Our Response

In tomorrow's Gospel reading, Jesus walks across the water, the disciples fear a ghost and then Jesus climbs in the boat and the storm stops. When all is calm, Mark tells us,

They were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

This exact line is much preached upon and Dylan at SarahLaughed.Net has some great reflections on the deeper meaning of this.

But what was it that they didn't understand? I've heard a lot of sermons over the years that suggest that the line of thinking that would have indicated Jesus' followers did understand would be something like this:

"Hey, this guy managed to make a few loaves and fishes feed thousands of people. He must be powerful. Heck, only God has that kind of power. I know ... he must be God!"

But that's not really the issue, and that's not how Jesus' followers would have thought or ought to have thought. Jesus' followers knew something that I think we also know intuitively—and if not intuitively, by cold hard experience in the world:

Not all power in this world is used benevolently.

...What they didn't understand was what their response ought to be. They didn't understand what it meant that God was, through Jesus, feeding all the people such that each had enough and no one accumulated too much—much as God fed the Israelites in the desert with manna. They didn't understand that God's power over winds and waters in Jesus was like the parting of the Red Sea. They didn't understand that in Jesus, God was fulfilling the promise of Deuteronomy 18:15-19 to raise up a prophet like Moses to do what Moses did. They didn't understand that what God was and is doing through Jesus is no less than forming a motley and marginalized crowd into a people, one people, God's people—a people called to do with power what Jesus does with his: healing, empowering, self-giving even to the Cross, to knit together a whole Body joined in love and building up its weakest members.

That's who we are—what we have been freed through Jesus to become.

I have only excerpted above, the full text is well worth a read: Proper 12, Year B