don't eat alone

Mark 5:21-43; Luke 8:40-56; Matthew 9:18-26

From time to time, my father’s words come floating back to the surface unexpectedly. Each time I feel more grateful that it happened. This week, as I thought about the story of these two people who came separately to Jesus, but whose stories are intertwined, I could hear my dad talking about how most of Jesus’ ministry happened in the context of interruptions. Nothing was scheduled. Regardless of which gospel account you read, the chapter before and the one after are chocked full of relentless need. What Jesus mostly did was pay attention.

On this particular day, two people found him almost simultaneously. First, Jarius, identified as a leader in the synagogue, pushed through to talk to Jesus because his daughter was dying. Mark says, “He begged repeatedly.” It doesn’t appear he was making a power move or demanding, but he was a man of privilege, used to being able to push through the crowd and talk to whomever he needed to talk to to get things done. Jesus went with him. There is no recorded dialogue; Jesus just went. As they were walking, a woman in the crowd who was hemorrhaging dared only to reach out and touch Jesus. She didn’t have the position or confidence to speak up, so she just tagged him and caught the hem of his cloak. Jesus stopped and asked who had touched him.

This is one of my favorite parts because I can imagine the tone of the disciples’ response: “In the middle of this crowd, you want to know who touched you?” I even hear sarcastic laughter. But Jesus didn’t move, as I am sure was true of most of the people pressed in around him. Sheepishly, the woman revealed herself, and Jesus comforted and assured her. But the time she took used up what was left of the girl’s life because by the time the scene had played out, Jarius’ servants had come to say it was too late. But Jesus kept going to the house, leaned down, and took the girl’s hand and said, “Talitha koum”—“Get up, little girl.” She awoke and they had dinner.

Once again, there are more paths to take than I have time to follow, and they all lead to great places, but as long as I have heard this story I have been fascinated by Jesus’ encounter with the woman who touched him. She touched him and Jesus stopped. It’s the second part of that sentence that set things in motion.

We moved back from Africa to America for good in December of 1972—the middle of my junior year in high school. In early 1973, my father became pastor of Westbury Baptist Church. I finished high school and went on to Baylor. During the fall of my junior year, my dad became the president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, a position he held for almost three years. I was in Houston for Christmas when he sat down at the dinner table with a letter in his hand and a sort of broken look on his face. The letter was from someone who had approached him at the annual meeting the previous November. The author told my father he had tried to approach him because he needed help.

“I was not someone you knew, or someone who could do anything for you, but I needed help,” he wrote. “I introduced myself and started to tell my story, but then someone whom you did know, or who could do more for you than I could came up and you turned to them and never turned back to me. After a while, I left.” The person went on to say that his intent was not to make Dad feel bad, but to make him aware that the next time he was in a crowd he should look for those who could do nothing for him because they were the ones who needed help.

My walk from Grand Central Station up Madison Avenue from 42nd to 34th Street means I walk past several homeless people on the days I go into New York. Most of them sit silently with a small cardboard sign. A couple of them have sleeping bags. I would like to tell you I stop every morning, or that I know their names, but I don’t. Most mornings, I am paying attention to the crossing signal more than I am looking to see who is around me. I have to get to work. Last week, I was not in a hurry. I was sitting in Grand Central waiting for Ginger to come in so we could have Date Night. I was reading and sipping on a bottle of water when a man interrupted and said, “I’m sorry to bother you. Would you be willing to spare some change so I could get some food?”

“How about I buy you some dinner instead?” I said.

He agreed and asked for something for the Indian Food kiosk nearby. His name was Donald and he got Chicken Korma and a bunch of rice, no vegetables, and a Coke. He thanked me and I went back to my table and thought about the people I pass on the street. Donald got to eat because I had time to be interrupted.

Jesus stopped because he said he felt power go out of him. His point is well taken: if we start stopping, it’s going to cost us something. We can’t touch one another without consequence. Then again, we can’t walk by each other without a price either.

I’m going to have to rethink my walk to work.

Peace,
Milton

Next week: the man at the pool.

I have had an interesting journey—actually, three—with this miracle over the past days.

The first, I suppose, is the expected, or at least obvious, one: what exactly happened? Here’s a story told in all four gospels(Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:12-17, John 6:1-14), making it somewhat unusual for just that, and, though they offer different details, they are in agreement that they were in the middle of nowhere, the crowd was hungry, and this little boy had five loaves and two fish, so they took it and fed everyone—with leftovers.

There’s something about this story that makes us want to explain it. How did the food multiply, exactly? Maybe lots of people had food but weren’t in the mood to share until the kid broke open his basket. Maybe, somehow, the food just kept coming. We are built, it seems, to look for explanations, and we live in a world that offers few and mostly asks us to come to terms with mystery. I have been reading Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, and one of the sentences he quotes is from John Donne that says, in part:

Thou art a direct God, a literal God . . . Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God, too . . . . (142)

God is God, and yet any sentences we write to expand on that point must move into metaphor because that is all we have to try and articulate the one who so far outruns our vocabulary. When the disciples lived the lunch that turned into a banquet, they weren’t making theological statements as they passed the baskets. They were serving bread and fish. Later—after Jesus walked on the water and healed people and spoke in parables and died and rose again, and after whatever else happened to the disciples for forty or fifty years that followed—the gospel writers took those memories, re-membered them and wrote them down.

The context of the story—what came before and after the miracle—sent me on my second journey. Both Matthew and Mark share the same sequence of events. First, Jesus went back to Nazareth only to find that no one there was particularly impressed with their hometown kid. Mark says, “Jesus was amazed at their unbelief.” (6:6) Jesus left town.

The second event they mention, along with Luke, is Herod’s execution of John the Baptist. John, of course, was Jesus’ cousin, baptizer, and perhaps even mentor. Matthew says, “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” (14:13) That’s when the crowds kept following and we get to the miracle. Jesus was hit with two big losses. The people he had grown up with rejected him and the one who officially started his ministry—ordained him, if you will—was killed. Whatever we make of what happens next, it is a grief story.

I kept thinking about what it must have been like for Jesus to be in such personal pain and yet unable to get away from the demands of his life. The people just kept coming. Life kept going on. I remember a friend telling of going to a mall soon after her father died and wanting to scream in the middle of the place because everyone else was going about life as if nothing had happened. I wondered if Jesus felt like that. And I really thought this was going to be the journey of the week: coming to a deeper understanding that Jesus’ life, much like ours, was a catalog of losses.

But it was another quote from Stanley Fish that sent me on the journey I found most intriguing. He was talking about great last sentences to books and quoted George Eliot’s ending to Middlemarch:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is vastly dependent on unhistoric acts, and, that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the humber who lived faithfully a hidden life, and most in unvisited tombs. (129)

When I finished reading the sentence, all I could think about was the boy.

The whole event was unplanned. Jesus, nor the disciples, had scheduled a rally. As we noted earlier, they were trying to get away. Jesus wanted to be alone with his grief and his friends, but the crowd kept coming, following him around the edge of the lake and out into the wilderness, without much regard for even their own personal well-being, much less Jesus’ need for space. Who knows how the little boy got caught up in it all. Maybe he was with his family. Maybe he was skipping school and so he was lucky enough to have his lunch with him.

No one wrote down his name, what he looked like, how old he was, or any significant detail beyond the fact that he had bread and fish. Once lunch was over, we never hear about the boy again. There is no, as Paul Harvey used to say, rest of the story. He was there. He had food. The disciples took it and shared it. There is no particular mention that he even got to meet Jesus. Though it was a miracle, it was also just lunch. When it was over, everyone, including Jesus and the disciples, went on with their lives. It was an unhistoric act.

And it mattered. His action was, as Eliot said, “incalculably diffusive.” What a great phrase. The words and deeds we calculate for maximum effect are rarely as diffusive as the small moments when we speak heart to heart, human to human, mystery to mystery, looking past the literalness of a cause-and-effect world and into the deep, abiding metaphor that is our God, whose name is Love, and in whose image we are created.

If we are inclined to believe that the good in the world is not growing, perhaps it is because we have lost sight of our unhistoric significance, our ability to make tiny motions that reverberate, if not across continents, then across the barriers that keep us from one another. Whatever hungry crowds we stand in tomorrow, or the next day, may we have the courage and compassion simply to offer what we have and who we are, unhistorically.

Peace,
Milton

Next week: The woman with a hemorrhage and Jarius’ daughter.

John 2:1-12
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples; and they remained there a few days. (NRSV)

I can’t help myself.

Every time I have sat down to think about the wedding at Cana, all I can hear is Emmylou Harris singing Chuck Berry:

it was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well,
you could see Pierre did truly love that mademoiselle—
and now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell,
“c’est la vie,” say the old folks, “it go to show you never can tell.”

This miracle is traditionally taken to be the first one because it shows up so quickly in John’s gospel. However it is that Jesus ended up at the celebration, it’s the story John chooses to tell pretty much right out of the box. We already know that John was a bit of a poet with his introduction (“In the beginning was the Word . . .”), but before he gets to the end of Chapter One, Jesus is has moved out of metaphor and into real life. He talks with some Pharisees, is baptized by John, calls some of his disciples, and then heads to Galilee. By the end of Chapter One, John has said, “the next day,” three times. He starts Chapter Two with, “On the third day . . . ,” which lets us know our poet is not necessarily marking time like everyone else.

The miracle itself feels like an act of insignificant extravagance: no one was healed, no one was saved, no one was changed, he didn’t talk to anyone but his mother and the servants, we never hear that the bride and groom even knew there was a problem; other than the disciples, no one appears to have even noticed.

What I notice is the heart of this story is between Jesus and his mother. The bride and the groom were gleefully unaware. The wedding steward wasn’t looking for a sign—only a solution. Mary, it seems, was trying to help a friend, though it’s not clear why she was on the inside of the problem. For some reason, she took it on. Mary finds Jesus to tell him they had run out of wine.

His response brings me to one of my biggest questions in scripture: how in the world did Jesus get away with saying, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”? Seriously? I have played the scene in my mind, and have yet to find a manner in which those words could be delivered without serious repercussions. Mary lets him have his say and then turns to the servants and says, “Do whatever he tells you,” and goes back to dinner.

And Jesus steps up.

Any time we read scripture, I suppose, we read ourselves into the story. When I read this story, I remember an interchange with my mother from many years ago, which may be why the dynamic between Jesus and Mary jumps out at me. My parents were living in Waco—in a town where I had never lived with them, in a house where I had never lived. As a Third Culture Kid, even the houses we had lived in together didn’t feel like home. Ginger and I were living in Boston at the time—in a house I had inhabited longer than anywhere else, and in a home we had built together. I don’t remember why I was in Waco.

On three different occasions, my mother said, “It’s good to have you home.”

Each time I responded, “I’m glad to be in your house.”

As many times as I have replayed the scene in my mind, I don’t remember trying to be adversarial. My tone was not contentious. If anything, I was searching—or at least I can see that now. I was glad to see her, to be with her and Dad, but I wasn’t home. The distance from the event has given me room to try and imagine what it felt like to be on the receiving end of my words. She spent a good share of her life moving around, as well. She and Dad had worked hard to make homes for my brother and I, and then for themselves in Houston and Waco after Miller and I moved on. Our family script—this part written mostly by my father—was that we left home after college and made home for ourselves. Looking back, I see all of us were trying to figure out what home meant, even as we were working out what it meant to be family. And we came up with different answers.

After she and I played the same scene three or four times, she said, “Every time I say, ‘It’s good to have you home,’ you said, ‘It’s good to be in your house.’”

“That’s because this isn’t my home,” I said. “I never lived in this house with you. I only lived in this town in college. It doesn’t feel like home to me.”

“But home,” she said, “is where your mother is.”

“Mom,” I answered, “you haven’t always believed that. When you were my age, you set sail to spend your life ten thousand miles away from your mother. You taught Miller and I to go where God called us. You are my family, but this is not my home.”

She didn’t say anything else and we went on with our time together. Two days later, as I prepared to leave, she hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “It was good to have you home.”

I answered, “It was good to be here.”

The gospels don’t offer a great deal of information about the relationship between Jesus and Mary. We know of her sense of calling in being his mother—“Let it be . . .”—and that she was with him as he died. John notices that the two of them, along with the rest of the family and the disciples, spent some time together after the wedding. Maybe they talked about what happened. Maybe not. Either way, as Jesus got ready to leave, I can hear Mary saying, “It was good to have you home.”

Peace,
Milton

Next Monday: Loaves and Fishes

When I look back over the life of this blog, it seems I grow silent in Eastertide. Part of the reason, I am sure, is the recoil from keeping my Lenten Journal and writing straight for forty-something days and nights. I don’t know all the reasons, or that they are the same from year to year. This year, my Lenten writings were not as regular and I have been thinking about some sort of plan or project I could dig into that would give me somewhat of a writing schedule. As I was waking up in the shower a few mornings ago, it struck me: Miracle Mondays.

I am going to write about the miracles of Jesus recorded in the Gospels.

I don’t want to read them the way too many high school English teachers make their students read poetry (“Be gone, J. Evans Pritchard!”),  parsing every syllable and looking between the seams of each sentence to see what was really being said. I know there are things to be unpacked in poems—and in miracle stories—but that’s not how a poem grabs you by the heart. First, you just read it. I just want the stories to talk to me, to see if I can see the forest and the trees. Of course, the details are worth noting, along with where the stories fall in the context of the rest of what was going on with Jesus. Details are what make a story good; I just don’t want to over-analyze.

I’m also going to do my best to not feel compelled to make a theological point, or necessarily have a point at all. I want to see what the stories have to say. For now.

I plan to take the stories at face value. If it says Jesus healed the person or calmed the storm, I’m to willingly suspend my disbelief and swing out on my trapeze of trust and see what (who?) catches me. I’m not going to try and explain things, or convince anyone of anything. I’m just looking for the story, the “Once upon a time, Jesus . . . .”

One of my New Testament professors in seminary described the miracles as “parables in event,” which is to say there is more going on than Jesus healing some random person. The Gospel writers weren’t writing a travelogue, or recording minutes of their gatherings. The stories are invitations to question, to engage, to see what we might see. A parable is not an allegory, nor a fable. There’s not a lesson that is necessarily apparent, or even there at all. For me, Jesus’ parables are this-is-how-life-is stories, or this-is-how-God-is, yet, when the parable is over there are often more options than before the story was told. Sounds like fun to me.

There are thirty-five or thirty-six miracles recorded in the Gospels. I don’t know that I will write on everyone. I’m just going to jump in every week and write about what I see. I may group them, or compare them, or write about one more than once. I don’t have a particular sequence. About all I can say is I am going to write about the wedding at Cana first, when Jesus turned the water into wine.

I’ll see you next Monday. I hope you will both read along and talk back.

Peace,
Milton