John 6:1-21, from Proper 12 (17).

Read in its entirety, the story of the “Feeding of the Five Thousand” could be more aptly named the story of the “Ditching of the Five Thousand.”

The story begins with a wondrous occurrence. Jesus replicated one of the prophet Elisha’s most famous miracles (See 2 Kings 4:42-44, one of this week’s other readings) and even kicked it up a notch, feeding more people than Elisha had, and with less food to begin with than what had been available to Elisha. Jesus even matched the leftovers exactly to the needs of his disciples. Twelve baskets for 12 men. Bravo, Jesus! Way to put it straight through the uprights!

But the wonder would quickly fade. The multitude that went to sleep feeling full and loved that night would wake up hungry and abandoned the next morning. And it would happen not because they had strayed off somewhere, like carelessly errant sheep. It would happen because Jesus had intentionally given them the slip.

As night approached, Jesus directed his disciples to sail away without him (I’m borrowing, here, from Mark’s version) in full view of the crowd, leaving Jesus with no obvious means of getting back across the lake. Jesus then withdrew alone to the mountains and, after dark and apparently unobserved, set out across the water on foot, leaving the crowd unaware of his departure. When the people awoke the next day, there was no bread, no fish and, bewilderingly, no Jesus.

Reverence might keep you and me from asking why, fellow Christian, but critics of faith in God certainly don’t avoid the question.

“I’d say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?” British actor and author Stephen Fry famously replied when asked what he would say to God if God, contrary to Fry’s expectations, turned out to be real. “How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?”

And while you might be unwilling to ask such a question as boldly as Fry, have you not asked it secretly, at least a time or two? Haven’t there been times when God has shown up in a big way for you during one crisis, only to be inexplicably absent during the next one? And even if you’re having a perfectly fine life, with plenty of everything you need and even a little of what you want without needing, you’re surely aware that many, many others aren’t so fortunate as you. Why would a good, all-powerful God feed, clothe, shelter and protect some people some of the time, but never all people all of the time?

It’s too soon in the story to answer the second half of that question, and I can’t promise you’ll find the answer that is coming all that satisfactory. Fry has heard the answer, surely, and it seems not to have impressed him in the slightest.

But Mark has already given us the answer to the first half of the question. “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd,” Mark wrote, “he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” It seems that, at least some of the time, God meets our needs because he simply can’t help himself. He loves us, and when we suffer, he suffers, too. Any half-decent parent knows the agony of seeing his or her child in want or pain, even when both are inescapably necessary. God knows that agony for every human being who ever was, is, or will be.

Grieving the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis initially described his attempts to find comfort in God as having a door slammed in his face, “and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” But in time, his sense of the experience changed.

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer,” Lewis wrote later. “But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’”

In the morning, the crowd will awaken hungry on a remote shore with no Jesus in sight. A morning is coming when you will, too, assuming it hasn’t arrived already. But God will see you there. And having felt, through Jesus, what you will be feeling, he will understand, and he will look upon you with compassion. For now, that’s the best I can offer you. More is coming, but be warned. It may not feel like enough.

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56, from Proper 11 (16).

We’ve reached the point in Mark’s gospel at which Jesus begins throwing away his political career.

The move doesn’t surprise you and me. As we watch it play out during the next five weeks’ worth of readings, we will have the advantage of knowing that the kingdom Jesus has been describing isn’t an earthly one. To his disciples, followers and the people of Galilee generally, though, he has sounded and acted so far exactly like the Messiah they’ve been expecting. The unexpectedness of who and what he really is will leave them bewildered.

As today’s text shows, Jesus’ preaching and healing have made him such a phenom that he can barely get a moment’s rest. Every time he tries to escape by boat, the crowds anticipate his destination and get there ahead of him. They are like sheep without a shepherd, Mark says. More to the point, they are like sheep needing and wanting a shepherd. Having just lost John the Baptist, they consider Jesus their leading candidate for the job.

Mark is setting the stage. Next week, we’ll switch to John’s gospel for an up-close look at Jesus’ most famous miracle, the feeding of a multitude with a few handfuls of bread and fish. We’ll also examine the less-frequently-discussed fallout that leaves Jesus asking his disciples whether they will abandon him the way everyone else has. Then we’ll return to Mark’s version of the story.

As we watch Jesus’ popularity tank, though, we have at least two reasons to avoid harsh judgment of the people who grow disaffected with him. First, their suffering is real. They are sick and hungry, both in body and in spirit. When Jesus shows up with healing and wisdom in abundance – and free food – who can blame them for mobbing him? Jesus feels compassion for them and does his best to help. We should follow his lead and do the same for all who suffer. Second, we are not as different from them as we might like to imagine. We suffer, too, both physically and spiritually, and we, like they, tend to fixate on our physical needs at the expense of our spiritual ones. Had Jesus shown up in our time, professing now, as he did then, that those priorities are exactly backwards, there’s a good chance we would have responded the same way.

One last point worth noting, I think, about the passage at hand: With all the scarcity Mark puts front and center in the text – scarcity of health, time, shepherding, etc. – it’s easy to miss the abundance waving at us from the margins. Wherever Jesus goes, many apparently perfectly healthy people recognize him and rush around the whole region to bring the sick to him. They lay these stricken people on mats in the marketplace and beg Jesus on their behalf for healing, if only through a touch his coat fringe. And it works.

I point out this detail not to draw attention away from the passage’s pain and suffering or to make some Polyanna point about always looking on the bright side of every bad situation. I do it to point out the virtue of responding to need by doing whatever you can, and by doing it as abundantly as possible. Can’t cure leprosy? Fine. Neither can I. But we are neither hopeless nor helpless as a result. Do you have an extra mat somewhere? Because if you do, maybe you and your two good feet can help me use it to get that poor leper down the street to someone who can. And if somebody has helped the guy already, or if he’s dead when we show up, maybe we can go find someone else to rescue. Just about everyone has an excess of something, even if it’s as minimal as a single spare mat. Combining our humblest surpluses with a little compassion has a way of putting a sizable dent in the scarcity and suffering around us.

Humility abounds in this passage, too, and that’s no small thing. Needing healing was a source of shame in Jesus’ time, especially if you needed healing from some chronic condition. Most people figured that if you were unwell or unwhole, God was punishing you for some sin you or your ancestors had committed. Allowing oneself to be laid out on a mat in the public marketplace and to be regarded by a reputed holy man while everyone watched required a hard swallow of whatever pride one might have left. But describing the outcome for those who managed it – those who, aided by others who simply did what they could, reached out to the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, Mark offers this understated-but-absolute picture of abundant grace: “And all who touched it were healed.”

Mark 6:14-29, from Proper 10 (15).

I bet you can’t name all the villains in Mark’s account of the conspiracy that led to John the Baptist’s grisly execution. Ready? OK, go!

There’s Herod, of course, who was responsible for arresting and jailing John. And as the story unfolds, we learn that Herod did so to placate his wife, Herodias, who – scandalously – is also the wife of Herod’s brother Philip. She has harbored a death wish against John ever since John pointed out to Herod that that Herod’s marriage to her was unlawful. But Herod fears, respects and even kind of likes John and thus protects him from Herodias.

Until, that is, Herod’s birthday bash, when the story’s third villain, Herod’s daughter (or Herodias’ daughter, depending on your translation) so thoroughly wows Herod and his guests with her dancing that Herod swears before a room full of courtiers and big shots to give her anything she wants, up to half of his kingdom. Prompted by her delightful mother, the girl asks for John’s head on a platter. Trapped, Herod obliges.

The degree of blame apportioned to the daughter in this hideous conspiracy expanded rapidly in the years after as people – men, really – relied on conjecture, imagination and outright fantasizing to fill in the substantial amount of blank space in Mark’s story. We don’t even know the girl’s name fore sure. Neither Mark’s nor Matthew’s accounts name her, and the only “Salome” who appears in the Gospels is a woman who, in Mark’s version, belongs to a trio of women who witness Jesus’ death and venture to his tomb on Easter morning. “Salome,” derived from the Hebrew word for “peace,” was a common name, and the “Salome” in Mark’s Gospel is certainly not girl who received John’s head from Herod. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions that Herodias and her first husband had a daughter named Salome, and the girl in Mark’s narrative clearly defers to Herodias, so odds are the girl and Salome are the same person. But Herod could have had other daughters, including daughters by Herodias.

Even if the name is wrong, though, history and culture have given us far greater distortions about what happened at Herod’s party that night. In Mark’s text, the Greek word used to refer to the girl, korasion, is the same word the text uses to refer to Jairus’ 12-year-old daughter in Chapter 5. But this fact didn’t stop artists throughout subsequent ages from depicting her as a full-grown young woman and, increasingly, a seductress, who aroused Herod with a striptease. In Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, the daughter develops an unrequited crush on John and, in a climactic scene, kisses his severed head in a sort of “I’ll have you one way or another” moment. More recent manifestations of this hypersexualized “Salome” include her depiction as a seductive, manipulative vampire in the HBO series True Blood. As Marg Mowczko convincingly argues, the stories in Mark and Matthew, taken at face value, minus all the freight added by subsequent cultures, may depict Herod as a father delighted, not aroused, by the playfulness, not the eroticism, of a tween daughter, not a grown-up temptress.

But getting back to my dare about your ability to name all the villains in the story: Have we identified all of them? I don’t think so. Stretching things a bit, you might indict the “soldier of the guard” whom Herod tasked with fetching John’s head, or Herod’s party guests, who watched this train wreck unfold without raising a single recorded objection.

But there remains a hidden villain, camouflaged behind the little-noticed fact that none of the people mentioned above would have brought about John’s death without the involvement of at least one of the others. Herod probably wouldn’t have arrested John had it not been for Herodias’ hatred. Herodias had no opportunity to slay John until the daughter’s dance provided one. The daughter’s request could not have trapped Herod were it not for a political structure that put unchecked power over life and death in the hands of a man given to acting on impulse, and Herod could have backtracked on his rash promise to his daughter had it not been for the social ramifications of reneging before his guests.

The hidden villain, in short, is the systemic evil that unified these individual moral failures in a way that cost John his life, and history’s evolution of the daughter into the chief cause of John’s demise has perhaps served, among other things, as a way of not talking about systemic evil’s reality. We like our systems. We often recognize their flaws, but we understand that, for most of us and for most of the time, they protect us, provide for us, and give us a measure of control over what happens to us. If the occasional prophet, peasant, black man, Native American, woman, gets caught and crushed in the gears, well, that’s just unfortunate, and there’s usually a Salome somewhere whom we can blame. Doing such is much easier, and far less costly, than implicating a whole system.

In one of the other lectionary texts for this week, God gives the prophet Amos a vision of a wall and a plumb line. Most translations indicate that the wall had been built straight, a property verified by the plumb line. God then drops the same plumb line among his people, the people of Israel, showing how crooked they are not so much as individuals but as an entire nation. Judgment of your whole system is coming, God says, a message Amos gets in trouble for repeating. But if you’re the type of Christian who relishes the idea of God’s judging your nation, you might consider taking a deeper dive into the systemic evils Amos pointed out. To give you a hint of what you’ll be in for, consider that when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his “I Have a Dream” speech that, “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he was alluding to Amos 5.

Maybe another reason we don’t like to talk about systemic evil is that it seems there is nothing practical we can do about it. Realistically, what can a single brick to do about the whole wall’s being out of square? Common sense suggests not much. Better to mind your own business, keep your own toes on the line, serve where you are planted, and all of that. Stick your neck out like John did, and you, too, just might get your head cut off for no good reason.

But be brave. Amos was just one brick in the wall. So was John. So were the disciples. So was King. It’s not easy being a prophet. But it’s not hopeless, either.

Mark 6:1-13, from Proper 9 (14)

I don’t know about your town, but mine could easily match Mark’s description of Nazareth in Chapter 6.

Spotting Jesus making his way up Main Street, most folks here would remark that they had grown up with him. They’d recall singing those fun little songs with him in Sunday School:

“Jesus loves the little chilllll-dren. All the children of the worrrrrrld …”

“Deeeeep and wiiiiiide. Deeeeep and wiiiiiide. There’s a fountain flowing deeeeep and wiiiiiide …”

Back then, they’d say, he spent a lot of time sitting on a big rock in a green pasture, cuddling lambs, and smiling at kids. And they’d remember gobbling Vanilla Wafers with him and swigging Kool-Aide – but never before first saying grace – and turning construction paper and glue and pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks into Bible-themed crafts that would hang on the refrigerator until Mom secreted them into the trash can.

Things got a little more serious later, they’d say. They’d remember Jesus warning them against running with the wrong crowd, against giving in to temptations, against “backsliding” from all the moral progress they had made. He’d said all of that and much more like it, they’d insist. And they’d be equally sure that aside from a few exceptions not worth going into, they had followed his advice. Having seen the truth, they had tossed their stick in the last-night-of-camp bonfire or walked down the church aisle as the music played. In one sequence or another, they had prayed the holy prayer and had gotten dunked in or sprinkled with the holy water. They had done it all and had gone to church regularly ever since, some of them just about every Sunday, some of them just about every Easter and Christmas.

So they would be confused when he told them to repent and believe, as if they hadn’t done both already. And when he tried to lay hands on them to heal them, they would brush away his touch, insisting that they were fine, just fine, thank you very much. And the more he said and did such things, the more their confusion would give way to indignation, then anger. Just who did little Jesus think he was, now that he was all grown up? And if he’s so dense about who stands where with God, they would think, maybe he isn’t the great prophet he’s thought to be among those who don’t know his back story the way we do.

Like Matthew’s version, Mark’s account of Jesus’ return to Nazareth ends mildly. Jesus and his former neighbors simply part ways. They’re offended by Jesus’ words. Jesus is amazed at their lack of faith. But things get more heated in Luke’s version, assuming Luke is describing the same incident. There, the townsfolk get so angry they try to toss Jesus off a cliff. I don’t know whether my town would go that far, but I doubt most people here would appreciate being told they didn’t, in fact, have God all figured out and squared away, like a fixed-rate mortgage or a recipe for buttermilk biscuits. I think a God who might challenge their habits or critique their politics or diagnose their maladies might just find himself run out of town, if not over a precipice.

And for all I know, I’d be in the thick of the mob, or maybe at its head. Because I grew up with Jesus, too. I sang those songs and assembled those crafts and tossed a stick into the fire and walked down the aisle and got baptized and avoided the wrong crowd and went to church regularly and got told in a hundred ways what a fine young man I had turned out to be. I like thinking I’ve got God all figured out and squared away. Maybe the lesson for me in this passage is that while God’s presence can be comforting and even chummy, it is more typically disruptive and humbling and convicting. Repenting and believing are ongoing acts, not finite ones, and next time I hear myself saying, “Well, I’ll be darned if it isn’t little Jesus, come back for a visit,” I’d be wise to drop my assumptions and prepare to accept whatever he might say.