Mark 8:14-21 "No Bread?" Scott Hoezee

What did they do with the leftovers? As our passage for this evening opens, the disciples discover they don’t have enough food with them. There’s one small loaf in the boat but that’s it—enough to take care of one person but what about the other dozen or so folks? How did this happen? Whose turn had it been to stock up that week? Had someone simply forgotten that it was his week to do the shopping? That’s what it looks like initially. But wait: not five verses earlier we read that following Jesus’ second miraculous feeding of a large crowd of people, the disciples had gathered up seven baskets full of leftover bread. Where did that go? What did they do with the leftovers?

The text is silent about where all that bread went. But the fact of the matter is that very soon after they collected more than enough to feed them all, suddenly the disciples find that they are as good as out of food. Although we don’t know what happened, from the looks of things the disciples had failed to take the leftovers along. For whatever the reason, they left it all behind. As we will see this evening, that fact may well stand as a metaphor not only for the larger issue at stake with the disciples but also for something we need to bear in mind this very evening as we again partake in the Lord’s Supper.

Two weeks ago we looked at an incident that took place right after Jesus’ first feeding of a large multitude. In that case, the disciples were caught out in a gale in the middle of the lake. Jesus walked on the water to come to them and calm the winds, but the level of the disciples’ amazement that Jesus could do that was said to be a result of their spiritual blindness. They still didn’t realize who Jesus really was. Mark 6 said that their hearts were hardened, and something similar is going on now here. Jesus makes an allusion to Isaiah in asking if they have eyes that fail to see and ears that fail to hear.

But in this passage there is an added element: Jesus’ warning about what he calls the “yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod.” For his part Jesus used the word “yeast” as a symbol for the way certain ideas or teachings can permeate a person’s heart the way yeast eventually gets into every part of dough. But since the disciples had just been scratching their heads over what to do about their lack of literal bread, they thought Jesus was getting in a little dig against them for not having packed dinner. So Jesus in turns shakes his own head to say, “Why are you talking about bread?” Although he didn’t do so, I’m sure Peter was on the verge of saying, “Well, you brought the subject up, didn’t you?”

No, Jesus had not mentioned anything that had to do with dinner or a loaf of actual bread. He was talking about the mindset of the Pharisees and of Herod. The Pharisees and Herod—that’s an odd pairing, when you think about it. Say what you want about the Pharisees, they were no friends of Herod. So what did they have sufficiently in common with Herod as to warrant Jesus’ lumping them into the same category? Commentators suspect that it may have something to do with what happened in verse 11 where the Pharisees had demanded that Jesus perform a miraculous “sign from heaven.”

Earlier in Mark we are told that Herod got wind of Jesus’ miracles only to conclude that this was John the Baptist back from the dead. Herod heard of the miracles and drew a singularly wrong conclusion. For their part, the Pharisees were interested in Jesus’ miracles, too, but the truth was that no matter what Jesus did, it would never be enough to convince them he was the Christ. They would always find a way to impeach his credibility. When he cast out demons, they said it was by the devil’s power that he did it. When he healed people in the Temple, the Pharisees complained he had broken the Sabbath and so it didn’t matter what Jesus did—a lawbreaker could never be the Messiah

So the yeast shared in common by both the Pharisees and Herod was their ability to see the miracles but not understand their importance. Unhappily, that is where the disciples were as well. In Mark 8 for a second time they saw a miracle that pointed to Jesus as the great Messianic shepherd of the sheep. Twice now they have seen that Jesus is a font of life so exuberantly generous that when he feeds crowds, there are always leftovers. Yet they just couldn’t grasp it. In Mark 8 the symbol for that cluelessness was their having forgotten to take the leftovers along for the next stage of their journey.

But, of course, we’re talking now about something more than just literal leftovers. True, this passage opens with the disciples’ discovery of having virtually no bread because they had not taken the seven baskets along. So yes, we begin with physical bread. But Jesus’ warning about the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod introduces metaphor into this story in a way that makes it legitimate to say something else about those leftovers. You see, both of the mass-feedings in Mark are proto-versions of the Lord’s Supper. Both times Jesus is careful to take, thank, break, and give the bread. That quadruple movement is unmistakable in the gospels as pointing to communion. The disciples had feasted on a sacrament with their Lord Jesus but when they left that sacramental meal, they did not carry anything away with them back into the wider world.

If you look at the first few verses of Mark 8 just before Jesus feeds the 4,000, you have the feeling that this time the disciples knew what would happen. After all, it had not been all that long since they had seen Jesus feed 5,000 folks all at once and so they pretty well knew what was coming now that they had 4,000 hungry folks out in the middle of nowhere. They pretty well knew what was coming and yet even so, when it was finished, they did not take away with them what they should have. Their failure to bring the literal leftovers along is symbolic of their failure to take out into the wider world the spiritual bread they should have received right along with the physical bread.

There had been more than enough both physically and spiritually. Yet when the disciples set back out into the world, they had apparently left both kinds of bread behind. And by now you should see why I said earlier that there is a lesson here for us tonight, too, as we shortly celebrate Jesus’ sacrament of Life around the holy table. Why are you here tonight? What do you expect to see? A feeding? Yes. A kind of miracle? In its own way, yes. Tonight the Holy Spirit of God encounters us and brings to us in a special way the living presence of a man who died nearly 2,000 years ago and yet is alive to us right this very evening. That really is its own kind of miracle.

And so in a while I will take, thank, break, and give you what we believe is the bread of life. But the cube of physical bread you will take into your mouth is just the sign of that spiritual feeding going on in your soul. There is more than enough bread being given to you in that sense—there will be leftovers in your heart, food to take with you back out into the world. But will you remember to take it along? Are you aware that this internal feeding is the key to understanding this entire sacrament tonight?

Fact is, we’ve all had the experience of the disciples, haven’t we? We come to church on a Sunday, we partake of the blessed sacrament, but then, not a day or two later, we find ourselves back out in the world and we’re scared to death about something or we’re convinced that no one in heaven or on earth loves us or we’re facing a decision and we’re just sure that we are totally alone in this matter. In other words, we face a crisis and conclude we don’t have the resources to handle it.

Or, tilting things a bit in a different direction, we feed on the body and blood of our Lord at his table only to go back out into the world and live as though we don’t believe the gospel. We face temptation and quite easily succumb to it. We throw ourselves into gossip with the same abandon as our coworkers who never darken a church’s door. We watch television with the same lack of critical discernment as everybody else in this media-saturated culture.

In short, we are fed with more than enough bread to nourish and sustain us in leading a Christ-like life well after we re-enter the workaday rhythms of Monday-Saturday. Yet so often we act as though we are almost starving to death of spiritual malnutrition. If Jesus warned against the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod, we need to be wary of the yeast of our wider culture.

Because our society is good at compartmentalizing, at keeping one part of life totally separate from other parts. We are encouraged to regard even our own faith as a kind of hobby, as something that won’t necessarily make an impact on our conduct at work or at the mall or when picking out movies at Blockbuster. But when faith becomes a Sunday-only hobby, then we’ve been leavened by our culture in ways that make our partaking of this sacrament tonight something approaching a mockery.

With all that is in me, I sincerely invite you to come to the Lord’s table now. I invite you to take, eat, drink, remember, and believe that Jesus was sacrificed to forgive your every sin. I invite you to take the Lord Jesus to yourself through the miracle of his Spirit’s presence among us this very night. But please note the leftovers. Please note that your soul will receive not just enough bread to last you until bedtime later this evening. You will have baskets-full of leftovers in your soul, more than enough to sustain you on the journey of faith in the days ahead.

This does not mean life will be instantly easy. It does not mean that you won’t encounter pain, tough decisions, or frightening moments in the days ahead. But what it does mean is that you endure all that and encounter all that with the bread of heaven feeding you continually in your heart and soul. You are not alone. You are not unloved. You are not forgotten. You belong, body and soul, to your precious Savior Jesus Christ. He feeds you tonight, body and soul, to prepare you for ongoing lives of discipleship.

In the boat that day when Jesus warned the disciples about bad yeast that could influence them, they said to one another, “He’s saying that because we have no bread.” No, he was saying that because they actually had access to loads of bread. The problem was they didn’t know it. Do we? Amen.