From Crowds to Community

This morning as I was running, I was thinking about a lot. This week, I have been focusing on the acts of the apostles as they moved from fear to evangelism. I passed a neighborhood watch sign in my neighborhood and thought about how we have a crowd of people in my neighborhood but no real community. Too often the church is exactly the same way.

Then I remembered the feeding of the multitudes stories in the Bible like the one found in Mark 6:30-44 (CEB).

You can hardly blame the dis­ci­ples for being a lit­tle irri­tated with Jesus. Here they have just returned from their first mis­sion­ary adven­ture, weary yet burst­ing with energy to share with him “all they have done and taught.” In response, Jesus invites them to go away with him “to a deserted place by them­selves” (Mark repeats this twice for empha­sis). The first-ever-recorded church retreat is inter­rupted, how­ever, in part because of the suc­cess of their own out­reach. The crowd sees them going, rec­og­nizes them, and fol­lows them. The dis­ci­ples, together with Jesus, have begun to estab­lish rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple, and they are no longer anonymous.

When Jesus sees the throng amassed on the shore­line, he is moved to com­pas­sion and can­cels (or at least post­pones) the retreat. For him, it is time to get to work. We can imag­ine that the dis­ci­ples had a some­what dif­fer­ent reac­tion. By the time night falls, they are both frus­trated with Jesus and fatigued by the work. In con­text, Jesus’ response to their rather sen­si­ble sug­ges­tion to send the crowd away seems almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble: “You give them some­thing to eat.” The crowd has now become a burden.

Their bur­den.

Yet that seems not to be what Jesus has in mind. The dis­ci­ples assume the resources for this repast must come only from them. Jesus instead sends them into the midst of the peo­ple to assess what resources might be avail­able from those they are called to serve. They are not impressed by what they dis­cover, but Jesus is not dis­suaded. What they have will be enough.

Then, in a move that is often over­looked in the retelling, Jesus prompts the dis­ci­ples to act in a way that they must have found mys­ti­fy­ing at the time. He directs them to have the crowd sit down in groups on the green grass. Not just any size groups, but groups of fifty and one hun­dred. In that moment, the crowd becomes a com­mu­nity. Then, to rein­force their role as lead­ers, after bless­ing and break­ing the loaves and the fish, Jesus gives the food to the dis­ci­ples to set before the peo­ple. It is they, not he, who feed them.

With­out dimin­ish­ing the mir­a­cle, notice how fun­da­men­tally this move alters the dynamic of the nar­ra­tive. You can visu­al­ize the sig­nif­i­cance of the trans­for­ma­tion. I pic­ture a sup­ply truck arriv­ing in a refugee camp, the hun­gry crowd gath­er­ing as a fren­zied pack to get their share of the scarce resources before they quickly dis­ap­pear. In com­mu­nity, the dynam­ics are alto­gether dif­fer­ent. Sit­ting in a cir­cle, you con­nect with those around you. As you pass the bread from per­son to per­son, aware of how many peo­ple it has to feed, you are less likely to take more than your share, both because you can see the faces of those around you and because the col­lec­tive will of the group would not allow any­thing else. You can imagine—though Mark does not say it—that those who might have had a lit­tle extra tucked away, afraid to share with the hun­gry crowd, now are more will­ing to add theirs to the col­lec­tive pot, know­ing that there will be enough for them, too.

Mark’s nar­ra­tive invites us to aban­don our assump­tions of scarcity and trust the abun­dant resources of the com­mu­ni­ties in which we serve, both inside and out­side the con­gre­ga­tion. While there are cer­tainly times when going on retreat is appro­pri­ate and get­ting away to a deserted place by our­selves is just what the doc­tor ordered, Jesus refuses to let the needs of the crowd be ignored because that is our need. If we come to feel that it all depends upon us, then the recourse is not to escape for a time, only to return so that once again we can be the sole provider of lead­er­ship in our con­gre­ga­tions and com­mu­ni­ties, but to look more deeply, to “go and see” what resources are present that we have not yet dis­cov­ered. The promise of com­mu­nity, and the tes­ti­mony of orga­niz­ing, is that we will dis­cover resources in such abun­dance that not only will the com­mu­nity dis­cover its capac­ity to meet its own needs, but our own spir­its will be fed in the process. At the end of the day, there is a bas­ket for each one of us, too.

I think the ongoing message of Easter is that we need to reach out to the community and take care of one another and we will be surprised at what happens.