THIS Gospel is like the bread encasing a sandwich filling: a dull outer containing tasty stuff within. But, in this instance, the tasty stuff has been taken out. The omitted section, Mark 6.35-52, contains two iconic spectacles: the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus’s walking on water. The lectionary does not come back to them on another Sunday in Mark’s Year B. It omits them altogether. Where are the ingredients “sweet to my taste” (Song of Songs 2.3), which can turn this supermarket sliced-white Gospel into a signature sourdough loaf?

If we want to find out what happens in between the two slices (vv.30-34 and 53-56), we have to wait more than two years, until the lectionary supplies Matthew’s version of those two miracles (14.13-33), spread across two Sundays in Year A (Propers 13 and 14).

I can see the point of not asking people to hear essentially the same stories two years in a row, in versions that differ only slightly. But it does leave a hole in this Gospel. Its opening verses are leading up to something big, which we then hear nothing about. What is more, its closing verses cry out to be read with the two miracles in mind: one for the crowd (the feeding), the other a gift to the disciples only (walking on water). But the hearer in church is left in the dark about both.

This is not to say that the lectionary should have done something different. Lectionaries are a gift of the Church to Christian worshippers, enabling us to experience the Word together as “living and active” (Hebrews 4.12), by making connections and crossing boundaries of language, time, and space within scripture. But they do cut across a more intuitive, start-to-finish, method of reading. Every time we read a passage, a chapter, even a sentence, on its own, we risk stripping it of context and limiting its message. This is not wrong: it is a practical necessity, and allows the text to work on us in other ways than the merely informative. But it sometimes comes at a cost in terms of how we grasp the events that we hear and read of.

When relating Jesus’s ministry, the Gospels occasionally give us details of geography, to help to anchor our imaginations in a landscape. Here, we glimpse some local towns, before Jesus suddenly disembarks from a boat at Gennesaret. Yet we have not been told that he got into one, never mind why. The events of 6.30-56 unfold over several days, but that fact, too, has been obscured by Gospel filleting.

What it was about these nine verses of Mark which made them look like a sensible option for a stand-alone Gospel this Sunday? As with the Gospel for Trinity 7, the opening verse of the reading makes no sense unless we were in church the previous week and can remember what happened then (the sending out of the Twelve).

We need to adjust our expectation to a homelier level than the spectacular missing miracles, and to be content with practical, workaday wisdom instead of supernatural mystery. On that level, this Gospel really delivers. The first two verses balance striving for the Kingdom with the rest and solitude needed by the apostles. Anyone who is active in faith can adopt this model by following their example.

We are also reminded that those who would build their life on caring for others must first care for themselves — like a parent on a plane being told, counter-intuitively, to put on their own oxygen mask before helping their child to do likewise. If the disciples are to function well as ministers, they must eat and rest, in order to have strength to preach, and heal, and cast out evil spirits. So should we.

The crowds’ eagerness borders on desperation. From his perspective of unimaginable power, Jesus might have scorned their neediness. But, instead, he is moved with compassion in the core of his being. He sees their hunger for true leadership, their thirst for righteousness.

The crowds are on the right track; for they follow him not only in hope of meeting their own needs, but also to bring their suffering loved ones to his attention. They are discovering for themselves that the power of his touch does for bodily illness what the words of his mouth do for lost and bewildered humanity.