Mark 6: 34-44 – Tuesday after Epiphany (Audio Bible, Spoken Verse)
34 And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things.
35 And when the day was now far spent, his disciples came unto him, and said, This is a desert place, and now the time is far passed:
36 Send them away, that they may go into the country round about, and into the villages, and buy themselves bread: for they have nothing to eat.
37 He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they say unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and give them to eat?
38 He saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? go and see. And when they knew, they say, Five, and two fishes.
39 And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon the green grass.
40 And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties.
41 And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all.
42 And they did all eat, and were filled.
43 And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes.
44 And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.
Jesus has invited the disciples to come away with him to find a lonely place, where they might rest. The pressures of the apostolic ministry have been so great, there has not been time even to eat. Jesus and the apostles have gone away from the crowds in a boat, but the people have seen them leave and have run ahead to find them, arriving at the place before Jesus does. Jesus, then, changes his plans. The rest period is not to be. Jesus feels compassion for the spiritual needs of the people. They need the teaching Jesus is able to give to them. They are as sheep without a shepherd. This need is paramount.
Immediately prior to these verses, the Gospel of Mark has recorded the martyrdom of John the Baptist, recounting the banquet of death, during which Herodias’ daughter pleases Herod and demands the head of John the Baptist as her reward, to which demand Herod succumbs.
We see, then, the great contrast between the Gospel episodes. Where Herod’s was a banquet of death, Jesus’ teaching of the multitude who have followed him out into the wilderness becomes a banquet of life.
The crowds have spent the day listening to Jesus, and now the day is spent; the disciples recognize and tell Jesus of the hunger of the people. The disciples do not, though, understand what Jesus means when he tells them to feed the crowds. They respond in amazement: Are they to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread? A denarius was a day’s wage for an artisan – this would be a significant sum of money.
Where the disciples have looked outside of the crowds for a solution to the hunger of the crowds, Jesus directs them not to look elsewhere but rather to look within. Jesus says to his disciples: How many loaves do you have? Go and see.
The disciples do so and return to Jesus with a seemingly hopeless answer: in all the crowds, there are five loaves, and two fishes. This is what is seemingly on offer among so many people – 5000 men. It doesn’t matter if others are hiding their food, and this is only the offering of one good person when that person is asked if he has any food to share. Perhaps it was so. Either way, now the miracle happens.
Jesus accepts this little offering, offered in what must have been such a loving and selfless manner, and Jesus asks the people present to perform a symbolic action: And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon the green grass. Jesus tells the apostles to make all of those present sit down, to adopt an attitude of peace, of passivity. We may remind ourselves that Jesus is preaching in a sectarian environment, and this sitting down is akin to a laying down of arms, and beyond this of differences and possible grievances.
At the supper of the Lord, we resolve our differences and we admit in a lowly way that we are all equal before God. We all equally crave God’s help – grace. We acknowledge our own shortcomings, known as sins, and we embrace our neighbours with all commonality and friendliness.
Mark’s Gospel account of Jesus’ words and actions tells of Jesus celebrating what would later become the Eucharist, and in similar words: he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves. The Last Supper and the Eucharist to come are anticipated, and the multitudes are fed abundantly. Of the five loaves and two fishes, twelve baskets of scraps remain to be gathered, symbolic of the people of Israel, and also of the preciousness of everything we do and of all that we offer to God and as we live with Jesus.
Moses told the people to gather just as much as they needed each day of the manna in the wilderness, and not to save anything for the next day, save prior to the Sabbath, else it would become corrupt and breed worms. Elijah gave the widow just enough to meet her needs. Jesus gives superabundantly.
For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth. (Isaiah 62:1)
God, our Father,
when your Only-begotten Son revealed himself in flesh and blood,
we came to know him as our fellow man.
May he transform us inwardly until we bear his likeness,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
Jesus has come to break Satan’s hold – on the people of Jesus’ time and for all time. Accused by some of being a servant to Beelzebub, Jesus exposes the error and absurdity of what his accusers are saying. If Satan casts out Satan, then Satan is divided against himself and his house falls – he self-destructs [ … ]
‘The Agony’, part of Herbert’s collection ‘The Temple’, Herbert explores theological dimensions of sin, suffering, and redemption. This poem, through its triadic structure, conveys complex spiritual truths through poetic form [ … ]
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]