THIS Gospel is just like the bread encasing a sandwich filling: a dull outer containing tasty stuff inside. But, on this instance, the tasty stuff has been taken out. The omitted section, Mark 6.35-52, accommodates two iconic spectacles: the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus’s walking on water. The lectionary doesn’t come back to them on one other Sunday in Mark’s Year B. It omits them altogether. Where are the ingredients “sweet to my taste” (Song of Songs 2.3), which may turn this supermarket sliced-white Gospel right into a signature sourdough loaf?
If we would like to seek out out what happens in between the 2 slices (vv.30-34 and 53-56), we’ve got to attend greater than two years, until the lectionary supplies Matthew’s version of those two miracles (14.13-33), spread across two Sundays in Year A (Propers 13 and 14).
I can see the purpose of not asking people to listen to essentially the identical stories two years in a row, in versions that differ only barely. But it does leave a hole on this Gospel. Its opening verses are leading as much as something big, which we then hear nothing about. What is more, its closing verses cry out to be read with the 2 miracles in mind: one for the group (the feeding), the opposite a present to the disciples only (walking on water). But the hearer in church is left in the dead of night about each.
This just isn’t to say that the lectionary must have done something different. Lectionaries are a present of the Church to Christian worshippers, enabling us to experience the Word together as “living and lively” (Hebrews 4.12), by making connections and crossing boundaries of language, time, and space inside scripture. But they do cut across a more intuitive, start-to-finish, approach to reading. Every time we read a passage, a chapter, even a sentence, by itself, we risk stripping it of context and limiting its message. This just isn’t unsuitable: it’s a practical necessity, and allows the text to work on us in other ways than the merely informative. But it sometimes comes at a price when it comes to how we grasp the events that we hear and skim of.
When relating Jesus’s ministry, the Gospels occasionally give us details of geography, to assist to anchor our imaginations in a landscape. Here, we glimpse some local towns, before Jesus suddenly disembarks from a ship at Gennesaret. Yet we’ve got not been told that he got into one, never mind why. The events of 6.30-56 unfold over several days, but that fact, too, has been obscured by Gospel filleting.
What it was about these nine verses of Mark which made them appear like a wise option for a stand-alone Gospel this Sunday? As with the Gospel for Trinity 7, the opening verse of the reading is unnecessary unless we were in church the previous week and may remember what happened then (the sending out of the Twelve).
We need to regulate our expectation to a homelier level than the spectacular missing miracles, and to be content with practical, workaday wisdom as an alternative of supernatural mystery. On that level, this Gospel really delivers. The first two verses balance striving for the Kingdom with the remainder and solitude needed by the apostles. Anyone who’s lively in faith can adopt this model by following their example.
We are also reminded that those that would construct their life on caring for others must first take care of themselves — like a parent on a plane being told, counter-intuitively, to placed on their very own oxygen mask before helping their child to do likewise. If the disciples are to operate well as ministers, they have to eat and rest, in an effort to have strength to evangelise, and heal, and solid out evil spirits. So should we.
The crowds’ eagerness borders on desperation. From his perspective of unimaginable power, Jesus might need scorned their neediness. But, as an alternative, he’s moved with compassion within the core of his being. He sees their hunger for true leadership, their thirst for righteousness.
The crowds are on the fitting track; for they follow him not only in hope of meeting their very own needs, but in addition to bring their suffering family members to his attention. They are discovering for themselves that the ability of his touch does for bodily illness what the words of his mouth do for lost and bewildered humanity.
