Mark 8

For a second time now, our Lord has provided thousands with food, when His disciples only seemed to have a few loaves of bread and some fish. What are we supposed to learn from these episodes? We should not miss the obvious: The text indicates that the actions of our Lord were an expression of His compassion. They were also a reminder of the One who had provided manna to Israel in the wilderness for forty years. We also can easily connect these accounts with prophesies of great plenty in the age of the coming kingdom of heaven, a kingdom that Jesus is preaching. Our Lord understands what it is to be human and to be hungry. He himself suffered in the wilderness for many days without food. He will provide for His church during the struggle of the present age, and He will bring us to a land that will truly flow with milk and honey in the age to come. He loves us, and He knows our needs. He will provide.

These are the kind of lessons that we can learn as those who have the Scriptures and the Spirit of God at work within us; those who have heard the truth about the cross and the resurrection. It was much harder to understand the meaning of the great deeds of Jesus in earlier days. His disciples seemed to have little awareness of what He was doing, even though He spoke to them explicitly about so many things. When He spoke to them about the "leaven" of the Pharisees and Herod, meaning the dangerous, almost infectious quality of their unbelief, the men closest to Jesus during His days on earth were convinced that He was making some vague comment about their need for bread. They did not understand His compassion, His divinely empowered actions, and the power of the kingdom that He was displaying. They did not see that what looked like a lack of bread was not a problem for the Messiah. Jesus knew that, though the church might suffer from hunger in future decades and centuries, her bigger problems would come through outbreaks of unbelief all around her and within her ranks.

The very next episode in Mark's account is a most unusual two-stage healing of a blind man. Why would the Messiah, who can heal perfectly with a simple word, choose to do something like this healing, first in a partial way, and then only fully with a second touch? It seems possible from the accounts before and after this miracle, that our Lord is telling us something about the progress of our faith. Just as Peter was able to confess Jesus as the Christ, and then deny His plan of dying for us as our Substitute, we too confess and believe, but we do not see things fully. We easily miss the signs of heaven in the Scriptures. We forget the compassion of our Redeemer, and we feel alone and abandoned, as if God were not trustworthy to work all things powerfully for our good. We need more than one touch from His heavenly hands in order to see things more clearly.

We are slow to see and to feel our true need for the cross. Jesus is not just another great prophet. He is the Christ, and this Christ is a suffering Messiah. Any Messiah who was unwilling to die our death, would be a Messiah who could not take away our debt. The true Son of Man who would come one day on clouds of glory, in fulfillment of Daniel's vision, would have to first suffer many things, be rejected by the great leaders of Israel's religious establishment, and be killed as the Lamb who was led to the slaughter. Yet this would not be the end of the One who was the Bread from heaven. He would conquer death itself in His resurrection after only three days.

Not only did His disciples find this plain statement very hard to understand, Peter thought it such a strange thing for Jesus to say that He rebuked Him. This was a very ignorant thing for Him to do. It was ignorant of the Scriptures, since these things were taught in the prophets. It was ignorant of the person of Jesus Christ, and His two natures as the one who was not only fully human, but also fully divine. It was even ignorant of Peter's own confession that Jesus was the Christ, a confession made just moments before. It was very strange thing for one of the disciples to presume to rebuke the man who He had just confessed to be the Son of God. Jesus rightly rebuked Him, and identified at least some of the source of our confusion and unbelief. There is an unseen adversary against us. When we foolishly believe lies about ourselves and about our Savior, then we fall into the snare of the one who is the father of lies.

Our way, the true Christian way, is always the way of the cross. We love the cross of Christ, because we know that there could be no hope for us without the perfect work of redemption that was accomplished for us by our Lord. We even love the lesser crosses that our loving God ordains for us. We know that these are here for us, at least in part, that we might see things rightly. Without suffering, it is especially hard for us to think that it would be a wise thing for us to give up the whole of the current world system in order to be found in Christ on the day of resurrection. Through our Lord's grace in our trials, we receive something of a second touch, a sanctifying blessing, we thirst for the day when He will come in glory with the holy angels, and we are aided in the hard work of putting off our foolish and ignorant shame of our Redeemer and of His powerful cross love for His people.