A Thanksgiving Meal
Mark 8:1-10
Today, we're looking forward to a wonderful Thanksgiving meal. This will be my first Thanksgiving - we don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Britain - so I had to find out what Thanksgiving is! Maybe some of you don't know either. So I looked in Webster's Dictionary - this is a very old dictionary of American English, and it said:
In the United States it is now customary for the President by proclamation to appoint annually a day (usually the last Thursday in November) of thanksgiving and praise to God for the mercies of the past year.
Then I looked in Wikipedia. Wikipedia knows everything. It says this:
Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, is a traditional North American holiday to give thanks at the conclusion of the harvest season. Thanksgiving meals are traditionally family events where certain kinds of food are served. First and foremost, turkey is the featured item in most Thanksgiving feasts (so much so that Thanksgiving is sometimes facetiously referred to as "Turkey Day"). Now this sounds very good! I heard last time how much work Brian and Vera put into making the turkey for us.
Stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, turnips, and pumpkin pie are commonly associated with Thanksgiving dinner.
This sounds all very good - do we have all these things?
Often guests bring food items or help with cooking in the kitchen as part of a happy, communal meal.
Did we do this? Oh well.
In keeping with the holiday theme of giving thanks, during the socializing or meal, people talk about what they are thankful for or tell about experiences during the past year which have caused them to feel grateful.
I hope we will do this around our Thanksgiving meal as well! But that will come later; today I want to look at another meal as we continue to read through Mark.
We already had the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand. Now, at the start of chapter 8, we have the story of Jesus feeding four thousand. Let's read it.
(Chapter 8:1-10)
Let's just recap a little. Jesus has been teaching around Israel, and he's starting to annoy the Jewish leaders. Then he and his disciples went on a holiday to Tyre and there they helped a Gentile woman. They came back through Sidon, and I think that they picked up a few people on the way. Jesus says that some of his crowd have come a ``great distance''.
Last time, Jesus was teaching, and the crowd got tired and Jesus asked his disciples to feed them. This time I don't think that Jesus has been teaching. These people have been with him for three days. They have been travelling from Lebanon to Israel with him. Let's not forget that Jesus was an interesting person to be around! People followed him to see what he was going to do next.
Two weeks ago I was at a conference about church planting and since then I have been talking with lots of people about the church. ``What is the church?'' ``What should the church be?'' I think here we find a very good definition of the church. The church is a bunch of people who follow Jesus around to see what he's going to do next! The church is a group of people who have been surprised by Jesus, and want to be surprised again. That's what I think the church is!
This time the church includes more than just Israel. Jesus has gone out to the Gentile lands and he has brought back people into Israel. In Isaiah chapter 66, God talks about going out into all the countries of the world and bringing them back to himself. Jesus has started doing this! He goes out, and he meets people in their need, and then he brings them to God.
And out in the wilderness, after three days of travelling, they are pretty hungry, and he feeds them. Now we have seen this situation before. The first meal was for the Jewish people, and this meal is for everyone. So this is not new to us, and it was not new to the disciples. He asks them pretty much the same question he asked them last time: how are we going to feed them?
This is a test. It's not a difficult test. They really ought to know the answer by now. But they still haven't got it yet. Jesus wants them to work out for themselves who he is.
The same thing happens as before. Jesus gives thanks for the bread, and breaks it. We know what he almost certainly said at that point - there was a special blessing you said over a meal with bread in it:
Barukh attah, Adonai Eloheynu, Melekh-ha'olam, haMotzi lechem min ha'aretz (Praised be you, Adonai our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth).
Then in the next verse, he gives thanks again. This is really a thanksgiving meal! This time we have no idea what he said. Because you didn't do this. According to Jewish law, thanksgiving for the bread would be enough for the whole meal. But Jesus does more than the law requires.
Remeber that Jesus has been fighting with the Pharisees. The Pharisees have made the Jewish law too complicated and difficult for people to follow. Jesus has been telling them that God looks at the heart, not at the tiny details of our actions. But this does not mean he did less than what was required to please God; sometimes he did more than enough!
Perhaps we can look at it this way: When he gave thanks the first time, he was doing what the law required. The law required him to give thanks. But when he gave thanks again, he was really giving thanks! He was giving thanks because he was actually grateful to God for everything He had done.
In a way, giving thanks to God is something you can't do enough. I have been challenged recently about the amount of joy in my life. The Bible talks four hundred times about joy and rejoicing. Jesus told his disciples to rejoice that their names are written in heaven. I don't really do this. Do you? I rejoice more that I win a game of igo, or that my cricket team beats India, but not really that my name is written in heaven. Like the four thousand, we have been brought in from the outside and made into the people of God. God has called us his own family! Isn't this amazing? We ought to be the most joyful people on earth. Our joy should shine out to other people and be attractive to them! Looking around the room today...
Today we're celebrating thanksgiving. Let's give thanks to God for all that he has done for us. Let's ask him to give us his Spirit and make our lives more joyful. Let's go beyond the minimum, and really make this a day for giving thanks.