Every now and then, she really catches me by surprise.  “She” is Callie Crossley.  Callie and I met in the gymnasium of Central High School in Memphis.  It was orientation day, and most of the kids knew each other from junior high, but I had transferred in from another part of town and did not know a soul.  I looked for a place to sit, then headed for an empty space next to two girls.  One of them was Callie.  Callie was among 9 African-American students whose arrival that morning effected the racial integration of Memphis’ oldest high school.[i]  

Skip ahead nearly 20 years, to 1987.  I have graduated from seminary and am now in law school, half listening to the Academy Awards show while trying to study.  The name “Callie Crossley” breaks into my consciousness, being listed among the nominees for an Oscar® for Best Documentary Feature.  Callie, I then learn, helped produce the acclaimed documentary series Eyes on the Prize, which chronicles our nation’s battle for civil rights.  A few days later, I tracked Callie down in New York City, where she was an award-winning producer for the ABC news program 20/20.  She and I spent some time catching up with what each of us was now doing and had done since leaving high school in 1969.  Then Callie caught me by surprise by asking, “Do you find yourself living your whole life in response to what we experienced those years we were students at Central High?”

Hold that thought — we will come back to it.  But, first, we need to learn what question we will hear Jesus ask for today.  We are continuing our progress through the Gospel of Mark, examining along the way some of the provocative questions that Jesus posed to the people around him.  To understand today’s question, we have to get our bearings.  Recall that Jesus and his disciples have made several trips back and forth between their home territory on the western side of the Sea of Galilee and the region on the eastern side.  That eastern region was home to Gentiles, and Jesus has performed miracles for his fellow Jews and for the Gentiles.  Jesus drew fierce criticism for that, for sharing his message and his healing power with Gentiles — with people who were not Jewish by birth or by conversion, people who did not worship and had no faith in God.  As our passage for today begins, Jesus has just left the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee — the Gentile side — and returned to the Jewish territory on the western side.

The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him.  And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign?  Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.”  And he left them, and getting into the boat again, he went across to the other side.  Now the disciples had forgotten to bring any bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat.  And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out — beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.”  They said to one another, “It is because we have no bread.”  And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them, “Why are you talking about having no bread?  Do you still not perceive or understand?  Are your hearts hardened?  Do you have eyes, and fail to see?  Do you have ears, and fail to hear?  And do you not remember?  When I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?”  They said to him, “Twelve.”  “And the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?"  And they said to him, “Seven.”  Then he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?”

When this passage started, Jesus and his disciples had just returned to the Jewish territory on the western side of the Sea of Galilee, but almost immediately we find him getting back into the boat and returning to the eastern — the Gentile — side.  Unless we keep that fact in mind — the fact that Jesus keeps taking his disciples back and forth across the Sea of Galilee, back and forth between their fellow Jews and people who do not worship God — unless we keep that back-and-forth travel in mind, we will not understand what Jesus is trying to explain to his disciples.

Back in February, we examined what happened one day when Jesus was preaching to a crowd of 5,000 men.  When it grew late, the disciples came to Jesus and suggested that he “send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.”  Jesus acknowledged that the people needed to eat, but he told the disciples, “You give them something to eat.”[ii]  The disciples had with them five loaves of bread and two fish, and with Jesus and the disciples working together, Mark tells us, “all ate and were filled,” and afterwards the disciples “took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces [of bread] and of the fish.”[iii]  When we looked at this story in February, we said that this is not a story about food, that it is not even a story about how five loaves of bread and two fish became enough food to feed thousands.  It is, instead, a story about how thousands of people came together and experienced the generous love of God — and about a band of disciples who were discovering how they could help people come together and experience the generous love of God.  Who were discovering that Jesus expected them to help people come together and experience the generous love of God.

That episode took place on the western side of the Sea of Galilee — the Jewish side.  Since then, Jesus has overseen the feeding of another large crowd of people, but this time it was on the eastern side of the sea, on the Gentile side.  The author of Mark tells us that, “there was again a great crowd without anything to eat,” but this time it was not the disciples who noticed that the people did not have anything to eat, it was Jesus.  Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way — and some of them have come from a great distance.”  His disciples replied, “How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?” and Jesus responded with the question we heard him ask the previous time a group of people needed to eat:  “How many loaves do you have?”[iv]  From there, things went much as they did before.  A crowd of about 4,000 people “ate and were filled,” and the disciples collected 7 baskets of leftovers.[v]  Right after that, Jesus got back into the boat with his disciples, and they returned to the Jewish side of the Sea of Galilee.

That is where the Pharisees showed up and began to argue with Jesus.  What the Pharisees asked was for Jesus to give them a “sign from heaven” that would prove that he was the messiah.  We know that Jesus was not opposed to demonstrating the power and authority that were his, but Jesus knew what the Pharisees were about.  As we said this past week, the Pharisees believed that it was absolutely vital for the Jewish people to keep themselves separate from non-Jews.  The Pharisees wanted the people of Israel to have a guaranteed trip to heaven and an exclusive right to be there, and they were looking for a messiah who would make that happen.  Jesus knew this.  Jesus knew that the only messiah the Pharisees wanted was one who would give Israel a military victory over Rome and make Israel #1.  Jesus knew that when the Pharisees asked him for a sign, they were asking him to demonstrate that he could give Israel that kind of victory.  Jesus had no intention of giving them such a sign.  Jesus repeatedly warned his fellow Jews not to view their role as God’s chosen people as a reason for bigotry or national pride.  Their identity as the People of God, Jesus taught, was bound up within their call to act as servant to — not master of — other peoples and nations.[vi]

That call to act as a servant to other peoples and nations — that call was not well received.  In fact, it got Jesus accused of being a traitor and a subversive, then hanged on a cross.  But, the call to servanthood was the call Jesus had come to bring, the call he kept trying to get the disciples to understand — and undertake.  Jesus wanted his disciples to understand that God’s purpose is to gather all peoples together — to bring all the world’s people together under a new covenant, a covenant written and sealed in his blood.  Jesus wanted his disciples to undertake the mission of reaching beyond the walls of their own culture and traditions to help gather all people together in his name and in his love. 

It was slow going.  Jesus kept taking the disciples back and forth between the Jewish territory on the western side of the Sea of Galilee and the Gentile territory on the eastern side.  He kept showing them that his message of love and salvation was the same for people on both sides of that divide.  Jesus cautioned his disciples not to get caught up in all the talk and fury of the Pharisees, in the snare of those who promoted conquest and war, those who focused upon the differences between people and not upon the one God who made them all.  “Do you not remember?” Jesus asked them.  Do you not remember how I offered bread to 5,000 Jewish men, then turned around and offered the very same bread in the very same way to 4,000 Gentiles?  And do you not remember, Jesus asked, that there was plenty left over both times?  Each time, I took what you had — one day it was 5 loaves, another day it was 7 — each time I took what you had, and both times it was enough.  No one had to go without.  But, you seem to have forgotten all of that.  Here we are, heading back across the Sea of Galilee, back into the territory of the Gentile people, and you should be eager to do ministry among them.  Instead, you have failed to bring bread for us to share.

Our English translation tells us that the “disciples had forgotten to bring any bread.”  But, the original Greek does not say “forgot” — which would indicate an unintentional lapse — but “willfully neglected to take,” which reveals that the disciples consciously overlooked their obligation to bring the appropriate supplies.  Jesus drove this point home when he asked the disciples, “Are your hearts hardened?  Do you have eyes and fail to see?  Do you have ears, and fail to hear?  And do you not remember?”  These are the disciples that Jesus had appointed to go out and proclaim his message, the disciples to whom he had given authority and the ability to understand.  These are the disciples who have watched Jesus grant the same mercy and love to ne’er-do-wells and outcasts, criminals and traitors as he did the most righteous Jew.  They have seen Jesus criticized, threatened for treating people at the bottom of the social and religious ladder as well or even better than he treated the people at the top.  They have heard Jesus say, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”[vii]  Have the disciples forgotten all of that?  Have they chosen to side not with Jesus, but with his critics?

In our First Lesson this morning, we heard the apostle Paul tell the Christians at Ephesus what they should never forget:  that although by birth they were Gentiles, “having no hope and without God, . . . now in Christ Jesus [they] have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall.”  Jesus died, Paul reminded the Ephesians, “that he might create in himself one new humanity.”  As we said this past week, our God is not a separating God — our God is a gathering God.  And, following Christ is not about building a protective wall to keep the world outside, but about looking beyond ourselves to discover how we can reach out and bring the whole world in.  Which is why I have been thinking, lately, about my high school friend Callie Crossley, and about her provocative question:  “Do you find yourself living your whole life in response to what we experienced those years we were students at Central High?” 

Those years had included the full racial integration of Central High, a garbage workers’ strike for safe working conditions, and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a couple of miles from our campus.  We had witnessed bigotry and hatred that ranged from white students trying to make a black student miserable enough to want to leave “their” school, to police officers pounding clubs on the heads of unarmed women and youth.  Some of our fellow classmates responded to those events with hatred of their own, while others did their best to ignore what was going on.  Callie?  She became a broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker, someone who rips away the curtains others erect to reveal whatever truth might lie behind.  And, in her most famous work, Callie has reminded us of some people who always kept their eyes on the prize that lay ahead, no matter what.  No matter who opposed them, no matter who tried to keep them down, no matter who fought to keep them from their mission of bringing freedom not just to one group of people, but to all. 

I have been thinking about all that as I have heard Jesus ask his disciples, “Are your hearts hardened?  Do you have eyes, and fail to see?  Do you have ears, and fail to hear?  Do you not remember?”  Jesus was calling his disciples to remember all that they had seen and heard in him, then to base their whole lives upon that, all the while keeping their eyes on the prize — on the prize of fulfilling their call from God.  The prize of acting in the name of Christ to break down all of the dividing walls that separate people from each other, and therefore from God.  The prize of discovering how to reach out and bring the whole world in, until all become members of the household of God.  Amen.

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