Forgetting the Bread

Sometimes, we read right past the things in the Bible that remind us that the biblical characters aren't so different from us after all. That the struggles we have are the same. 

Usually, these things we miss are in the transitions. 

The other day, I was reading in Mark 8, which starts with the feeding of the four thousand. You can probably recall this story - Jesus is discovered by a crowd of folks who are impressed by the reputation of Him and want to hear and see Him for themselves, but it's getting late and it's obvious that everyone is going to be hungry, so Jesus asks how much food they have lying around, and they come up with a few loaves of bread and a few fish. Jesus blesses them, breaks them, hands them out to the crowds, and then, the disciples pick up seven baskets of leftovers. In an age without refrigeration, there doesn't seem to be much use for leftover fish, so it's likely that most, if not all, of these seven baskets were filled with bread. 

Then, "immediately," Jesus and His disciples get into a boat and cross over to the other side of the sea, where the Pharisees start to harass Him (as expected), and He says to His disciples that they don't have time for this, so they get back into the boat and go somewhere else. 

Cut to another scene that we seem to know very well. Jesus and His disciples are in the boat, crossing the sea once again, and the disciples are grumbling because they're hungry. They don't have any bread with them. Jesus tells them to beware the yeast of the Pharisees... and they're like yeah, of course. The Pharisees don't make very good bread. We wouldn't want that anyway. 

But that's not what He was talking about. 

And all of a sudden, here we are, two or three paragraphs from the miracle, and we're arguing about what the yeast of the Pharisees is and whether the Pharisees can even make good bread or whether they're not very good persons or what exactly Jesus means by this. 

In the middle of all of this, there's one little sentence that changes the whole way I understand this scene...and I'm not sure I recognized it for what it was until I read it this most recent time (despite the fact that I've been reading my Bible for 25+ years). 

Here it is:

The disciples had forgotten to bring any bread with them. 

That's it. They had forgotten to bring any bread with them. 

In our world where we have cut and numbered and compartmentalized the Bible, we miss what this means. We miss the connection here. We have traveled, in our minds, across three different stories - the feeding of the four thousand, the interaction with the Pharisees, and the famine in the boat. They even have different headers in most modern Bibles over these different subsections, so we simply read them as different little stories, vignettes, unconnected parts of the Gospel. 

After all, we know there are time gaps. We know that we're bouncing around a little bit. 

But read Mark's words. Jesus feeds the four thousand, immediately gets into the boat and crosses the sea, encounters the Pharisees for an indeterminable amount of time (but probably not long), then gets back in the boat, where now we're grumbling about not having any bread. 

Just a few paragraphs ago, right before immediately, there were seven baskets of bread. The disciples forgot to take any of that with them? Mark doesn't say they ran out of bread. Mark doesn't say the bread went stale. Mark doesn't say the bread was moldy. Mark says they forgot to bring any bread with them. 

They left seven baskets of bread on the hillside. 

We are more like than I even thought we were....