Not unlike the United States of America, first-century Palestine was marked by distinct regions—each with various languages and accents, some with bustling urban centers while others mostly dotted with livestock herds or farms, all of them a mix of different religious sensibilities and a variety of political affiliations.
These regional features can sometimes contribute directly to the theological substance of a given story. Many Christians heard from Mark’s account of the Gospel yesterday, a passage the lectionary compilers stitched together in some peculiar ways. Overall, the passage portrays Jesus and the disciples crisscrossing the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:30-34, 53-56).
Depending on which shore they land, they could be in a town shaped by Greco-Roman culture, or one still firmly rooted in Judean traditions, or a peculiar blend of ethnic customs from many different parts of that ancient Mediterranean basin, from Egypt to Gaul.
Mark seems to fancy here some geographical depictions of how the Gospel crosses all these lines of difference, not to erase them but to weave them together into something new. The image of the boat, the singular inland sea—these stand as symbols of hope for a new world, not a world of scattered fragments but of a beautifully woven tapestry.
Mark is likewise sure to note something about the crowds Jesus encounters on these shorelines: they were like “sheep without a shepherd”—aimless, perhaps, or without a clearly defined purpose, or maybe in search of some sense of home, the safety of the corral, as it were. The growing diversity of that Galilee region, an occupied province of the Roman Empire, probably felt unsettling; the long-standing familiar had become very strange.
More pointedly, those crowds were like sheep without a good shepherd. This was Jeremiah’s complaint, which some chose to read from the lectionary yesterday as well. Ancient Israel had plenty of so-called “shepherds,” religious and political leaders of all kinds. But they were hardly “good”—they divided the herd and scattered the sheep, destroying the flock itself.
“Woe to you shepherds,” Jeremiah imagines God saying, “woe to you who have not tended carefully to my people.”
That’s another way our country today resembles ancient Palestine. By some accounts, we are more fragmented than we have ever been. Media commentators have been expressing deep concern about the recent gun violence at a presidential campaign rally coming at a time when our country is “already deeply polarized.”
Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker noted that American society has “split, it often seems, into two countries, even two realities” if not more. The divisions have grown so stark that 47 percent of Americans now believe a second civil war is likely or very likely in their lifetimes—forty-seven percent.
That sobering statistic might shed some light on another detail from Mark’s storytelling: the particular location where Jesus offers a healing touch. The crowds were bringing all those who were sick, Mark says, and laying them out in the marketplace of each town.
Markets are of course places for buying and selling, but they also stand for much more. In western Michigan, where I live, and in many other parts of the country, too, farmers markets pop up regularly as gathering places, locations for vendors and artisans of all kinds, as well as shoppers and visitors of all kinds.
Both ancient and modern markets are often crossroads, places where travelers and visitors and residents all mingle together. You can get swept away by the energy of a mob, take delight in the peculiar mix of people, or maybe feel a bit lost in a sea of strangers, perhaps unsure of where you really fit and belong, if anywhere at all.
The crowds—the ones who were like “sheep without a shepherd”—they bring the sick, and probably the lonely, and surely the despairing, always the alienated and unwell into the marketplace. Right there, Jesus heals them—sometimes only because they were able simply to touch just a corner of his tunic, a gesture of reaching out to connect, to reunite, to come home.
Mark doesn’t say what kind of healing took place, but this was no private consultation with a physician. This seems to me like a moment of social healing, of mending the fabric of a torn community, these crowds who were like “sheep without a shepherd” coming together in the marketplace for healing.
For all the advances of modern western medicine, many of us have likely forgotten an ancient insight, captured Mark’s story: healing is mostly a communal endeavor, the mending of relationships, a restoration of community—is this even imaginable any more in the United States?
In doing an image search for this past week’s liturgy leaflet, I stumbled upon a gorgeous photograph, which we used on the leaflet’s cover. It’s a photograph of a mended quilt. The textile artist, Catherine Reinhart, brings people together to mend worn-out, tattered, and torn fabrics.
The photograph of that process which accompanied the mended quilt shows the gathered community in a circle engaged in shared mending. Reinhart calls this a “collective mending session,” and I cannot help but hear the Gospel in those words, and to see in that circle of careful menders a vision of mending a torn world—one square, one village, one region at a time.
This particular mending resulted in creating something like a blood-red cross—yet another nexus point with the lectionary yesterday. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians includes a declaration of divine peace-making, with Jesus breaking down the dividing wall of hostility with the blood of his cross (Eph. 2:11-22).
All of Paul’s writings are rooted in his own experience of having been a violent persecutor of the early Jesus movement. Encountering the forgiveness and reconciliation of God in Christ—which, by the way, began with the healing of his vision—that encounter dramatically changed his life.
Whatever else salvation means, it certainly includes the healing of our divisions. For Paul, this meant the nearly unthinkable communion between Jews and Gentiles; the circumcised and uncircumcised; the religiously righteous and the ritually unclean. The Gospel creates, we might say, an ongoing collective mending session called “church.”
Whenever I despair over the state of American society—the vitriol, the hatred, the violent divisions—I try to imagine what in the world the Church can offer to such intractable problems. Catherine Reinhart has given me a new way of envisioning a solution: bearing witness to the God who heals and mends, offering a model of community not rooted in “sameness” but stitched and woven together with the threads of difference.
Surely this is why it matters for Christians to gather around the Eucharistic Table week by week, a Table to which God calls us not by merit but from grace, and only and always for love.
By such grace and love we might yet offer a collective mending session to a world in pain, and for the world’s healing.
