Green Grass
Mark 6:30-52

July 30, 2006


A few years back one of my aunts sent me a pretty good summary of our family tree. The earliest ancestor was a man born in Georgia in the year 1800. His name was Uriah Kitchen. Certain names seem to have been recycled through the generations, as it is with many families. Uriah has not returned and I am not surprised. For while Uriah the Hittite was a most honourable man and professional, his fate has never been an enviable one, and I don’t know why one would saddle a child with this name. Charles Dickens’ character/villain Uriah Heep in David Copperfield did not up the stock of this name. I think we will leave the tale of Uriah behind for another day - and David and Bathsheba. Instead, we’ll relive, if not reenact, the feeding of the five thousand on that deserted green grass.

The Lectionary Gospel reading is actually listed as John 6:1-21 or John’s version of the feeding of the multitudes. This, however, is the year the Gospel readings march through Mark, so I figured we need to hear Mark’s rendition. This is one of the few stories that finds its way into all four Gospels. Besides, in John, there is no green grass for the people being taught and then fed by Jesus to sit down upon. Just had to tell you this, because you never know where the Lectionary Police may be lurking!

All of this started after the apostles reported back in to Jesus following their first practicums. They had been out in the field, teaching and healing, and they were excited and exhausted by their efforts. Jesus suggested a little sabbatical, getting away to a deserted place in order to regenerate themselves. The best way to do that was by boat and across the Sea of Galilee they rowed to just such a deserted place. The Sea of Galilee was a large lake, but not that large, seven miles long and about 14 miles wide. On a clear day you could watch a boat go for quite some distance and if you knew the country well enough you’d have a good idea of their destination. Let’s face it, knowing the geography of that region was their business. It may have been deserted, empty, without people, but that was in the past tense by the time Jesus and his company landed. What kind of emotions would have welled up in Jesus and his tired bunch once they got out of the boat? Had to be some annoyance, some resignation, and perhaps some sense of elation that here were people who came with ears to hear.

And so they heard. Yet none of the accounts of this particular session in a lonely deserted place ever records even a word of what Jesus said. Not one of the five thousand or more people remembers his teaching; they remember the food. Not much has changed. I can bet you that if we were to hold a potluck in the Lower Assembly Hall after worship today, some of you would recall several years from now who had the best salad and baked beans. By the time you get to dessert, the idea of the sermon will have vanished like sweet nothings.

This was an unexpected event, a serendipity neither foreseen nor planned. It was getting late and dark, so the apostles became practical: “Send them away to get their own food.” Jesus seemed to have something up his sleeve, “You feed them!” 5000 men - add on the women and children - is not a small crowd. “Are we to go buy 200 denarii worth of bread to feed all of them?” the apostles answered back edgily. 200 denarii meant 200 days of labour - a sizeable sum I doubt they had in their pockets - and for 5000+ that probably wasn’t sufficient. Never heard people bitterly sarcastic with Jesus before.

Check how much bread you have, Jesus asked, and they reported back, five loaves and two fish. Is that all they brought with them on their little get-away sabbatical? How many apostles accompanied Jesus is not known, but still they were not going to feast on that inventory. Apparently, no administrative assistants were making sure the Jesus bunch was properly and efficiently supplied. A real boondoggle.

Let’s get back to the food. The in-thing today is to be interested in spirituality, but the Bible doesn’t talk about it directly. Time and again the talk is about food. Not diets, but eating the real thing and probably not losing weight. Apples or figs in Eden, red porridge for Esau, bread and wine in the Upper Room - spirituality is most easily accomplished with a plate around a table.

I know there are some true believers here, but one of the ironies of the famed Atkins diet is that it has declared war on bread. It’s funny that billions thousands of centuries survived and flourished with bread as the staff of life is somehow ignored. The word “companion” is from Latin meaning “with bread.” Our closest friends are those with whom we eat and share bread, not “bread” as a catchall for food, but that commodity in all its shapes and textures which we usually describe in “loaves.” They only had five, and so Jesus began.

Actually, Jesus began with organization of this sprawling crowd. He had them all sit down “by companies” (RSV) upon the green grass. They were thus organized as fellow eaters, in groups of 50 or 100. Green grass sounds like a logical place to sit down on a picnic, but the Bible is not particularly big on noticing colours, and no other evangelist mentions the colour. Except for the days of drought, grass usually comes in green shades.

Go back to that annoying, frustrating moment when the apostles and Jesus pulled up at their previously deserted location to find that mob of listeners who had followed their getaway across the lake. Jesus looked at them, and “had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.... He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” (Psalm 23:1-2, 5a)

This is not just any meal. Mark makes clear that Jesus is ushering his people to sit around the table of the kingdom. He took the bread and fish, blessed it, broke it into pieces and gave the pieces to the disciples to set before the people. Around the table in the Upper Room, at the inn in Emmaus, this is Jesus’ way of celebrating a meal, celebrating what we call here “communion.” It is an extraordinary meal in which our eating together unites us like we have not been united before. Forget for the moment all the talk about spirituality methods - this is the way human beings find themselves surrounded by God most easily, by eating together. Being surrounded by God and sharing the manna from heaven, eating together in such an atmosphere inevitably changes the way you and I relate to one another.

The pieces were distributed and I can imagine the laughter belling throughout the green grass. Something’s happening here and what is ain’t exactly clear, but it was incredibly good. Don’t try to figure it out; no one ever has, and no one ever will. That’s because it is going to happen again, or already has in your experience. Everyone ate, and everyone was satisfied - enough was enough. Twelve baskets of broken leftover pieces of bread and fish were gathered together and no calculus can describe how that happened. Where did they get all the baskets?

Contemporary study of the Bible has spent an inordinate amount of effort trying to figure out the scientific explanation for this gigantic banquet on green grass, and we have been barking up the very wrong tree. We don’t need to have this explained away so that it makes our kind of sense; we are being called to be on the alert for those occasions when the science doesn’t fit, the mathematics don’t calculate, the psychology of human beings doesn’t mix the usual way, but clearly God is present and when we are in God’s presence we are somehow saints. Whatever Jesus was teaching that day, for those few moments of eating all the ideas Jesus tried to teach us were being practiced without having to say a word.

I am definitely not talking about miracles, for miracles get in the way of seeing God. Either you want to blindly believe that Jesus contradicted natural law as the whole point of the story; or you spend all of your time trying to rationalize the scientific basis of the event. In both cases, you are distracted from the real point. You don’t need miracles because when God is present, for God makes you into somebody different, somebody more gracious, somebody saturated in love. Funny thing, how it seems to happen most noticeably when you are companions, bread in hand, with your neighbour.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan