"The Arc of Scripture" (Mark 7:1-8)

“Everything you need, you already have.”

Remember that? That was my sermon message July 12. In that sermon I mentioned how there were two miraculous feeding stories in Mark’s gospel, times when Jesus found himself out in the wilderness with a large, hungry group of people and not nearly enough food to feed them all.

I talked about how Jesus told his disciples to have the crowd sit down on the grass as though they were going to have a banquet – to actually recline, because that is the proper posture for a formal banquet in Jesus’s time – even though there was no banquet table, no banquet hall, no servants to prepare and serve a meal, and no food.

The disciples thought he was crazy. Yet Jesus took one of the few loaves of bread they did have; he lifted it up to the sky and he blessed it: “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu… praise to you, the Lord our God, who brings forth bread from the earth…”

You remember it now, don’t you, because that’s about the only phrase in Hebrew I feel comfortable attempting in public.

And after he took the bread, blessed it and broke it, he had the disciples distribute it to the people, along with two fish – just two.

And somehow, they did not run out of food.

I mentioned then that there are actually two miraculous feeding stories in Mark’s gospel. I didn’t have time then to explain why this story appears twice in one gospel, just a few chapters apart.

So that’s what I’m going to do today.

A clue as to why there are two feeding stories can be found in today’s scripture story. You’ve heard it, how the Pharisees washed their hands but the disciples did not. What do you think it’s about?

A. Hygiene (The Pharisees are worried about germs; the disciples aren’t. Clearly the disciples are right, so… God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt!) … No, that’s not it. It’s not about hygiene. The washing was a ritual that identified them as Jews. It has as much to do with hygiene as the holy water Catholics use.

B. Tradition (traditions are stupid; get rid of them!) … No. Jesus actually had great respect for the ancient traditions.

C. Don’t know, but the Jews & Pharisees are bad, Jesus & disciples are good, and that’s all that matters. This is not far from how stories like this were taught to me in Sunday school, btw. But again, this is not what this story – or any other story in scripture – is about.

Well, let’s find out what this scene is really about.

The entire gospel of Mark reads like a story. Since this episode comes in the middle of the story, there is obviously something that comes before it, and something that comes after it.

Usually, when we read the Bible, we read it in bits and pieces, just a few verses at a time. According to a book I have by David Rhoads and Donald Michie, that’s like hearing quotations from Shakespearean plays without ever having read or seen one of those plays in its entirety. If you take just a few lines of Shakespeare out of context – well, come on, Shakespeare is hard enough to understand as it is, sometimes!

So here we have this strange story about the Pharisees who wash their hands and the disciples who don’t wash their hands. It’s in chapter seven. Let’s see what comes before, in chapter six; and after, in chapter eight.

In chapter six, right before this episode, we have the first miraculous feeding, the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus and his disciples had been teaching and healing people among the villages of Galilee, not far from Nazareth and the hometowns of the disciples, which means that they were among people like themselves. They drew huge crowds, even when they went out to the wilderness trying to get a break… and there, the first miraculous feeding took place.

The scene where the Pharisees accuse Jesus of breaking with tradition by not washing comes next, in chapter seven.

Then Jesus and the disciples venture out, going further away from their homelands. They go to places like Tyre and Sidon to the west, and the cities of the Decapolis to the east, and to Caesarea-Philippi to the north. They encounter Gentiles and Syrophoenicians and other non-Jews, and heal them.

And again, huge crowds follow them.

And then, in chapter eight – way out in a remote, wilderness location – those crowds get hungry.

And the question arises: are the blessings of God that were evident when Jesus fed the 5,000 also available to these foreigners, these people from other lands, who practice a strange, deviant form of Judaism (or no Judaism at all)? Would they, too, receive bread?

After all, these people aren’t among God’s chosen ones. They don’t follow the Jewish customs. They don’t wash their hands before eating.

Again, there is nothing wrong with the rituals. Jesus would never say that it is wrong to take part in rituals that identify you as Jewish.

But at the same time Jesus would never insist upon imposing those rituals on others who were not Jewish.

It’s like the meme I saw on social media earlier this month: It’s cool to say “I can’t do that because of my religion.” It’s not cool to say, “You can’t do that because of my religion.”

Jesus’s mission is to invite people into the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is at hand! It is now! And there is room in the kingdom of God for all of God’s children, not just those of Jesus’s own religion, the Jewish faith.

“Why don’t you and your disciples wash, Jesus?”

“Because I’m preparing to go and invite into God’s kingdom those who aren’t Jewish. And they don’t have to be Jewish to be part of the kingdom. The kingdom is bigger than that. It is a kingdom of peace and love and justice and equality for all of God’s children.”

And this group of Pharisees didn’t like that, because they placed more importance on their religion than they did on the peace and love and justice and equality God desires for all.

But how does God feel about this?

When Jesus ended up in the wilderness with 4,000 people who weren’t hardcore Jews and didn’t participate in all the Jewish rituals like the washing of hands and bowls and cups, would God’s blessings still pour down on them?

The answer comes in chapter eight: in those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, “These people have nothing to eat.”

And the disciples said, “Yeah?...”

This time, there were only seven loaves, for four thousand people. Jesus took the bread and blessed it… baruch atah Adonai eloheinu…and he had the disciples start distributing the bread, along with what the scripture describes as “a few small fish.”

Would they multiply, for these people? These non-Jews? These foreigners? Would there be enough?

The crowd ate. Everyone had their fill. And there were seven baskets of leftovers.

God’s miraculous blessing had come upon these non-Jews, these “non-washers,” just as it had upon the Jews earlier.

I have to say it again, because scriptures like these have been used throughout history to condemn the Jews: there is nothing here that supports that. Jesus is not condemning Judaism or the Jews. But he is criticizing those who insist that everyone else must become like them. If certain rituals and observances are important to you, that’s good. But don’t say that everyone else has to follow them in order to participate in the kingdom of God.

What we see in Mark 6, 7, & 8 actually reflects the arc of scripture as a whole. There is, throughout the entire Bible, a movement that is constantly expanding the community of God, or at least people’s ideas of the community of God.

Remember when, way back in Leviticus, the people of Israel drew a circle that kept all sorts of people out, especially those who were considered foreigners. But then later, we have Ruth the Moabite, who becomes the great-grandmother to king David; and Job, the “most blameless man on the face of the earth,” who was from a far away place called Uz. And we have Isaiah, challenging conventional wisdom in saying that God’s house is a house of prayer for all people.

Jesus himself, in Luke’s gospel, gets a lot of people in his hometown upset when he mentions that the prophets Elijah and Elisha conveyed God’s word and God’s healing to foreigners in Sidon and Syria – people who of course did not follow any of the Jewish customs. This offends his fellow Nazoreans, who chase him out of town.

In Acts, the Spirit convinces Philip that a eunuch from Ethiopia can and should be welcomed into the community of believers, and the Spirit convinces Peter that “God shows no partiality, but in every nation are people who are acceptable to God.” After all, Peter says, Jesus is Lord of all.

It is always a challenge, to widen the circle. It means widening one’s understanding of who God is and how God works.

But that is the arc of scripture. At times, the disciples had a hard time following it; their eyes were blinded, and they made mistakes. The Pharisees and other religious elites had an even harder time following it and accepting it.

And many people today have a hard time with a faith that encourages one to continually open one’s mind, to draw the circle wider, to consider new possibilities. There is comfort in a static, non-changing view of the world, a faith that never changes, never challenges a person to expand his or her mind.

But scripture does not allow us to take refuge in that. Scripture is a non-stop challenge to continually open our minds to a God and a kingdom that is and always will be far more than we can ever imagine.