And What Kind of King Would You Like?
Mark 6:30-45
Pastoral Prayer: Gracious Father, give us Your Word today that we may be satisfied with You Who sees our needs, enters into our suffering, and reveals Yourself to be a very different king than those we have longed for, and even other than when we sit on the thrones of our own lives. Fill us and satisfy us over and over again with the Son Whose presence is always with us by the power of Your Holy Spirit. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be Your Word for us this day. And all God’s people say, Amen.
We love to be catered to. Take, for instance, ordering dinner where options are involved. How would you like your hamburger cooked? Rare, Medium, Well Done. Or a variation on one of the standards. Your steak? If you like fish, do you want it grilled, battered, or blackened? We could go on, but these get to the point that if we have options, we want to be asked, and we want our choice to be delivered as declared.
In these cases, we are dependent on a chef we do not see to prepare our food in the way the waitstaff relayed it. What gets lost along the way? Does Medium Rare mean the same thing to the chef as it does to you?
All of this talk of food may be making you hungry. And that is what the disciples believed the people had to be that day Jesus fed more than 5000. However, there was no short-order cook that day. On the menu - five loaves of bread and two fish, along with more people than food. In other words, when the disciples panned through the crowd, they found scarcity - a lack of enough.
If there is a most familiar miracle, it must surely be Jesus feeding the 5000, not counting women and children. After all, it is the only miracle recorded by all four Gospel writers. Mark’s telling that Laura read is the longest account in the shortest Gospel.
The setting for the episode, as Mark locates it, is the death of John the Baptist.
When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.
The end.
Early hearers may have picked up on the irony or seen it as foretelling. Both Matthew and Luke relay that Jesus said no one born among women was greater than John. If that is the case, his end surely casts that assessment into question. Do great people lose their heads?
We either hear this as irony. That is, we often struggle to understand what truly makes people great. Or we hear this story as foreshadowing. Jesus has increased, and John has decreased. If John suffered the power of the Empire, what would happen to Jesus?
Mark moves from the burial of John the Baptist to the report of the disciples as they return from their mission to do what Jesus did.
The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all they had done and taught.
This is Mark’s summary. Jesus had given them authority to do what he had been doing. Here, the apostles - those sent by Jesus - reported all that they had done by Jesus’s authority.
John lay in a tomb. The apostles must have been on a high, having accomplished all that Jesus had done. You cannot write a more startling contrast.
Success goes to our heads. Yes, even for those in ministry - anyone involved in ministry. Jesus knows well they need a debrief, time to take in all that God has done. They were not having an optimization meeting. How may we do even better next time?, was not the main agenda item. Jesus knew our temptation and that always working to do more than is physically wise is an attempt to be godlike. Jesus suggests some R&R for the disciples.
You likely know the story - not only because Laura recently read it with us, but our familiarity has us already to the end. Jesus tells the disciples to have the people sit. They do. Jesus takes the little bit of food, blesses it, and gives it to them, and all are fully satisfied. There was enough to fill twelve baskets after everyone was satisfied.
What began as scarce became an illustration of abundance.
Full and satisfied.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke follow this same narrative.
John does as well. Right up to the point that those wanting to understand the meaning of the meal decide to take Jesus and make him king.
Dissatisfied with Jesus’s description of what it means to share in the kingdom, the crowds then leave him. The 5000 men, and the unnumbered women and children, the religious leaders, all of them, leave Jesus standing with the twelve.
Do you also wish to go away?
Jesus singles out the eleven who fit Peter’s confession,
Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.
Jesus leaves them with,
Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.
Not everyone had ordered up a Messiah of God that came not to fulfill all that they wanted. Jesus came with an entirely different mission as Messiah of God, as King and Kingdom.
You could say that everyone that left Jesus had some grievance with Jesus’s mission.
Every grievance we have ever had toward leaders we disapproved of is revealed to be eerily similar to the conditions under which Israel would live in response to their clamoring for a king. I have often made the point that what we have in the Old Testament is the story of Israel, an origin story. There is another way to understand the Old Testament, maybe a better way. God is making a history for himself. And as such, it shows us how it is that God comes to be known as an active and present God when God shows up, making promises.
It is there at the end of the book of Judges.
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
The observation, even the indictment, is astounding, given that the God who revealed Himself to Abraham is the One who raised Israel from Egypt and delivered her into the land promised. It is not just one story among many, though Israel has many stories. But the story of God raising Israel from Egypt is THE Story.
And not anytime passes, it seems, and the memory of the people places them back in the Garden questioning the God who walked with them and provided all they needed.
Where are you?
It is the age-old question.
By the time we reach Samuel, the people have grown tired of being organized differently from all the other nations around them. Samuel’s sons were grifters, willing to work for bribes and perverting justice. The people knew Samuel was getting old. Their trust in the future of the system led them to appeal to Samuel for a king “like the ones we see leading other nations.”
Yes, God’s people shouting for something or someone new is not a new phenomenon. And, it is also not new that those same people who put their trust in God are now asking God not to be the One to whom they look for the kind of life promised. They think that the king they are ordering will bring what they want. Samuel is devastated. Even if he knows the lack in his sons, he trusts that God will raise another just as he had been raised up when the sons of Eli before him had also been derelict and only interested in power for their sakes.
The quote is true - history repeats itself. First, as tragedy. Then as farce.
Pretending to trust God but clamoring for something or someone else is, as Ron Sider put it, treasonous.
By their daily activity, most 'Christians' regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is their Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate their allegiance to money, sex, and personal self-fulfillment.
The miracle of the feeding of the 5000 is not Jesus’ magic act at work. Instead, it requires us to re-hear the history God is making for Himself. It is the history of a people wandering in the wilderness. Hungry and tired, God gives them manna from heaven - the bread of heaven. Jesus ties the feeding of the 5000 to that moment where God is both present and active in the lives of His people.
If we make the same connection, then we hear not that the presence and activity of God is scarce, but that it is for all - it is abundant.
Robert W. Jensen wrote, “Jesus is the bread given anew - Israel’s manna now incarnate.”
Here, in this event, we see that Jesus gives himself for the world, wrapped in a moment that is both a call back and a call forward. Back to stir the memory that God has always had more to give, not less. And the call forward that the Last Future, when hunger will be no more, is brought into he present where episodes of bread for the world point to that Day when all will be filled and satisfied.
It is, as Wolfhart Pannenberg noted, “The signs of feeding are not simply wonders - they are the presence of the kingdom’s fulness.”
When the Body of Christ feeds the world with both the Gospel Good News that Jesus is the Bread of Life, and works to feed the hungry with real food, the Church is doing what Jesus did. It is not one or the other, it is both/and.
David Bently Hart wrote, “The miraculous feeding is not excess - it is the proper measure of divine hospitality.”
The Goodness and Grace of God are not scarce but plentiful.
And this is manifest in Jesus.
Chris E.W. Green exclaims, “In the hands of Jesus, scarcity becomes a feast.”
Every miracle is a pointer to the breaking in of God’s kingdom into the presence, giving us a taste of what is to come. It is not that there is not enough, it is that there is more!
Jesus told those who wanted a different sort of king,
Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have not part with me.
Jesus is the One on whom we feed and are satisfied. When we share the Lord’s Supper, we encounter the real presence of Jesus in the Bread and the Cup given for us. It is the Good News that sustains us, and that news is the Person Jesus Christ. So when we come to the table, we don’t have to wonder where Jesus is; He is here with us.
So, those of us who have trusted Jesus, experienced baptism, come to the table where we taste and see that He is good! For He is the One we need!