GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 8:8
Clean up after yourself
There are probably few parents who have not told their children to clean up after themselves. A kindergarten teacher said she repeatedly told her class to clean up their workspace because she wasn’t their mother. Our oldest son came home after his discharge from the Army to live at home, attend college, and work. He never had to be reminded to clean his room. I always suspected that his Army commanders planted that behavior in the minds of recruits.
During my high school years, I worked for Reeves Concrete Company after school. Part of my evening responsibilities was keeping the garage work area clean. After a while, it was easy to identify which employee had been working in the area. One employee left his work area clean—tools were returned to their place, work projects were in order, and the floor was usually clean. The other employee? Not so much.
After feeding over 4,000 people on a hillside in the Decapolis region, Mark wrote, “And they ate and were filled. And they took up the remaining fragments—seven large baskets.” (Mark 8:8) In other words, the disciples and the crowd cleaned up after themselves. One of my brothers often went on fishing trips to Canada with his friends. One of the rules for those trips was that they had to leave their camping space clean.
The crowd in the Decapolis picked up seven baskets full of fragments. Writers point out that the word for “basket” here refers to a large container, a hamper, not the small container for carrying one’s lunch mentioned in the previous story (Mark 6:44). None of the writers explains why this mobile crowd had such large containers—containers large enough to hold a man (Acts 9:25). At any rate, they cleaned up after themselves, filling seven of these large containers. Personal hygiene and cleanliness are just two of the lessons in this story, but they are important.
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