Following Jesus by Remembering

Have you ever been doing something and all of a sudden you had this eerie feeling “I’ve done this before.” or “I’ve seen this person before.”? They say that most of us have had a déjà vu experience. Déjà vu is French for “already seen.”

In fact, there’s a list of different types of déjà vu:

There’s…

·      Déjà boo: The eerie feeling I've been frightened like this before.

·      Déjà coup: The eerie feeling my government’s been overthrown like this before.

·      Déjà do: The eerie feeling my hairdresser’s given me this cut before.

·      Déjà stew: The eerie feeling this is made from the pot roast we ate the week before.

When we come to our text today, we get the feeling we’ve witnessed this situation before. These verses are full of similarities to a scene we’ve already seen in Mark’s gospel:

·      In v. 1, we find a hungry multitude. We’ve seen that.

·      In v. 2, Jesus has compassion on the multitude.

·      In v. 3, the disciples ask, “How can we feed this multitude?”

·      In v. 4, Jesus asks them for a food count.

·      In v. 6a, we find they have just a few loaves & fishes,

·      In v. 6b, Jesus multiplies them to feed everyone.

·      In v. 8, the disciples collect baskets full of leftovers. 

We read this and we think: “Didn’t this just happen? This feels like déjà vu.”

“Didn’t we just see Jesus feeding a 1,000s with a few loaves and fishes?”

And the answer is: Yes, it was at the end of Mark 6.

You say “Then why do we have it all over again at the beginning of Mark 8?

Was Mark tired when he wrote this scroll?

Did he accidentally repeat the story?

Is this déjà vu?