Written by: Dennis Pethers - Viz a Viz
Mark 6 v 35-44
When it was late in the day, his followers came to him and said, "No one lives in this place, and it is already very late.
Send the people away so they can go to the countryside and towns around here to buy themselves something to eat."
But Jesus answered, "You give them something to eat."
They said to him, "We would all have to work a month to earn enough money to buy that much bread!"
Jesus asked them, "How many loaves of bread do you have? Go and see."
When they found out, they said, "Five loaves and two fish."
Then Jesus told his followers to have the people sit in groups on the green grass.
So they sat in groups of fifty or a hundred.
Jesus took the five loaves and two fish and, looking up to heaven, he thanked God for the food. He divided the bread and gave it to his followers for them to give to the people. Then he divided the two fish among them all.
All the people ate and were satisfied.
The followers filled twelve baskets with the leftover pieces of bread and fish.
There were five thousand men who ate.
Notes
5+2=5000. Obviously the mathematics don't work. Here are the disciples of Jesus surrounded by a massive crowd of people who are hungry. They come to Jesus and ask him to send them away to get some food. Jesus response is unexpected: "You give them something to eat"
it gets a 'you must be joking' kind of reply - you can almost hear the disciples thinking 'get real Lord, have you seen how many people there are here, we'd never get enough to feed this lot - it's impossible!' Jesus doesn't tell them to work harder to earn enough he asks another, on the face of it, daft question: 'What do you have?'
It is obvious that you can't feed thousands of people with five loaves and two fishes but the disciples did what Jesus said and sat the people down in groups. I wonder what was going through the disciples minds as they sat the people down and thought that there could be a riot when they get their share of what was on offer.
Then the miracle happens and the crowd is fed with loads left over.
I often feel like the disciples - there are so many people who are hungry, millions physically, millions spiritually. The Lord says feed them. Our response can be - 'You must be joking - have you seen all the people, all the needs. I haven't got anything to give them, I'm not good enough… Jesus says to us; 'Don't think about what you can't do, but bring me what you have - your talents, your time, your money. It doesn't matter how small you think it is just bring it to me and I'll do far more with you than you could ever imagine.'
KEY POINT: Bring God what you've got, that's all he asks for.
Mark 6 v 45-46
Immediately Jesus told his followers to get into the boat and go ahead of him to Bethsaida across the lake. He stayed there to send the people home.
After sending them away, he went into the hills to pray.
Notes
There are different kinds of Christians because there are different kinds of people. Some are by nature active, they love doing stuff - sport, going out....others are a lot more reflective. They enjoy reading and thinking and 'being still'. A lot of us are a bit of a mixture of both.
The key to this short mention of Jesus praying between the action packed stories of feeding thousands and walking on water is that one needs the other. Prayer is a crucial part of the Christian life, but prayer is most powerful when it is linked to our efforts at serving God and aiming to be who he wants us to be and doing what he wants us to do.
Action does not replace prayer and prayer is not an excuse to do nothing. Every Christian that I know finds one of these easier than the other. It is not because they are more, or less spiritual. It is mainly to do with the kind of person they are. The challenge of this brief moment in Jesus life will be different for different kinds of people. Jesus 'did' the will of God and spent time with God in prayer. For those of us who do a lot and never find time to pray the challenge is to discipline ourselves to pray. This will make our activities more effective. For those of us who love to spend time with God but never do anything, the challenge is that we need to hear Jesus challenge to 'Do the will of the Father in Heaven'.
KEY POINT: People often talk about being 'Proactive'. God wants us to be 'Prayeractive'.
Mark 6 v 47-56
That night, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and Jesus was alone on the land.
He saw his followers struggling hard to row the boat, because the wind was blowing against them. Between three and six o’clock in the morning, Jesus came to them, walking on the water, and he wanted to walk past the boat.
But when they saw him walking on the water, they thought he was a ghost and cried out.
They all saw him and were afraid. But quickly Jesus spoke to them and said, "Have courage! It is I. Do not be afraid."
Then he got into the boat with them, and the wind became calm. The followers were greatly amazed.
They did not understand about the miracle of the five loaves, because their minds were closed.
When they had crossed the lake, they came to shore at Gennesaret and tied the boat there.
When they got out of the boat, people immediately recognized Jesus.
They ran everywhere in that area and began to bring sick people on mats wherever they heard he was.
And everywhere he went-into towns, cities, or countryside-the people brought the sick to the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch just the edge of his coat, and all who touched it were healed.
Notes
I'm not sure why the disciples had decided to go on the lake without Jesus in the early hours of the morning. This adventure of high winds, fear and mistaken identity makes a really important point about believing in Jesus.
There are two groups of people in this passage. The first part of the passage is about the disciples. v52 explains their problem. They had not recognised that Jesus was capable of doing anything. They had just seen him feed thousands of people with a handful of food and now, just a few hours later, it gets windy and when they see Jesus they are so scared that they think he is a ghost. They should have known that Jesus was bigger than their problem of windy weather.
The second group is introduced at the end of the passage. - they are just called 'people' v54 records that the people "immediately recognised Jesus". Not only do they recognise him but they have huge expectations of what he can do. They ran to him and hoped just to touch him because they believed he could do what was needed to heal them.
The disciples do not recognise Jesus and have little faith, the people immediately recognise him and are filled with faith.
KEY POINT: it is not always the people we expect who exhibit the most faith.
Mark 7 v 1-8
When some Pharisees and some teachers of the law came from Jerusalem, they gathered around Jesus.
They saw that some of Jesus’ followers ate food with hands that were not clean, that is, they hadn’t washed them.
(The Pharisees and all the Jews never eat before washing their hands in a special way according to their unwritten laws.
And when they buy something in the market, they never eat it until they wash themselves in a special way. They also follow many other unwritten laws, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and pots.)
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law said to Jesus, "Why don’t your followers obey the unwritten laws which have been handed down to us? Why do your followers eat their food with hands that are not clean?"
Jesus answered, "Isaiah was right when he spoke about you hypocrites. He wrote,
‘These people show honor to me with words,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me is worthless.
The things they teach are nothing but human rules.’
You have stopped following the commands of God, and you follow only human teachings."
Notes
So, at the end of the last chapter, the disciples are doubting, the ordinary people are believing and now we come to a section that deals with the 'Religious leaders'. The point of this passage is simple - don't make your rules obey God's rules!
We can make a big mistake when we read this passage. We can think that Jesus is saying that rules are not important and that Christians are forgiven and therefore don't need to worry about rules. This is not what Jesus is saying here. The point Jesus is making is that we should not make up our own rules and then lead people to believe that they have to obey these rules as well as God's. This was the mistake of the religious leaders, they added a whole lot of stuff to the commands that God had given and insisted people obey these.
Jesus is really hard on this and accuses them of hypocrisy (v6), empty worship (v7) and replacing God's commands for human ones (v8).
It is the last of these three that is the most damaging. When we add to God's commands ones of our own it normally follows that we obey these instead of God's commands.
More about this tomorrow!
KEY POINT: Don't replace God's rules with your own.
Mark 7 v 9-16
Then Jesus said to them, "You cleverly ignore the commands of God so you can follow your own teachings.
Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘Anyone who says cruel things to his father or mother must be put to death.’
But you say a person can tell his father or mother, ‘I have something I could use to help you, but it is Corban-a gift to God.’
You no longer let that person use that money for his father or his mother.
By your own rules, which you teach people, you are rejecting what God said. And you do many things like that."
After Jesus called the crowd to him again, he said, "Every person should listen to me and understand what I am saying.
There is nothing people put into their bodies that makes them unclean. People are made unclean by the things that come out of them."
(Some Greek copies add verse "You people who can here me, listen!")
Notes
Jesus now elaborates on the problem of adding our own commands to God's. In verse 9 he is really direct: "You cleverly ignore the commands of God so you can follow your own teachings".
I don't know many young people who are like the pharisees and religious leaders. They added more rules to what God said! Most young people I know don't want more rules they want less! But if you think about it, it all amounts to the same thing. We decide what rules we want to live by and our list becomes more important than God's. As Christians we often go a bit further and add ' Even if I do get it wrong, God will forgive me any way'. God will forgive you but that isn't an excuse to do it your way and not his. Jesus didn't die for us just so we can be forgiven, he died for us so we can be made into the people God wants us to be. He wants us to live his way in his world. That's why he has given us his 'commands' or 'rules'.
KEY POINT. Don't adapt God's rules to justify your behaviour. Learn God's will and rely on him to give you the strength to do it.
Mark 7 v 17-23
When Jesus left the people and went into the house, his followers asked him about this story.
Jesus said, "Do you still not understand? Surely you know that nothing that enters someone from the outside can make that person unclean.
It does not go into the mind, but into the stomach. Then it goes out of the body." (When Jesus said this, he meant that no longer was any food unclean for people to eat.)
And Jesus said, "The things that come out of people are the things that make them unclean.
All these evil things begin inside people, in the mind: evil thoughts, sexual sins, stealing, murder, adultery, greed, evil actions, lying, doing sinful things, jealousy, speaking evil of others, pride, and foolish living.
All these evil things come from inside and make people unclean."
Notes
This passage carries straight on from v15 in yesterdays passage and gets to the heart of what Jesus has been talking about. The Jewish leaders thought that Holiness was about being clean in the sense of not eating the wrong foods, washing the body and that kind of thing. They had failed to understand that real holiness is not on the outside but on the inside. It is a persons heart or soul that leads them to do the things they do, say the things they say. It is the heart that needs to be changed if a person is going to follow God - being outwardly 'clean' is not enough.
I think the meaning of this passage to us today is that it is not enough just doing Christian things. Going to church, attending Christian conferences, praying out of duty or habit. All of these things may make us look like Christians but on their own they are not enough. Following Christ involves a constant 'change of heart'. It is not about learning how to behave so that people think you are being a good Christian - knowing when to sing enthusiastically, raise your hands or whatever you do in worship. It is about daily having your heart changed so that the things Jesus lists in vs21 and 22 are transformed into Holy and righteous living.
KEY POINT. Christianity is not about putting on a good show to other Christians, it is about allowing Jesus, by His Spirit to slowly and patiently make us into new people.
Mark 7 v 24-30
Jesus left that place and went to the area around Tyre. When he went into a house, he did not want anyone to know he was there, but he could not stay hidden.
A woman whose daughter had an evil spirit in her heard that he was there. So she quickly came to Jesus and fell at his feet.
She was Greek, born in Phoenicia, in Syria. She begged Jesus to force the demon out of her daughter.
Jesus told the woman, "It is not right to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs. First let the children eat all they want."
But she answered, "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table can eat the children’s crumbs."
Then Jesus said, "Because of your answer, you may go. The demon has left your daughter."
The woman went home and found her daughter lying in bed; the demon was gone.
Notes
The past few days Jesus has been speaking mainly to Jewish people. In this passage everything changes. Jesus goes to Tyre and 'hides' in a house, he is found by a Syrian woman who asks him to drive a demon out of her daughter. You might be surprised by Jesus reply, he seems to be saying 'why do you expect me to heal a
gentile?' (a non-jewish person), he even calls them 'dogs'. There is no doubt that Jesus wanted to make it clear to the woman that he had come to minister to jews, but this does not mean he excluded the gentiles.
I think that to understand the real meaning of this story you have to think of what has happened in the previous passages. As Mark has written his story he has told us that the disciples often got it wrong, the religious leaders had replaced God's rules with their own. Those who should have known better didn't. And now this person who should be excluded dares to ask Jesus to heal her daughter and what does Jesus do? He heals her. Not because she claims it as her right but because she throws herself on his mercy and trusts in his ability to do the impossible.
KEY POINT - Whether you have been brought up in a Christian home, consider yourself a good disciple, think that God could never love you because of what you have done, it is God's mercy and not your merit that counts!
word-on-the-web uses the Scripture text taken from the Youth Bible, New Century Version
(Anglicised Edition) copyright 1993 by Word Publishing Milton Keynes