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Daniel 9.4-10

I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession, saying, “Ah, Lord, great and awesome God, keeping covenant and steadfast love with those who love you and keep your commandments, we have sinned and done wrong, acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and ordinances. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our ancestors, and to all the people of the land. “Righteousness is on your side, O Lord, but open shame, as at this day, falls on us, the people of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, in all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against you. Open shame, O Lord, falls on us, our kings, our officials, and our ancestors, because we have sinned against you. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him, and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by following his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets.

Until I read this confession of Daniel I had not thought much about confessions themselves. This is a religious confession, so there we will remain. The confession begins in the first person singular, and Daniel pretty quickly dispatches his transgressions. He then begins with “we” which seems through the course of the next six verses to be sufficiently broad to include the entire congregation, all of the Israelites, the entirety of the people.

Daniel makes this confession when the Israelites have been living in hard times, the people dispersed and enslaved. The nation, the congregation has transgressed. The transgressions against the Lord, “the great and dreadful God,” are listed. The list may seem general, but I suspect any pious member of the congregation could list the specifics of the laws broken, the prophets disdained. The “men of Judah…..the inhabitants of Jerusalem…” knew the laws as their descendants know those same laws today.

But we are not members of this congregation. We do not tend to believe that nations are punished by the Lord. As a nation we look away from transgressions beyond the immediate and passing fashionable ones. No “creditable authority,” that is, no modern Daniel, is proposing the current pandemic as a punishment of God. A couple of prominent evangelists suggested the 911 attacks on our nation were God’s punishment for our misdeeds and transgressions. But their words were vilified immediately to a degree leading to public retraction and apology.

As with Daniel in verse 4 we do have our confessions on the individual and personal level, our “Confiteor”--our prayer of acknowledging our sins and asking for God’s mercy. The Confiteor, which is beautiful, is exquisite in its vague nature regarding sins and transgressions. I think that if we enjoy, believe in and take comfort from confession but we do not believe in punishment or real specificity of our transgressions, perhaps we should look more closely into ourselves to explore the precise purposes confession, public or private, may serve for us.

Mark 6:30-46

³⁰ The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. ³¹He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. ³²And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. ³³Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. ³⁴As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. ³⁵When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; ³⁶send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’ ³⁷But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii^* worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’ ³⁸And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ ³⁹Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. ⁴⁰So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. ⁴¹Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all.⁴²And all ate and were filled; ⁴³and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. ⁴⁴Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men. 

⁴⁵ Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. ⁴⁶After saying farewell to them, he went up on the mountain to pray.

Here we have the miracle of the loaves and fishes.  What transpires in this passage is clear.  And as I read the passage, I find two messages, one stated clearly and one implied.  I do not know if we believe in miracles in these days of science.  How do we distinguish a modern miracle from a coincidence?  But dividing five loaves of bread and two fishes among five thousand cannot be a coincidence.  Nor do I find anything in the passage to suggest a metaphor, another favorite piece of modern sophistry to explain what we, in an age of science, struggle to understand.

I must examine myself daily to appreciate the altar to science that I build between me and my God.  I find that my work on that altar makes it grow higher and stronger almost by the hour, and I am afraid that I cannot, without faith and love, tear it apart.

For me, the second message comes through seeing just what Jesus does through faith and love.  When he is trying to rest and take care of himself and his disciples, he nevertheless feels compassion for a great crowd.  He becomes the shepherd to a flock of five thousand, speaking to them and feeding them.  Nowhere in the passage does he ask the lepers to seat themselves in a separate section.  He feeds the flock both spiritually and physically. And then, not having rested himself, he does not disperse the flock but sees it members safely off before retreating for his own spiritual nourishment through his prayers.