Regular visitors will remember that a week or so ago, in reference to Mark 8, I mentioned that the "feeding miracles" were the textual fodder for some of the best sermons I have ever heard. So, a few days later, I walked into church, heard John's account of a feeding miracle, and sure enough, it was followed by one of the best sermons I have ever heard.

And here it is, courtesy of the preacher, the Rev. Martin L. Smith of St. Columba's in northwest DC:

I taught myself to read during daycare at my grandmother’s using the only reading matter available—her weekly women’s magazines. My grandfather used to read aloud in a satirical tone extracts from the personal advice columns, the equivalent of Dear Abby. He called them “the dirty bits” because they contained veiled allusions to sexual problems. This greatly intrigued me at age four, so I turned to the back of the magazines and laboriously spelled word by word what “Evelyn Home” or “Angela Gray” had to say to help the women who had written to them deal with their painful issues, conflicts, dreams, aspirations, and fears—and above all how to deal with men, the biggest problem of all, it seemed. Most of it was veiled in an adult code I couldn’t crack, but that didn’t deter me in the least.

So for me, reading and writing were for ever after indissolubly linked with the possibility of reaching out to people struggling with their unhappiness and seeking ways to negotiate their relationships. And I was precociously alerted to undercurrents of gender conflict that are constantly pulling all of us this way and that. That’s why many passages from scripture only really come alive for me when I can uncover the gender tensions that are just below the surface. Let me demonstrate. The story of the feeding of the five thousand is electrically charged with high voltage tension about ‘gender agendas.’ What do women really want? What do men really want?

First of all, I must warn you there is a deliberate mistranslation in today’s gospel reading which arises from our present-day nervousness about gender inclusiveness. “So they sat down, about five thousand in all.” But the Greek text says, “So the males sat down, about five thousand in all.” That sounded “exclusive”, so the translators cheated and changed it to the generic “they”—defying the hard fact that all four gospels insist that this story concerns five thousand men. Mark says so directly. Matthew underscores it with an expression that means women and children were off the scene. This is a gender-divided occasion.

Why did five thousand able-bodied males converge on Jesus when he had sailed over the Sea of Tiberias with the twelve into the uninhabited hill country? Well, let’s see what this would look like to Roman intelligence officers, if they could have done an aerial reconnaissance. First, they would have been very aware that the feast of the Passover was near in which Jews celebrated their liberation from Egyptian oppressors. Jewish insurgents often launched their rebellions just before Passover when feelings were running especially high about the shame and misery of being under pagan occupation. Secondly, the gathering was in the wilderness, which, as we know from the Jewish historian Josephus, was the traditional mustering place for rebels, out of range of military surveillance.

Click for more. And think about printing it out. You deserve the chance to read it at your leisure.

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