By the Lakeshore with Jesus, a devotional thought

Compared to the three other Gospels, Mark comes across as brief, unpolished, even cursive at times. Yet for all this, many of his stories capture details that the other Gospels might minimize or edit out, but they leave you certain you're brushing up against the raw texture of a story remembered by those who were there.

Mark 4:1 is an example of this. I've always loved the description of Jesus sitting in a boat and teaching from the water because the crowds were so packed along the lake-shore that there was no room for him there. This is, I think, the sort of out-of-the-ordinary detail that would have lingered long in the telling and retelling of the event: "And then Jesus—get this—he was almost pushed into the water by the crowds pressing in to hear him, so he hopped in a boat and shoved off into the lake, and taught them all from there!"

When I tried to visualize this, it sort of strikes me that today the crowds aren't "practically pushing Jesus into the lake" in their enthusiasm to encounter him. Even among Christians, you don't often see this sort of falling-over-yourself eagerness not to miss a thing he has to say; sadly, Jesus has plenty of room to move about freely in most Canadian churches.

It makes you wonder.  What had those crowds at the lakeshore that day *experienced* in Jesus, that we have yet to experience, that nothing in the world was so compelling to them as standing under his teaching as he taught? But it also makes you wonder this: what if the 21st Century Canadian Church was like that lake shore: crammed so full of people there to hear Jesus that it almost felt like there was barely room left for him? I think we'd find he was filling up the place to overflowing, if it were.