1/26/2014

HEARD AT CHURCH

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I attended church today after a six week hiatus. 

Life sends those special little pop ups that cannot be disabled by checking a box.  They get in the way.  They distract.  Sometimes they annoy.  Other times they cannot be helped.

It’s funny how I did not miss going to church when I exiled myself for over two decades.  Now that I’ve found a church I really like, I do not want to miss a service.

I told everyone I could how much I missed everybody.  I told someone that missing church was like not taking a bath for a week.

So what did I hear? 

In Sunday school we discussed Mark’s the feeding of the five thousand.  It’s interesting to listen to others discuss about how such and such might have happened in the Bible.

Did Jesus personally break bread and feed every man there that day?  Five thousand is a lot of men.  Mark mentions only men.  Luke adds women and children. 

Mark says Jesus told his disciples to feed them.  Jesus blessed the bread and broke it.  He gave it to the disciples to pass out to the crowd.

They passed out the bread.  Jesus passed out the fish.  What do we make of that?

In any event, there’s a lot of bread breaking, fish cutting, and sharing going on.  Even if Jesus and his followers proceeded like churches do during the Lord’s Supper, that is quietly and expeditiously, it would take a long time to feed everyone.  Right?

Our regular teacher had a cold today.  She wondered aloud and with a raspy voice how long it would have taken Jesus to feed that many men. 

Remember that Mark only mentions the men.  Luke says there were women and children present.  Good grief!

The thing I love about academic Biblical studies, as opposed to dogmatic Biblical studies, is that modern scholars have better explanations for what happens in the Bible.

If we make this story a biographical event, it seems silly.  If we understand it as a parable about Jesus, then it has a lot to say to us.

Well, even if you think it is biographical, it still has a lot to say, but you waste time trying to figure out how something impossible happened.

Consider the following:  Mark writes in the present tense.  He writes of a Jesus who is now.  He is writing to us and all the Christians who follow us for the next one thousand years.

He writes parables about a Jesus who is with us right now.  That is a bit more profound, don’t you think?  A parable speaks to more than the just the intellect.

I think it is interesting that the story begins with five loaves and two fishes, but ends up with twelve baskets of both.  Since Jesus is Jewish, and the writer is Jewish, and the earliest Christians were Jewish is it possible that the writer is telling us that Jesus has given nourishment sufficient for all Israel?

Are the numbers “five” and “two” important in the Hebrew Bible anywhere?  How about the Christian Bible?  I need to look that up.

Now, I’m no numerologist, but other writers certainly can be.  Surely, it is not farfetched to think that Mark deliberately chose the number twelve because of what it meant to his readers.

Let me share a technical term from academic Biblical scholarship.   It is the term kerygma which means “message.”

 We can talk until we are rigidly crossed up about whether Jesus really did this or how Jesus did that, but at some point we must address the meaning of the text.  That is what good preaching and teaching are all about.

What is this anonymous gospel writer we call Mark saying about Jesus now in this passage?

He’s saying, “Feed hungry people.” 

Don’t make excuses why it can’t be done.  Don’t make it about money.  Don’t ask if those who are hungry deserve to be fed.  Just feed them.

And do it together, as a group of followers in a community that is bringing about a kingdom of justice, love, and peace.

Blessings…