Disappearing Party

Be careful when asking for more bread... You might just get it!

If you listen closely this coming Sunday morning to the Gospel lesson you will observe something remarkable. No, not the beautiful invitation that Jesus offers his followers to “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” No, not the fervor with which people chased after Jesus like paparazzi stalk today's celebrities. No, not even the power with which Jesus healed those around him. The outstanding feature of this coming Sunday’s Gospel lesson is not any of the above. Rather, it is a disappearing party.

When I was in college I can remember observing a similar phenomena of vanishing shindigs. During my freshman and sophomore years I drove around the Bacchus bus at Sewanee. Bacchus was the student-led organization that aimed to create a safe campus by offering rides in a 15-passenger van that catered to mostly drunk students on weekend nights. As I drove fellow students around, I remember them oddly moving from one party to the next throughout an evening. This happened as one party gathered steam and another lost it. Quite often as a student would enter the van to go from one side of campus to the other she would say, “That party is dead” indicating that what was once there was now gone. In a strangely similar way, we observe that this coming Sunday’s Gospel story once had something that is now gone!

Before we get to what vanished, let's look at what is there. Jesus received his disciples back from their mission trip to share healing in his name. As his name spread even the powerful heard it and they were startled. This we know because Herod thought Jesus was the reincarnate version of John the Baptist whom Herod had recently beheaded. When Jesus invited his followers to take some respite after they completed their work this downtime was soon overrun by a group of people so lost that Mark described them as sheep without a shepherd. It is at this point in the story where things skip around.

Instead of describing the feeding of the five thousand, our given Gospel lesson jumps ahead to Jesus crossing the sea again. In Gennesaret Jesus brings more healing, and while this healing gives us reason to be thankful, I am left wondering, what gives? Why did the framers of our Sunday Lectionary decide to dispatch with Mark 6:35-52, the feeding of the masses? How could they think it was the right move to never include Mark’s version of this story anywhere in our Sunday Eucharistic Lectionary? As a realtor might say, it has everything to do with location, location, location!

This disappearing party where Jesus invites everyone to God’s grand banquet has been moved. It's location has changed, or rather it's time has been delayed. Very soon—as in next week—we will be swimming in bread so rich that we won’t know what to do with all of it. Soon enough—as in a couple weeks from now—we will be so sick of Jesus feeding us that we will politely ask him to stop. All too soon—as in over the next month—Jesus will not stop talking of the Bread of Life such that we will beg him to tell us of anything else. Yes, after this coming Sunday we will swiftly shift from Mark’s Gospel account to John’s Gospel account where we will spend five weeks hearing the fourth evangelist’s telling of the feeding of the masses and everything that Jesus thinks about anything gluten!

When on Sunday morning we feel like the folks who made the Revised Common Lectionary have stolen our mass on the grass, our pop-up party in a field, our counter-cultural banquet with Jesus, we can rest assured that we will get our feast! And, like all things that flow from Christ Jesus and all that our life-giving Creator gives we will have more than an abundant plenty. This Sunday be thankful that we do not have to hear about Jesus and bread because soon enough we will be so full of the Bread of Life that it will be coming out of our noses!