It’s very physical this Christianity thing. Sometimes I like to pretend it’s all rather esoteric, and spiritual. But then we read something like that and we realise that Christianity is all about incarnation, about God alongside us… in this world and with this world – a part of this world.
So we continue the story of David and it is not for the faint-hearted. Still, at least the rape of Tamar has been missed out, as has the successful beginning of the coup d’état staged by David’s third son Absalom. David is forced to run and his cause seems lost. Only through the loyalty of his “old guard” and with much slaughter is the kingdom won back.
The inadequacy of the disciples is a constant theme in Mark’s Gospel, their weakness of faith, their propensity to get the wrong end of the stick, their hope for power and eventually glory, their depressing similarity to the rest of us. And yet Jesus’ never gives up on them, even at the end when they have run away and left him to his fate, his resurrection message sent through the young man in white is addressed to them. “I am going ahead of you into Galilee, you will see me there” – business as usual, back to work, the daily work of living and proclaiming the gospel.
John’s crowd ask the wrong questions, they are looking for grapes on a gooseberry bush. They think they have seen a miracle, or heard of one, and they want more. Jesus must put them right. He doesn’t talk in physical terms, the physical is only there to reveal the spiritual. He talks in metaphor because there is no other language to use. The food of which he speaks stands for an experience which his hearers have not had and cannot understand.
There is an awful realism in the Hebrew Bible, it has very few heroes that do not have feet of clay. Or, put another way, its characters are portrayed as real people, not cardboard cut-out supermen. This is true even when it recounts the life of one of the most significant figures in Israel’s history.
Today’s reading from St Mark’s Gospel is, at first sight, rather unspectacular. The most dramatic parts of this section of St Mark’s Gospel have been taken out, the feeding of the 5000, Jesus walking on water and the second stilling of a storm. All three of them are covered in next week’s Gospel reading in John’s version of events. But what we have left does have some interest, it’s full of movement if not action, there’s lots going on and it’s all rather evocative.
