Didn't we just do this? Haven't we been here before? Deja vu is French for ‘already seen’ and is used to describe the feeling one gets sometimes that he/she has experienced a particular situation before. Yankee manager Yogi Berra, after witnessing Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hitting back-to-back home runs in the early 1960s, famously quipped, “It’s deja vu all over again.”
And that's the feeling we get when we read this story in Mark’s Gospel. In fact, that very feeling has led to a lot of conjecture over the years about the veracity, or historicity of the story itself. It is so similar to the story of the feeding of the five thousand that one wonders if it might not be just a repeated telling of that same event told in a slightly different way.
The feeding of the five thousand, if you'll recall, is the only miracle story recounted in all four gospels. This feeding of the four thousand is recorded only by Matthew and Mark. Luke and John, for whatever reasons, did not include it.
In modern times the idea has been posed that perhaps these two stories are just different recordings, different tellings, of the same event--traditions that came down from divergent sources perhaps, and thus were recorded as different events--even if they weren't actually different events. And I suppose that idea might be plausible if Mark were writing hundreds of years after Jesus and if his sources weren't as reliable, or at least as verifiable, as he would have liked.
But Mark wasn't writing hundreds of years after the fact--more like 35 years after the fact. And Mark did not have to rely wholly upon tradition as his source. He wrote either directly or indirectly from the mouth of Peter who was an eyewitness. If the recounting of this miracle seems uncannily familiar to us, it would have seemed the same for Mark. And if they were two different recountings of the same event surely a little investigation would have revealed the truth to him. So whatever else you may conclude, Mark surely believed them to be two distinct events and he wrote within a few decades of the life of Jesus.
And not only does Mark record them as two distinct events, later (as we shall see) he has Jesus reminding the disciples of both events and referring to them as two separate miracles.
And while much about the stories is the same, there is also much that is different. As we shall see, each story serves a unique purpose within the greater story that Mark is telling us about Jesus.
Now if we accept that there is a supernatural God (and we obviously do), and we accept that Jesus was God in the flesh (which we also do), then it isn't hard to imagine that if he chose to do so, he could multiply bread and fish in order to feed a multitude once if he wanted to, or twice, or as many times as he chose--whatever served his purposes.
So we are left asking ourselves, what purpose would it serve for Jesus to do this miracle twice? And there is an answer to that as we shall see.
As for those things in the text which cause us to have deja vu all over again, we shall offer an explanation for them as we go. So let’s go ahead and get started.
The audio for this sermon you will find at the link below. The preaching of the word of God is always a blessing to God's people, so click the link and be blessed.
Click here: Mark 8:1-10 - The Feeding of the Four Thousand
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