January 25, 2004
Dunedin, Florida

Also preached at the Igreja Presbiteriana Independente de Vila Romana, Sao Paulo, Brazil on January 11, 2004, in Portuguese.

A Tale of Two Places

Mark 8:1-13

This is a tale of two places. The two little stories, told one after another, tell a larger story together, a tale of two places. We don’t have exact geographical knowledge; we don’t know how to pinpoint them on a map. We do know how very different they were, how different things happened there, how different people came to Jesus in different ways, for different reasons, and how Jesus gave different responses to them, and different things happened.

The first of these places is simply known to us as a desert place. It would be better to call it a deserted place. It might have had green grass. It seems to have been some kind of floodplain on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. It might have been near Bethsaida, in the territory ruled by Philip the Tetrarch, which included a few miles of lake frontage. Poor Bolivia has always wanted an outlet to the Pacific Ocean, which has been denied to it, but Philip the Tetrarch did have an outlet to the Sea of Galilee, a small one, and that might just have served as a meeting place. It was one of the few places that could accommodate large numbers of people in those days. You couldn’t fill Rio’s Maracana Stadium, but you could fill the floodplain.

The other place was called Dalmanutha. It must have been a newly built settlement or one newly rebuilt or at least renamed, since the name has an Aramaic feel to it. The ending in “tha” is a dead giveaway for Aramaic. If, as some e scholars suggest, it was near Tiberias, it would be a perfect place for Pharisees. Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, had built Tiberias on top of a cemetery, which made it impure from the point of view of Jewish law. One could be in Dalmanutha without violating the purity code but be close enough to Tiberias to pursue an unholy alliance that apparently existed between the Oh-so-holy Pharisees and the oh-so-profane Herod, and Mark hints strongly at just such an alliance. (Mark 3:6; 12:13. One exegete who understood the irony in Mark 3:6 was John Calvin.) But on a day-to-day basis what they had going there might have been something like a theological seminary. Since I love theological seminaries, the Pharisees and I might even have the same problems.

At these two different places, Jesus reacted to the people in two different ways in ways that the disciples would be sure to remember. On the floodplain, Jesus had compassion on the crowd. Nobody asked Jesus for anything on that occasion. It was Jesus’s compassion that started the action there on the floodplain, and not a request or petition on the part of the hungry people, also not a suggestion or recommendation on the part of the disciples. Outside Dalmanutha, Jesus reacted with extreme impatience, as his action there will show.

On the floodplain, what happened was really a show. Feeding 4000 people to their full satisfaction with seven loaves of bread and a few little fish—How can you top that? Well, maybe, by feeding 5000 people from five loaves of bread and exactly two fish, as the same Jesus has done earlier (Mark 6:35-44). The language of the Feeding of the Four Thousand reminds us of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, telling us that Jesus did it more than once. Something else: these shows were really signs from Heaven. On the occasion of the first one, Jesus looked up to Heaven while blessing the bread.

What happened near Dalmanutha was, of course, different. Jesus’s words to the Pharisees there have nothing to do with getting himself out of a scrape or with covering up for his inability to put on a show.

Jesus has just put on a show, and the Pharisees have missed it.

Jesus speaks to the Pharisees a few words, which come through like an unfinished sentence, turns his back, and leaves abruptly, taking the disciples with him in such a hurry that they forgot about buying bread before they left. Later on, in the boat, they would talk about that. That’s the action by Dalmanutha. He cut them off.

The Pharisees have missed the show, and there was no show for them. Why? What happened?

We can say, correctly, that the Pharisees had a testing attitude. They demanded a show on their terms and on their turf. Give us a miracle, bet you can’t do it, ha, ha. That’s bad, but it might not be the whole story. While the Pharisees’ attitude is fairly clear, we just don’t know about the attitude of the Four Thousand. Who’s to say that all Four Thousand had the same attitude? Nowhere does it say that the Four Thousand were people of faith. It might well be that some were and some weren’t. It may well be that some people among the Four Thousand also had their doubts, also had a testing attitude. Whatever their inner attitude, at least they were there, and at least they stuck around for three days.

The Pharisees hadn’t gone to the floodplain. They hadn’t gone where the people were. (One can read in a number of textbooks that the Pharisees were “popular leaders.” There seems to be a problem with those textbooks. The Pharisees were indeed more popular than the Sadducees, but that wasn’t enough.)

We too may well see more of Jesus if we go where the people are. Linnis can tell you more about where the people are in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

[Here it was Linnis’ turn to speak. She spoke about tenements called cortiços. She spoke about recycling workers or paper pickers, called catadores de papeis. She talked about the conditions of life for the very poor in Sao Paulo. Those who dwell in favelas, the shantytowns or slums that a visitor to Sao Paulo sees and considers an eyesore, are far better off than these people.]

Now it’s time to sum up, and the point should be clear by now. You and I may well see what God is doing if we go where the people are. There are many rewards along the way, but no promise that it will be easy. There are many moments that one wouldn’t trade for anything. Burnout and depression are also realities, but resurrection lies ahead of us, at the end of precisely this road.

I would like to challenge those who believe in the resurrection to involve themselves in one of those places which need resurrection the most.

Archibald M. Woodruff

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 146