Sharing the Bread Jesus offers

Generally speaking, the contemporary New Revised Version Bible from which we have read today serves us well, but sometimes things do get lost in translation. In this case it's just one thing: in the Greek text (and also in the old King James Version) there is an extra word: in the older version this first verse of today's Gospel reads: "And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread."

Bread is left out of this version, doubtless with good intentions but unintended consequences. 
The translators decided that where the text actually reads "to eat bread," it just means “to eat.” They were correct that this phrase could function as an idiom, and didn't necessarily refer to bread alone. Yet they were also wrong in that every meal in the ancient Mediterranean, whether in the Galilean countryside where this story is set, or the urban center like Rome where Mark wrote decades later, involved bread. And yes, they ate other things too, but always they ate bread, which was not just incidental or idiomatic or metaphorical but the staple food.

Bread is a motif that winds its way through Mark's Gospel and through scripture, not for its own sake, or just as a symbol, but because it was a material necessity. It was important in its own right, and because of that could stand for other things too. The petition in the Lord's Prayer which we will say again today, "give us today our daily bread" means exactly what it says. While we can find more in that petition than a reference to food, if we do not start with the fact that these texts emerged in a hungry world, where food insecurity was widespread, we are missing something. More generally, it is noteworthy how often food turns into a theological problem in scripture, as in today's first reading from Genesis 3 where so much hangs on what you eat or don't eat. Scripture is then full of redemptive stories about food that respond to that one. To pray for daily bread is trust in God's provision; it is a statement not just about bread, but about faith and hope.

Food - not least bread - is necessary, but it’s also revealing. Tell me what you eat and you will reveal a lot; tell me who you eat with, and you reveal even more. In this Gospel story, where it is so crowded that "they could not even eat bread," it seems not to be the bread that is missing (except in the translation) but the space or the means to eat it, or the people to do it with. Not having room to eat bread because of the crowd is not really an architectural problem, but a social one. This crowd is a mob at this point, chaos and not community; and to eat bread or not is not just to ingest, it is to relate. Despite the number of people there, Jesus has no-one to eat with.

But then even more people arrive. His family show up—how they get in, we have no idea—having heard perhaps that he isn't eating properly (as families might), but more specifically that Jesus is "out of his mind." And then scribes from Jerusalem, representatives of the religious and political establishment, also show up—how they can get in the door is again not clear—to say worse things, and that this power that has drawn the crowds is from Satan, not God. 

This—which gives rise to that famous statement about blaspheming against the Holy Spirit—is a familiar ploy from some types of politics even now, the reversal of the truth that distracts from the real motives and goals of the accuser. We still find ourselves in many places (maybe even more so where I live and work in the USA) in the grip of claims that evil is good.  

Jesus responds to all these with a dense set of sayings that all allude to this problem of what space we inhabit, of not having room, or of whose room it is; not, that is, the literal room or space, but the way of inhabiting the world, of how it is arranged and who gets to determine that. "A house divided against itself cannot stand" he says, and then he names Satan as the original “strong man” leader who needs to be put in his place: "no one no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man." This isn't a first century home-invasion; the metaphorical strong man is a local tyrant who has unjustly accumulated goods that others need, and Jesus presents himself as the one to take and distribute what is being hoarded. So the chaos of this crowd, Jesus implies, is a sign of a deeper malaise, an arrangement of human affairs in general that Jesus comes to unmask, to oppose, and to remedy even if he is misunderstood in the process, even by family.

This episode ends with another family reference though. Mark's Gospel often presents Jesus' actions and sayings like—wait for it—sandwiches! A theme or story begins, another intervenes, and the first one finishes so that the two parts interpret each other. Here now, prompted by the renewed concern of his mother and brothers, Jesus seems to shape and form the chaos of the crowd. He extends and creates the household: "looking at those who sat around him." Mark now describes a circle, a community and not a mob. And Jesus says of this community, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” These are those he will live with, work with, and eat with.

After this episode, Jesus will go on teach the crowd by comparing the reign of God to the mystery of grain and growth that give rise to bread; then he will make plenty of room and plenty of bread, and famously feed the crowd of five thousand, leftovers included, again turning crowd into community and justice and plenty.

Not so much later, he and the disciples will again find and share bread in an upper room, where he will take it, break it, and offer it to them, inviting them to see in the bread and in its breaking and sharing, a sharing of his own self, his body and blood, so we become not merely family but members of his body. He invites them to keep eating even in his absence— which will not in fact be absence, for he will be with them when they break bread—and with us too.

The translators might have found room for one more word in this crowded passage today, but the bread is not itself the point. Much as we need bread (and there are many close by who need bread, given that our world has managed to combine massive overproduction and food waste with food insecurity and food deserts) we need the body of Christ more, not just in our spirits but so that we become the community that shares Jesus' bread, and shares bread with others. 

It is no accident that this sacrament of bread and wine uses not just the material of that one Last Supper but the staple food and drink of ancient Judea and its neighbors, of many suppers, to make us not crowd but community. As St Paul says and we will say again today, we are one body, a community in Christ, because we all share in the one bread. 

Just as it’s not bread for its own sake though, this is not community for its own sake; it is the community in which the love of God is made known and shared freely among and beyond us, where the nature of community itself is revealed not as the exercise of domination but as communion, where by sharing the bread Jesus offers, and the truth he reveals, we turn from being strangers in a crowd to being a community who do the will of God, Jesus' "brother and sister and mother."