when I broke up the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets of broken pieces you picked up?” “Twelve,” they said.
remembering what Jesus did
is old hat to us
we can reel it off
years of stories have settled
until we know
every little life episode
is really about Jesussuch remembrances
finally add up to being storyless
it turns out to be a dream
unmoored in effect
awaiting a next Jesus deed
missing our picking-up
we fail to carry onhaving left left-overs
out of our equation
we have broken a trail
to new fishing grounds
and don’t know where
to pick it up again
without a big hintIsrael is dispersed
scattered inside and out
occupied through and through
on a scale of 1-10
it’s 12 sheets to the wind
remember forgotten bread
it is your bait
We all have information stored away within us that would be helpful if only we could access it when it would be helpful.
Unspoken is a remembrance of what followed that feeding—a storm. As a water-walking Jesus entered their boat, Mark notes the Twelve didn’t understand about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.
Such is still the case. It was as if a storm took any glimmer of insight away from them and they were simply left in awe. Awe is not a good place to try to figure things out.
This is the same distraction that comes with leavening (attending to short-term advertising glitz rather than long-term sustenance) and remains in attendance when we set fire to basic life needs, whether bread or news.
Myers90, sees in this verse the hardening of Christianity’s heart that formally began in 313 C.E. when “the church began to shift from the bottom to the top, from the margins to the center, from those who had no power to those in power”. The result: “once the dynamic core of the gospel message, the realm of God, was replaced by a different message, the defense of the status quo.” In a moment of testing we chose the “politics of exclusion and domination” and lost a “hermeneutic of suspicion … about the way in which our own self-interest might shape our reading of text or context.”