Homilies

Back to Homilies menu

            Today’s gospel, “The Feeding of the 4000,” is the second miraculous feeding in Mark’s gospel.  Two chapters earlier we have an account of Jesus feeding 5000 (Mark
6:30-44).  Later in this chapter Jesus refers back to these two miracles:
                        When I broke the five loaves to the five thousand, how many
                        baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?  And how many
                        baskets full of broken pieces did you take up for the 4000?
                                    Mark 8:19-20
            Unlike Matthew, Mark stresses the incomprehension of the disciples:
                        Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?
                        And do you not remember? (v.18)
Freud gave us the advice: “Stop repeating, and start remembering!” 
            Despite the succession of miracles which Jesus performs, the disciples fail to grasp who he is.  This dullness gives way, still later in this same chapter, when Peter acknowledges Jesus as the Christ (v. 29).
            But now a new failure to understand manifests itself, the failure to understand that Jesus’ Messiahship is not that of contemporary Jewish expectation, according to which the Messiah King would drive the Roman infidels out of the Holy Land.  Jesus declares,
                        the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the
                        elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after
                        three days rise again (v. 31).
            When Peter rebukes Jesus for this scandalous prediction (v. 32), Jesus rebukes Peter: Get behind me, Satan!  For you are not on the side of God but of man (v. 33).
            The failures of religious people are usually not failures of faith, but failures of understanding.  The Third Collect at Evening Prayer begins:
                        Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord!
            The theme of today’s epistle is liberation from sin, for “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).  If Paul seems at times to be obsessed with sin, our church seems to be obsessed with sex, and it is this obsession which is threatening the unity of the Anglican Communion.     Our understanding of both sin and sexuality has certainly changed since New Testament times, but I believe that without bringing to consciousness the dark places in our individual hearts, as well as in our view of the world, there can be no redemption.  We will simply continue to make the same mistakes, thinking all the while that we are doing the will of God. 
            When the BAS came out in 1985, the penitential rite was made optional in the Communion Service.  The authors claimed that “in the ancient church there was no verbal confession and absolution in the eucharistic liturgy.  This element was introduced into the first Prayer Book as an element of medieval piety.”  They quote a Roman Catholic liturgist who calls verbal confession and absolution “a peculiarly Western absorption.”  From this it would be easy to conclude that sin itself is a medieval superstition, and that “I’m OK, and you’re OK!” 
            Such incomprehension would merit the same rebuke that Jesus administered to the Marcan disciples:

July 6, 2008

back to top