Mark 6:39-40 39 Then Jesus directed them to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties.
In her book The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker quotes a 16th-century Japanese tea master, Sen no Rikyū. He taught his students the transformative power of a Japanese tea ceremony with a simple phrase Ichi-go ichi-e. The phrase roughly translates, “One meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.” He explains further, “We could meet again, but you have to praise this moment . . . because we are also changed.”[i] This power of gathering, of coming together in a unique moment, is what we, as a church, are called to emulate.
According to the Gospel of Mark, we are called to gather the scattered sheep of our world. Before we can teach and feed them, we must reassemble them through the power of peaceful healing and compassionate care. To do so, a Christlike power must churn inside us. Mark calls this Jesus’ superpower of compassion. We literally (in the Greek) feel in our guts. Our stomachs churn when we see the sin, division, hatred, and hunger in our world. We take pity on people, empathize with their issues, and willingly listen to their challenges. Like Jesus, we view enemies as potential friends.
Then, the gathering begins—but not always on our terms. According to Mark 6:39, Jesus places the disciples in a remote isolated place, among the people he wants to feed. He seats them in groups of 50 and 100, like a giant outdoor symposium. (Mark repeats the words “symposia symposia” in Greek for emphasis). They sit with the scattered sheep and show them Jesus’ compassion. It’s not a perfect process, but kindness is not just a virtue, it’s a force. It’s contagious and ripples through the community. The disciples stabilize and strengthen scattered people, and in doing so, they set in motion a wave of kindness that reverberates far beyond their immediate actions.
Where do you gather with scattered people? Jesus invites us today to go out to the margins of society, where people are hungry, and treat them the way he sees them—as sheep without a shepherd. There, he prepares a feast in the presence of our enemies. Ichi-go, ich-e, a gathering where we are changed.
[i] Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How we Meet and Why it Matters (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 19.