Conspiracy Theory

Proper 11B

So I’ve been thinking about conspiracy theories this week. And no—before you start worrying about me—they have nothing to do with why the Secret Service didn’t heed warnings about a shooter climbing an adjacent building. Nor do they have to do with angels surrounding the former president nor with any divine anointing of his ear with blood. The latter is the weirdest theory, and I rather hope you aren’t exposed to it if you haven’t already been. But it goes like this. Since, according to Leviticus 14, blood is applied to the right ear of a person being consecrated by God, former president Trump is the anointed one. There’s a few problems with this particular conspiracy theory, including the fact that it implicates God in the murder of firefighter Corey Comperatore. Whew. People of God, please let’s just not use the Bible that way.

But here’s the thing about conspiracy theories. They thrive in the void: in the missing parts of the stories, kind of like bacteria thrive in an open wound. Better that we should bind up the wounds than use our imagination to further infect vulnerable openings on our bodies or in our explanatory narratives. So imagine my own surprise when I found myself trying to fill in the missing parts of today’s Gospel, or at least I started to develop conspiracy theories about it. Why in heaven’s name, I found myself wondering, did the scholars leave out the central part of the story as Mark recorded it?

Take a second look at your bulletin and notice that the reading from Mark’s Gospel leaves out verses 35-52. What’s the deal with that? What’s in that hole in the story? Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Pro tip: it’s one of the most important stories in the Gospel. In all the Gospels, actually. It’s the feeding of the multitudes, or—as Mark described it—the feeding of five thousand men. Which is the only miracle, besides the resurrection, that is actually recorded in all four Gospels. The evangelists tell it with an intriguing peculiarity of details, and—in both Matthew and Mark—there’s a second version in which four thousand men (plus woman and children) were fed a meal of bread and fish. All of which means that some version of this miracle certainly occurred, and that the evangelists all thought it very important that we hear about it. Whatever or whomever else Jesus may have done or been, he multiplied blessing. Exponentially! Indeed, he was anointed for this purpose. Because in a New Testament  perspective, God’s anointing is about abundant life, not about violence and death.

But back to conspiracy theories and what our lectionary has left out. I actually have no idea why the feeding of the 5000 was excised from today’s reading, but I’m going to guess that it may have to do with the fact that next Sunday’s Gospel—and every Sunday that follows it through the end of August—contain versions the feeding of multitudes and descriptions Jesus as the bread of life. It’s kind of a famous summer season for preachers, when we all start asking each other what more can possibly be said about bread. In contrast, today we seem to have the prelude and the postlude of the central bread story, mashed together without the innards. Kind of like an empty sandwich.

That was not an accidental metaphor. Mark is actually famous for writing intercalations, which are popularly known as the “Markan sandwich.” That is, his longer narratives tended to sandwich a special story—the meat of the matter, so to speak—between two stories related to each other. So today we heard about crowds approaching Jesus before and after the feeding, seeking teaching and seeking healing. Both the prelude and the postlude to the missing bread story indicate that was no rest for him nor for the exhausted apostles. For the people were like sheep without a shepherd.

Sheep without a shepherd. In the Bible, this phrase means what you think it does: the people were lost, metaphorically, in need of someone to guide them. But it’s used in very specific ways in the Hebrew Scriptures: lacking a shepherd was shorthand to indicate God’s judgment on bad leaders. You heard it used that way in the Jeremiah lesson: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” So based on where this particular “Markan sandwich” falls in the Gospel, we are supposed to know that sheep “seeking a shepherd” was a direct reference to the moral failures of King Herod, whom we met beheading John the Baptist in the previous chapter.

That is to say, Jesus is starting to get political, and challenge the powerful leaders. A lot has happened in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus was rejected in his hometown. He sent the twelve out on mission. John the Baptist was executed. Jesus fed the five thousand: that’s the part that was left out today. But even without that critical meat in the sandwich, we can still taste and see that something new and profound is happening. Jesus is publicly inaugurating the kingdom of God. He teaches, he feeds, he heals, visibly undermining the coercive power of bad shepherds like Herod.

The very geography of the story reveals Jesus’ emerging identity as the good shepherd of Israel. It takes us from a deserted place to shores to towns to the marketplace—the agora—the public space in which legal hearings, elections, debates and commerce were conducted. Jesus isn’t hiding his message anymore. He’s out in very public settings, condemning bad leaders and modeling the reign of God.

If he were doing this in our time, we might say that Jesus has just made his mission Instagram official. And just like social media does today, his public messaging changed the culture. But rather than making teenagers feel bad about their body image, Jesus’ media strategy illuminated ordinary people being made whole and healthy. He gave rise to hope, which is a dangerous attitude within oppressive circumstances. In a world where cynicism and despair reign, hopeful people are a threat. And hope, once launched, can’t be retracted. You can’t take it out of the Biblical story, no matter what meat you pull out of the sandwich.

So what’s been left out of the Gospel story? Despite my quibble with the curators of our Sunday lectionary, they’ve actually left the identity of Jesus and the history of salvation whole in this little sandwich of a reading. But perhaps left us with some hunger for bread, of which I assure you there is plenty coming, for weeks and weeks of summer Sundays. So I really have nothing to build a conspiracy theory around. But if anything material is actually missing from our Biblical texts, more generally speaking—anything that might give rise to conspiracy—it’s the ending. We all want to know what will happen with your next pastor, what will happen in November, what climate change will do, what God will make of our messes. We wonder endlessly about the future; if we are conspiratorial about it, we might go start prepping for doomsday. But God’s story with us is not over. The hole we have to fill in with our imagination—in the company of the Spirit, which is another definition of conspiracy—is what we will choose to do next.

Will we fall victim to dangerous conspiracies or will we be people of hope? Will we look for reasons to despair or will we go out into the marketplace—the agora—with our dreams for a kingdom of justice and peace? Will we fall victim to the pessimism and despair of this moment, or will we reassure each other, in our deeds as well as our words, that everything will be OK in the end? If you believe one thing that the Bible promises, believe this. Everything will be OK in the end. It may not be OK right now, but that’s how we know we are still called to do Jesus’ work. There’s a hole of unknowing about the future, there’s a missing piece of future we have to fill in. But as Brazilian writer Fernando Sabino assured his readers—in in the midst of the last century’s apocalyptic world wars—everything will be OK in the end. And if it’s not OK, then it’s not the end.