I. Introduction
I want to frame this conversation with a question: How does Jesus orient or reorder his society around the welcoming meal, around hospitality?
All societies, as I have written elsewhere, are ordered around models of table fellowship. After the Fall, however, this ordering is often a dis-ordering that tends towards the deformation of both individual and communal desire, as well as a bending-out-of-shape of political and economic life.
To explore this question I want to draw upon the account of Jesus’ feeding of the 5000 in the Gospel of Mark (6:35–44). The goal in this opening contribution to a conversation on hospitality is less to propound a fully-orbed account of missional hospitality or intercultural exchange or whatever else. Rather, my aim is to frame our topic in a way that incites fruitful gospel dialogue.[1]
II. Send them away
Our setting, we notice if we are attentive, is terrible: a desolate place (Mk 6:35).
This is not merely a place in which the means to provide is limited, narrowed, making hospitality a seeming impossibility; it is also a haunted place. It is where Jesus is led by the Spirit to contend with the Devil (1:12–13). It is a place inhabited by wild beasts.
This is no trivial detail. Wild beasts, thēriōn (θηρίων), like the Devil, are ravenous. They look for those whom they may devour (cf. 1 Pet 5:8). This is the language used by Sophocles to describe the condition into which Philoctetes has descended after being marooned by the Atreidai:[2]
Now stript of all the things
That make up life, lies here, apart from all,
With dappled deer, or beasts
With shaggy manes, still dwelling in his pain,
In hunger fierce, with grief.
To be in the wilderness is, like the beasts which inhabit it, to be cut off from the life of the city. It is not just to be without home or food; it is to be without law and order.[3]
And while John made the wilderness the site of his ministry (cf. Mk 1:4), he has just recently been beheaded (according to the structure of Mark 6:14–29). There’s a haunting question posed here in the wilderness: Will the same thing happen to the Son of Man who now ministers to crowds in the wilderness?
The wilderness is a place that exposes our hunger, our questions, and our mortality. It reveals precisely what we don’t have. It presents to us a place which disables all the domestic features that allow us to make things click. The wilderness, like the TV series The Office, is a setting without a laugh track—no canned giggling to cover over our weaknesses and awkwardnesses. Our need becomes naked in the wilderness.
It is this extreme exposure created by the wilderness that produces the seeming humanitarian response of the disciples to the needs of the crowd: “Lord, send them away” (Mk 6:36). Which is to say, “Let them go and have their needs cared for in conditions and among persons who are better equipped to provide for them.” It is the standard human response, edged with more or less sharpness, when I am made to realize my lack.
It is the response of the disciples to the neediness of children (e.g., Matt 19:13–15) and the response to the outrageousness of a woman anointing Jesus’ feet (e.g., Mk 14:3–9; Jn 12:1–11): “Get her outta here!” It is, lastly, the response of Jairus’ servants upon the passing of his daughter (Lk 8:49), “Don’t bother the Master any longer!”
But Jesus came precisely to be bothered by us. Jesus does not send us away. Jesus does not dismiss the children,[4] nor does he dismiss the crowds who are hungry.
The disciples may also be well aware that the difference between a crowd and a mob is often only a matter of hunger. How quickly could these needy thousands, spurred-on my need and desperation, become therion, wild beasts, themselves?
III. How many loaves do you have?
Jesus’ response demands the impossible of the disciples: “You give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37). We cannot jump ahead of the story and anticipate the miracle ahead of its occurrence. We must be very careful here to not miss what is going on: Christ is refusing to let them off of the hook of being included in the work of the kingdom.
Jesus acknowledges, if implicitly, that the need they are pointing out is real. The crowds must have something to eat. He is also acknowledging that the lack they feel is real, for he does not say, “Nah, come on guys, you got it in you if you believe and follow your heart and be positive, and strain harder at the yoke of life.”
He is acknowledging their need, acknowledging their lack, but not allowing those two things to excuse them from participation in the service of the Kingdom. Instead, he invites the disciples to obey him in his command to a conviviality—a life-with-ing, a sharing of life.
Jesus does not ask the disciples to produce what they do not have. What Jesus does ask for is everything that they do have.
Christ comes into our lack and need, into our wilderness, our desolate places, not to excuse us from his Story, nor to merely manipulate us as strictly passive recipients of God’s grace, vacuous zombies whose creaturely sovereignty can only function in a zero-sum game with God’s Sovereignty. No. He comes to include our lack, our finitude, our dependency, our need, our gifts, our talents, our bodies, our mannerisms, and our ever-leaning dependencies, in his kingly ministry of provision.
He includes us with what we do have and gathers us into hospitable mission with him. He takes the loaves and fishes into his Narrative just as he takes all other kinds of “what you do haves” throughout the Scriptures: the widow’s mite, Paul’s roman citizenship, Mary’s timed breathing through contractions as she labors in a kataleuma late on the evening of December 24, the largeness of Lydia’s Philippian residence, the solitude and stink of Simon the Tanner’s rooftop terrace, the hard wood of patibulum and stipites stuck in the ground on a hill east of the City of Jerusalem, Lazarus’ corpse, and the list goes on and on.
Often we protest against Kingdom Conviviality because we compare our lack with what others have. “Oh I could not do what the Leitharts or the Knowles or the Smiths do,” we say. “I don’t have the [insert noun] that they do.” But this misses the point of Jesus’ invitation: He asks me to be hospitable with what I do have. He does not disdain what I lack, but neither does he let that lack prevent me from answering his call to discipleship.
In this event, Jesus directs, or orders, desire towards the commingled good of what one has towards a common sharing of life. Jesus eschews a zero-sum game drawn between “me” and “you” or “self” and “other” and creates a new identity: “us” and “ours.” This sharing and giving and mixing of things in the Master’s Hands liberates us from what Byung Chul-Han calls the “inferno of the same.”[5]
V. On green grass
Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd (Ps 23; Jn 10:11–18), treats the crowd as a flock of sheep, making them repose on the green grass (Mk 6:39). His display of hospitality here is not “general” but particular. He is revealing himself in the gestures and signs done here as the Divine Shepherd Host which YHWH God has always been.
He has his disciples array the hungry multitude in groups of hundreds and fifties, a marshal arrangement recalling the way the Lord of Hosts led his people up from another wilderness (Ex 18:25; Deut 1:15). Jesus is the True David, shepherding the flock of Israel; he is a new Joseph giving bread to Jacob’s hungry children in a wasteland where there is no food; he is a new Joshua with a new military camp eating miracle bread in the wilderness; he is a new Moses governing a multitude and dividing them by number.
He takes the bread, blesses, breaks, and multiplies it, following the biblical pattern of creation.[6] And the many hungry gathered there eat, and they are satisfied, being well-fed. Their common life is structured by the hospitable welcome of the eucharistic life of the Lord.
We cannot miss the order of the miracle. It is in the breaking—which is an act of division, of ripping, of tearing, of loss—that the multiplication occurs. As I have written elsewhere, this pattern of “dividing to multiply” runs from Creation through the entire Canon of Scripture.God breaks, divides, and “makes room” in order that life may abound. As in the beginning God created the whole world in a three-fold pattern of separating / dividing (darkness from light, water from water, dryland from the waters), so also God wondrously recreated the whole world by breaking the blessed body of his Son, the Bread of Heaven, on the Cross. Even our Lord’s clothes were divided.
The miracle of the feeding of the 5000 is not an anomaly in God’s Story. It is how the Story proceeds. This call to hospitality is, therefore, “with the grain” of the world. Our selves, our communities, our societies, and our desires are ordered by the Lord, the Good Shepherd, in the breaking and dividing of hospitable welcome. And in that very place of being broken, we find multiplication and glory. This is the mystery of the Church’s very life:
In Christ we all have become one loaf, one body; members of his body, his loaf (1 Cor 10:17). We thus share in Christ’s pattern of being broken and given for the life of the world (Jn 6:51). When through Christ the church lays her life down for the world, her life is multiplied. We, like him, take it back up (10:18; 12:25). When we cast bread upon the waters, it returns multiplied unto us (Eccl 11:1). “The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us,” said C. S. Lewis, “the more we shall all have.”
Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu and Director of the Theopolis Fellows Program.
[1] Much of this content is taken from two commencement addresses I delivered in the past few years. One in the Spring of 2024 at Oahu Theological Seminary, and the other in January of 2026 at Theopolis. The talk given in Tokyo of last year develops and expands upon themes from these two talks.
[2] The Tragedy of Philoctetes, trans. Edward Plumptre in The Tragedies of Sophocles (London: Daldy, Isbister, and Co., 1878), available online at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tragedies_of_Sophocles_(Plumptre_1878), 181–187 (emphasis added).
[3] Insert joke about the police procedural TV series; I cannot think of one now, but there must be one out there somewhere.
[4] One must wonder how the Jesus who did not dismiss the children in the Gospels would feel about the language in contemporary service just before the beginning of the homily: “Now it is time to dismiss the kids.” I’m making no comment on this policy here. I only admit that I wonder.
[5] Byung Chul-Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception, and Communication Today, trans. Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2018).
[6] See James B. Jordan’s treatment of the pattern in Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Wipf & Stock, 1999), 117–131.