One of the table blessings that Jews have said every Friday night at the Sabbath dinner since before the days of Jesus is, “Blessed are you O Lord our God, king of the universe who has sanctified us with your commandments and commanded us to wash our hands.” This prayer consists of two parts: something God does and something we do in response. The first part says that God sanctifies us with his commandments. Sanctify is a big word that means to make holy. Holy means cleaned up and set apart for God’s purpose and use. We must also note that God does the holy-making. We cannot make ourselves holy or sanctified. God did this for and to Israel by calling Abraham and promising to give him and his descendants a land and make them a great nation, then by God’s delivering them from slavery in Egypt, then at Mt. Sinai by God's unilaterally declaring that he is their God and they are his people, and then giving them the Law. In doing all this the LORD created a people, declared them to be his own, and then by giving them the Law he sanctified them. He made them holy. Being the only people to have God's Law made the Hebrew people distinct among the nations for the purpose that as they lived according to the Law they would become a just and compassionate community among the nations who by their way of life would reveal that the LORD God was the one true God.
The second part of that blessing, the response, we would expect to be something like "Gratefully, we will live accordingly." But, instead we get a command to wash hands. That seems odd for there is no command to wash hands anywhere in the Old Testament. It apparently is part of tradition rather than Scripture. The thinking seems to be that if they ate something with dirty hands they would defile the food and the food could defile them nullifying the sanctifying work of God in giving them the commandments. Jesus hit the nail on the head with respect to the Pharisees and Scribes quoting Isaiah “you have forsaken the command of God and are holding to the traditions of men” and then he said, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” The Gospels are full of stories about the Scribes and Pharisees trying to keep up the appearance of being faithful by observing dress codes and food rites, but when it came to actually keeping the Law and actually being just and fair they failed miserably...as do we all.
To take the finger off the Pharisees and Scribes, they aren’t the only ones to miss God for trying to keep up with traditions. We do it too. North American churches today also have some sad and unbelievably tacky ways of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe our own traditions, rites and rituals, and ways of doing things, and what's moral and immoral, and who's included and who's not. But, I’ll not rant on about that because I don’t want to get bogged down in the topic of hypocrisy. There is something bigger going on in this passage. What I would like to point out is that the disciples are indeed eating bread, the bread of the kingdom of God come by the hand of Jesus. The Scribes and Pharisees can't see it because they are more concerned about the ritual purity of the disciple’s hands and thus are missing out.
We need to talk about what the disciples are eating. I bet you didn’t know they were eating bread? You wouldn't. Our NIV says food. Most modern English translations just say "eating" to emphasize the unclean hands stuff. Yet, the Greek New Testament says they are eating bread, in fact eating the bread. It is the bread that the disciples are eating with defiled hands. Almost all Modern translations have omitted this simple fact and it has to be among the biggest Freudian slips in the Bible translation industry in the Western church. We in the Western Church are predisposed to read this passage through the lens of the issues that the Reformers in the 16th Century had with Roman Catholicism and its corruptions and abuses. This text is not about justification by faith as opposed to works righteousness. It's about the bread and how it symbolizes Jesus being God with us and his Kingdom being at hand and our partaking of that no matter the state of our hands.
This text is located within a major section of Mark that runs from 6:1-8:21 in which bread, be it loaves or crumbs, is a major recurring theme. The section begins with Jesus sending the Twelve out with no bread to carry out his ministry of bringing in the Kingdom of heaven. They go without him for he stays behind; thus, no bread, no Jesus. They still meet with great success. We’re just supposed to realize a correlation between Jesus physical presence and the presence of bread.
Immediately after their return, Jesus creates some bread by feeding the 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two fish and there are twelve baskets of left overs. From here on out we have to use our imaginations as to what happened to those twelve baskets of left over bread. Well, I think they set out on a journey to distribute it to the surrounding nations to symbolize that the Kingdom is for all nations not just Israel. So, with these twelve baskets in hand they start out on a journey to take the bread, Jesus and his Kingdom, to the people of the surrounding nations.
First, they land across the Sea of Galilee in Gennesaret (Jordan) and Jesus heals a lot of people. We can imagine that while there they shared the bread. Then, they cross back over and we have today's passage. Jesus’ disciples here are eating the bread presumably from the twelve baskets of leftovers and the Scribes and Pharisees are upset that they have not washed their hands and were defiling the bread and in turn themselves. They don’t understand about the bread.
Next, we find them having travelled up into Lebanon and there is a Gentile woman who wants Jesus to cast a demon out of her daughter. Jesus at first refuses but she gets his attention by saying that even dogs get to eat the crumbs that children drop under the table. She must have seen the baskets and was noting that she understood about them. Jesus says he has seen no greater faith than hers in Israel and heals her daughter. They then return to Israel and Jesus heals a deaf man and goes on to feed another crowd of 4,000 people with seven loaves of bread and this time they have seven basketfuls of crumbs left over. Then the Pharisees come again demanding a sign from Jesus to prove who he is and he refuses presumably because there are still baskets of the bread around. You’d think that was enough?
The section ends with Jesus and the disciples getting in a boat and the disciples have forgotten to get bread and all they have between them is one loaf; i.e., Jesus. Then Jesus warns his disciples about the yeast of the Pharisees. They think they are in trouble for only having only one loaf and Jesus then takes them to task for not trying to understand what the feedings were all about. From five loaves Jesus fed 5,000 and they had twelve baskets of crumbs left over and so with the 4,000. They were missing the point about who it was that was in the boat with them. The Lord God and his kingdom were there in their midst and they were sharing in his mission and ministry. Would they get that? Do we?
Well, back to the disciples eating the bread with dirty hands. We’re supposed to grasp the significance of the bread here. Jesus' disciples’ eating the bread signifies that they are sharing in Jesus and his kingdom something the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t get because they were more concerned about keeping the religion they had created rather than about maintaining their relationship to God. Something we Christians have gotten good at over the centuries as well.
Like the disciples we are the community that is consuming the bread of the presence of God. Just as ancient Israel was made holy by the gift of the Law so are we made holy by Jesus presence in and among us through the fellowship created in and by the Holy Spirit so that we are cleaned up and set apart to participate in Jesus mission and ministry to save his creation. The church isn’t about traditions and what conditions must be met before someone can participate in what Jesus is up to. The church is about Jesus and his kingdom working in, with, and through us even though our hands and indeed our hearts are dirty.
My friends, Jesus the Bread of Life, is here. The kingdom of God is at hand. Jesus, God the Son become human to deliver the creation from its slavery to sin and death is here in the presence and work of the Holy Spirit. He is here and in this moment that we are sharing with each other right now in his presence he is making us to participate right now in the greatest thing to have ever happened in this creation, even greater than the event of creation itself. Just simply being here together in his presence is healing, restorative, for us and for anyone who comes. While we are here the Holy Spirit, the Presence of God with us makes us able to go forth to share the Bread of Life evidenced by our being compassionate and healing influences in all our relationships. We don’t really have to do anything in particular while we're here. Our Lord, the Lord of all creation, is here ministering to us, making us holy, making us like him, and all we’ve got to do is be here and keep coming back and soon we find people will want the bread that we've been eating. Jesus is here. We’ve got one loaf, Jesus Christ and he is all the bread we need. Amen.
