Today’s Scripture Readings

Gospel Reading

NRSV

As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’ But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’ And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.

One can only speculate what life would have been like for the early Christian Church in Rome when Mark was writing his gospel. Persecution would have been rife and the threat to the fledgling Christian community both ever-present and troubling.

This world in which the early Christians found themselves was ‘a deserted place’. Their understanding of the imminent second coming of Jesus is reflected in Mark’s comment ‘the hour is now very late’. There is a sense of urgency in the message.

Today’s gospel story is one of both encouragement and hope, encapsulating the very essence of eucharist. Jesus welcomes the crowd who have heard his teaching and yet are still hungry for both word and physical nourishment. ‘You give them something to eat’ he says to his increasingly anxious disciples.

In the context of the early Christian community, it was the disciples who would feed the faithful in both word and eucharist in the name of Christ: ‘Take and eat, this is my body given for you…’

Today, we too gather in ‘a deserted place’, a world dominated by fear, threats of war and civil unrest, a world overcome by consumerism and negativism. One could easily be forgiven for wondering where the good news of Jesus is in all of this. The answer can only ever lie in the gospel of hope we can offer. Jesus commands: ‘You give them something to eat.’ What we have received and what we give is the food of eucharist which nourishes and replenishes us to be the face of Christ to others.

This, my friends, is our challenge today.