Deserted Places II (Mark 8: 1-10)

Today's Gospel is about the Feeding of the Four Thousand. It is a familiar story of the multiplication of seven loaves of bread and a few fish.

Going through this exercise of reading the mass readings for the day, I couldn't help but notice that this was the nth time in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus was in a deserted place. I've already written about deserted places here and here.

In fact the place where he was for the feeding of the four thousand was so deserted that there was hardly any food around and he was afraid that if he sent the crowd home, they might collapse.

All this talk of deserted places makes me wonder why Jesus kept going to deserted places. Maybe because he didn't want to bother anybody? So if people wanted to go see him, they had to go out of their way and get out of other people's way?

Maybe because he wanted to avoid the places where the powers-that-be were? So far, every time he has been in a non-deserted place, the authorities contested him, his teaching, his practices, and his miracles. And every time they did so, he moved on to the next place. Deserted places, on the other hand, are places where the powers-that-be probably wouldn't go.

I know there's a passage somewhere in the bible where he escaped from a place because they were going to crown him king. So maybe it's that too.

And of course, I have a theory that he went to deserted places to look for deserted people.

I'm pretty sure as the Gospel of Mark continues, there will be more talk of deserted places. Maybe all this suggests that if we're looking for God, we should go and look for him in a deserted place.

Elaborate Healing (Mark 7: 31-37)

The memorable word for today's Gospel is Ephphatha. Jesus is in another place which I assume is filled with Gentiles (Decapolis) and a man was brought to him who had a speech impediment.

What amazes me about this particular healing (and the one involving a blind man and mud) is that Jesus does quite a bit to heal this fellow. He puts a finger in the man's ear, spit, touched his tongue, looked up to heaven, groaned, and shouted Ephphatha!

I seriously doubt that all of that was necessary. As we read in yesterday's Gospel, Jesus could heal from a distance. So all Jesus had to do was will it and the man would have been healed. No touching needed.

Of course it could be argued that Jesus healed from a distance when the ill person was not around and someone just came to Jesus with a request. When the person was right in front of Jesus, he tended to touch them. But in most cases, all Jesus had to do was to touch (or be touched by) someone and they would be healed. So all he had to do was to touch this person with a speech defect.

Re-reading the passage, I'm thinking now that Jesus did everything he did because he felt he was expected to do something like this. The passage notes that some people brought the man with a speech impairment to Jesus and asked Jesus to lay his hand on him. If he were just asked to heal the man, then maybe no touching was required. But he was asked to lay his hands on the man. So he laid his hands on the man and then some.

I guess Jesus heals us in the way we expect to be healed, even if that method is not absolutely necessary.
Or maybe it's the miracle equivalent of speaking in parables.