before them. 34 When Jesus arrived and saw a large
crowd, he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a
shepherd. Then he began to teach them many things.
35 Late in the day, his
disciples came to him and said, “This is an isolated place, and it’s already
late in the day. 36 Send them away so that they can
go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy something to eat for
themselves.”
37 He replied, “You
give them something to eat.”
But they said to him, “Should we go off and buy bread
worth almost eight months’ pay and give it to them to eat?”
38 He said to
them, “How much bread do you have? Take a look.”
After checking, they said, “Five loaves of bread and
two fish.”
39 He directed the disciples to seat all the people in groups as though they were having a banquet on the green grass. 40 They sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. 41 He took the five loaves and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed them, broke the loaves into pieces, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. 42 Everyone ate until they were full. 43 They filled twelve baskets with the leftover pieces of bread and fish. 44 About five thousand had eaten. (CEB)
Secondary text: Ephesians 3:20–21
20 Glory to God, who is
able to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine by his power at work
within us; 21 glory to him in the church and in
Christ Jesus for all generations, forever and always. Amen. (CEB)
I
am not a cook. I do not want more
cookbooks or well-meaning reassurances that if I tried, I would get better at
it. I am not a bad cook but a
disinterested one. I find cooking
tedious and time-consuming.
Because
I am not a cook, and for at least four other reasons, I spend Thanksgiving with
the J* family. This began when I
was in graduate school, when my distaste for cooking was even more ferocious
than it is now and Nan adopted me as the slightly pathetic creature I was. It has continued such that, come the
beginning of November, I no longer get an “are you coming” text but a “when
will you get here” one. Because they
love me, Nan requests that I bring things like bread from Zingerman’s, so that
I do not have to cook. I am delighted by
this.
I
am also amazed, every year, at the precision.
J* Thanksgiving can involve easily 25 people or more flowing in and
out of the meal and Nan and Dan have precise calibrations down to a
science. The kitchen floor is cleaned at
a specific time, the brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes are prepared largely
the day before, the turkey goes into the oven at a time honed by years of
experience, and the appetizer table is a careful pattern of cheese, pickles,
drinks, and crackers so as to maximize the ability to eat too much before we
eat too much. It is a masterpiece of planning,
and I am quite glad to move chairs rather than cook because feeding a hockey
team + is something that should be a resume skill.
So
it boggles my mind to consider today’s miraculous setting of feeding 5,000;
probably more, since women and children often weren’t counted. I think the miracle is less that the loaves
and fish stretched and more that 13 30-somethings organized that many people
for all to be able to eat.
It
matters to put this meal into context, though—it always matters to put
Scripture into context, since Scripture will say anything you please if you
dice it up small enough. We find
ourselves about a third of the way through the gospel of Mark—Mark, the
chronologically first gospel, who has a penchant for fast, brief, and to the
point. Mark, who uses “immediately” or
“suddenly” more than 40 times in his 16 chapters.[1] Mark, who always wants us to know that Jesus
was up to something.
Today,
Mark begins, “They departed in a boat by themselves for a deserted place.”
Two
things happened to make Jesus and the disciples want to take a prolonged
vacation cruise: one, the disciples had just gone on their first evangelical
tour to spread the word and to heal the people, and two, John the Baptist was
just beheaded by Herod. Author Debie
Thomas describes it as “the return of the disciples from their first ministry
tour—their inauguration into apostleship.
Exhilarated and exhausted, they have stories to tell Jesus—thrilling
stories… [and] stories of failure and rejection.
“…Jesus
senses that the disciples need a break.
They're tired, overstimulated, underfed, and in significant need of
solitude.
“Jesus,
meanwhile, is not in top form himself.
He has just lost John the Baptist, his beloved cousin and prophet, the
one who baptized him and spent a lifetime in the wilderness preparing his way. Worse, Jesus has lost him to murder, a
terrifying reminder that God's beloved are not immune to violent, senseless
deaths. Maybe Jesus' own end feels
closer.”[2]
They need
rest, this weary and heartsore troupe of friends, so off they go—and their
plans are foiled. People recognized
them, followed them—we might, perhaps, say stalked them, a bit—and were
awaiting them when they arrived at this no-longer-deserted-place. Jesus has now become a Kpop idol.
Whenever I
read this passage, I get stuck here. I’m
an introvert, and the idea that people want even more out of Jesus when He’s
already giving so much and is exhausted on at least three different levels
makes me furious on his behalf. Don’t
these people have boundaries? Don’t they
recognize that He’s a person? Leave Him
alone! He needs a nap! For several days!
The
gospels, in their infinite patience of being written texts, have zero qualms
reminding me how much I am not Jesus. I
don’t know if you encounter this problem as well, church, but any time I read
more than about four verses of the gospels, I find myself humbled by how not
Jesus I am. I am disgruntled by the
crowds; Jesus “had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a
shepherd.”
Be a
language nerd with me for a moment.
“Compassion,” here, is a translation of the Greek ἐσπλαγχνίσθη (es-planch
[k] -nis-the [thuh])—yeah, it’s not a cute word. It’s not meant to be; somewhat more
literally, it means to feel from the bowels, which is where ancient Greece
considered love and pity to live.[3] You didn’t feel for someone out of the
goodness of your heart but out of the intensity of your guts.[4] The English word we have, compassion,
is itself an Anglicization of the Latin compassio, literally “I suffer
with.”
Jesus, in
mourning and still digesting all the stories of His followers and friends,
overwhelmed and tired and really hoping for a day off, looks at the crowd of desperate,
broken people, and feels a visceral sense of connection, a body-borne recognition
that ignoring them would hurt everyone involved.
So He
teaches them, a marathon session that takes them to late in the day where
everyone is hungry and there isn’t even a McDonald’s within convenient
distance. It’s the disciples who first
interject, the disciples who probably are also pretty hungry and tired and
didn’t get their day off, and aware that a tired and hungry crowd of thousands
can get really ugly really fast. They’re
practical about it—and as much love as I have for Pastor Jess, I’m going to
have to refute some of her sermon from last week. Here, the disciples are very much concerned
with efficiency and detail; “Send them away,” they say to Jesus, “so that [the
crowd] can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy something to
eat for themselves.”
And Jesus
replies, “You give them something to eat.”
I think
again of how many moving pieces and how much cooking are involved in the
Janecke Thanksgiving for maybe 30 people; I think of the disciples looking at a
group of people nearly one and a half times the size of Western Michigan’s
entire graduate student population;[5] I
think of the Ancient Near Eastern culture of hospitality that grounds in the
idea from birth that sending a person away hungry from one’s dwelling or
temporary table was an insult in the highest degree.
I am so
very sympathetic to how much the disciples freak out.
“Should we
go off and buy bread worth almost eight months’ pay and give it to them to
eat?” they ask incredulously. None of
them have eight months’ pay to spare; most of them gave up their jobs to travel
with Jesus. All of them just got back
from their evangelical tours in which Jesus had explicitly told them not to
bring any money at all. There is no
bread to be had, Jesus; there is no money to be had, Jesus; have You gotten too
tired to think straight, Jesus? This is
why You need a vacation, Jesus!
Jesus “said
to them, ‘How much bread do you have? Take a look.’
“After
checking, they said, ‘Five loaves of bread and two fish.’
“…[Jesus] took
the five loaves and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed them, broke the
loaves into pieces, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people. He
also divided the two fish among them all. Everyone ate until they were full.”
Everyone
ate until they were full. Not
only that, but “[t]hey filled twelve baskets with the leftover pieces of bread
and fish.” There were leftovers! Leftovers, in a crowd of at least 5,000! Leftovers, from five loaves of bread and two
fish!
I’ve come
across the notion before that perhaps it wasn’t just five loaves and two fish;
perhaps there were people who had known they were going to a deserted place and
packed lunch and, seeing Jesus’ example, felt a desire to share their own
food. Perhaps it was 3,000 separate
picnics becoming a full banquet, with five loaves and two fish and fourteen
dates and eight jars of olives and twenty crocks of chickpea soup and seven
containers of lentil stew and thirty handfuls of figs and maybe, if one of the
rich men who were curious about this Jesus guy was hanging out at the edge of
the crowd, even some smoked lamb.
The miracle
then becomes less about making loaves and fish stretch and more about making
people talk to each other and share. I
know we all learn to share in kindergarten but I don’t need to look further
than the morning news to know that not everybody let that lesson sink into
their bones. The miracle becomes compassion,
feeling from the guts that they’re all out in this deserted place together,
that they’re all hungry, that pooling resources will help more than hoarding
them. The miracle becomes that together,
the impossible becomes possible because we never sit to the banquet alone.
This is how
Thanksgiving works: I bring bread (so I don’t have to cook), and Dan cleans the
floor and Gail brings a dish and whoever’s around helps cut vegetables and Q
brings drinks and Melissa arranges the cheeses (and eats a lot of them, let’s
be honest with ourselves) and Rob brings in the dishes from the Midwestern
freezer and Adam sets the table and someone and someone and someone. “You feed them” does not mean “hey,
individual, fix this problem” but “hey, group of people who is learning what
the Kingdom of God means, open the doors even wider.” It’s “many hands make light work” but without
being trite, because they really do and we really can’t solve anything at all
on our own.
Two days
ago, multiple tornadoes ripped through south central Michigan, killing four and
injuring dozens more. Houses and
businesses were leveled and it will take several days before the scope is fully
measured.[6] Coldwater UMC, some twenty minutes from the
badly-hit Union City, has opened its doors to offer a place to charge phones
and computers, access WiFi, and have safe space to breathe and make plans for
whatever is next.[7]
When ICE’s
cruelty escalated to thuggish lawlessness, the restaurant in Ann Arbor called
Detroit Street Filling Station wrote up a packet on what people can do and
partnered with Buenos Vecinos to donate part of every Monday’s business
proceeds; this was in addition to its work started last year as a hub for food
donation for those who had lost access to food stamps under the new laws. One of the subject lines of their emails was,
“Eat vegan food. Fight fascism.”
When Jesus
looked at the crowd, He had compassion; he had a gut-wrenching awareness that even
when He was tired, when He was grieving, He could not turn away from them. Please do not hear that you have to work
yourself into the ground and never take time away; boundaries, Church,
boundaries matter. But please also hear
that the miracle wasn’t really about how many people or fish there were. The miracle was Jesus saying this is the
Kingdom of God: that we gather together
and care for each other, have compassion for each other; that all who hunger
are fed, that there is enough when we share what we’ve been given, that
scarcity and fear have no place here.
This is the good news: that we have collectively what is needed, that
Jesus invites us to be more together than we can ever be separately, that eight
months’ pay is a paltry sum against the priceless connection we build. This is the good news: that many hands do, in
fact, make light work, that the grace of the Kingdom will never run out, that
we are not asked to feed the multitudes alone.
This is the good news: that Jesus teaches compassion by example, that we
are invited to be in relationship with skin in the game, that God is “able to
do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine by his power at work within us”.
So, church,
how are you feeding others? How are you
letting yourself be fed? Do you trust
that there will be leftovers at God’s table?
I call the dark meat; after all, I’d hate to have to cook.
May we
trust in our good Shepherd; may we grow in our compassion; may we hear Jesus’
invitation to abundant faith, now and always.
Amen.
[1]
Suddenly! |
Theology of Work; “εὐθὺς” (euthýs); Why
does Mark frequently use "immediately"?
[2]
Journey
with Jesus - Come Away with Me July 2015
[5]
Western
Michigan University Student Population and Demographics; 3,717 grad
students in the 24–25 year
[6][6] https://www.mlive.com/weather/2026/03/deadliest-tornado-day-in-michigan-in-46-years-preliminary-data-shows.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawQZPP5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE4c2JZZU45dHF0ZVFnUFRQc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHoX-Giqzs0gN-QLapmva42U80e19JtKEi1Ex1SkCJXwlkgPuhdIEpyf7uJ6C_aem_6OwKSkiOKI7INfOAdE9i6A
[7]
Post by Anthony Garn 3/7/26, https://www.facebook.com/anthony.garn/posts/pfbid02fEFqDhGr7iaV4gH1pEZGqGyvX6F7fjTEyXMWnwUhW1n3CFto9N7VD7DnZX1jdSc3l
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