Mark 6:34-44
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[a] 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)
Amy Gopp, the director of the Disciples’ crisis aid arm, the Week of Compassion, tells the story of when she was traveling through the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and stopped one Sunday morning at a local parish to act as a guest preacher. After her sermon, this congregation held its offering, and they did none of the formal things that we do, of solemnly passing the plate around, no, they came forward with their offerings, and they danced—they danced as they brought forward the first fruits of what very few possessions they had—they had brought out of a patch of dirt a cornucopia. But that was not enough, as the music started all over again, and the congregants danced forward again with still more offerings to lay on Amy’s lap—fishes and plantains and fruits and crops, and she was absolutely stunned that a people so poor would ever want to give anything to someone so comparatively wealthy. As for the why, I can only venture a guess—the people she was ministering to may never have learned math as we know it, with algebra and calculus, but they knew what I have come to think of as Christian math.
Back in school in the 1990s, my hand would always shoot up in class with the answer. But fast forward a few years, put that young confident boy in an algebra, or geometry, or calculus class, send him up to the board, and it is a fine recipe for embarrassment, hurt, and humiliation. I usually crack that I went to seminary due to my antipathy to science, but really, clerics are just as apt to be inept at math, a horrible trait, I am quickly learning, during church budget season. The pressure of getting it right when it comes to math did not stop with the high school chalkboard, it continues in my life to this day, even though they do not teach you math in seminary. Christian math is seldom accurate math.
But the pressure of getting it right is not limited to those black-and-white subjects like math and science where there is only one answer. No longer in the church today is it enough to be fair, or just, or equal, much less loved, we must now be right, and rightful, and righteous. And what was right in the time of the Bible? What was it to be right? It was to believe that food for the people was supplied by the gods through the Roman emperor…that was what the empire taught us in that day. If you think that is patently ridiculous, remember that the entire country of North Korea is taught essentially the same thing today by Kim Jong Il’s heirs. Wherever you received your food, that source was likely to be treated with respect bordering upon reverence.
What is overlooked in the story of the feeding of the 5,000 is that the story immediately before it is the beheading of John the Baptist. Mark doesn’t say it explicitly, but implicitly--that these are sheep who no longer have a shepherd. imagine that the hordes of people coming to Jesus had once been followers of John the Baptist…and we don’t really know how many of them there really were—the number 5,000 was the number of soldiers in a Roman Legion, which we can take to simply mean that there was a horde of people, a legion in the modern sense of the word. Many are the children of God who have been thrown into the wilderness of despair and grief at the loss of their religious leader, and many are the children of God who have now turned to one child in particular—God’s Son—to lead them anew.
But Jesus’s first task in this leadership of a new flock is not to lead in the sense we would think of it—it is to feed, and to feed abundantly. Just as out of the patch of dirt that was Nazareth, Christ built for us a new Jerusalem, so too out of five loaves and two fishes did He build for us a new meal of all the food that we could ever need. In the face of everything else that the Roman education system and the propaganda of the emperor told us to be true and correct and right, Jesus is asking us, his disciples to have only faith in Him, something that the disciples, despite being deep into the journey of Jesus’s ministry, are not yet prepared to do—they are prepared to dismiss the crowds to find food for themselves, surely, as any sensible, responsible person would do, any person who was well aware of the mathematics and logistics of the situation when it came to feeding a legion of men, never mind the women and children whom Mark forgets about, but whom were presumably fed as well—Jesus feeds the forgotten.
Jesus does what we now know to be right, but what any respectable person back then would say was the impractical course of action. And if all we are concerned with is the practical course of action, then we need to get out of the being-Christian business. Being Christian means performing acts of mercy and compassion, but even before those acts can happen, we must have a faith in ourselves that those actions we might take, those burdens we might bear, and those weights that we assume upon our weary shoulders might actually make a lick of difference in this fragile and broken world! It was Soren Kierkegaard who spoke so many years ago of taking a leap of faith, jumping from the known into the unknown in the hopes of coming closer to God, but what I want to know is how he managed a leap when the weight on my shoulders sometimes feels so heavy that I can barely manage to hop; never mind a jump or a leap, on many days I feel like I could settle for walking just so that I wouldn’t be reduced to having to crawl, because I may not have
the energy to leap today, but please God, leave me my dignity, leave me my pride.
I know what you may be thinking…sure, it is noble for people who have so little to give, but isn’t it also discomforting to imagine people who have so little giving to people who have so much? Yes…yes it is. And once you know where to look for it, the appeal to give until it hurts is all over the Bible. The way the Disciples preacher Granville Walker translated Paul’s famous 1st Corinthians 13 passage was not, “Love is patient,” but rather, “Love suffers long.” Today’s Scripture ends at verse 44, but if we were to continue reading, we would see a Jesus fleeing the crowds so that he could be by himself once more. The feeding of the legion of people was indeed a miracle. We know this because it forced Jesus to give until it hurt, and do you think the Roman Emperor would’ve done the same for the children of God, or would Caesar have been like the disciples, ready to dismiss the hungry masses out of hand? That is why stories of the poor giving are so moving to us, because wronged as they are by the empire, by the Caesar who to their faces claims to bring them food and behind their backs has created the system that oppresses them, they still have the energy to dance towards God in a leap of faith. All of this, it lies at what I have to think was and is the heart of the civil rights movement. I was not alive to see the boycotts, the marches, the demonstrations, but I also know that without them, there would indeed be a lot less faith in the world for any one of us to leap towards, because, quite simply, what empowers a brother or sister empowers us as well—that is why Martin Luther King dared to preach that he had a dream—it was a dream he demanded for everyone.
And believe it or not, Christian math can still be the right, rightful, as well as righteous form of math today, for when right thought is of less concern than right action, all of the sudden Christian math becomes far more able to guide you to the best answer, because even before we decide to act, to give of ourselves until it hurts, we must decide if it is worth it to even do so. By practical math, the answer may well be no. But by Christian math, by the math that created thousands of meals out of five loaves and two fishes and helped recognize civil rights for millions of our brothers and sisters, the answer is a no-brainer. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
January 15, 2012
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