Reading the Gospels Together The Multiplication of the Bread and Walking on Water – Part 4 As we turn to Luke’s gospel we make in important discovery. Luke only tells the story of the multiplication of the bread to feed the 5000. Luke does not tell the story of Jesus walking on the water. And Luke omits the second story of the feeding of the 4000. In the telling of the feeding of the 5000 Luke is very faithful to Mark and tells the story in virtually the same way. So we need to ask ourselves why Luke omitted the story of the walking on water and why did he leave out the second story of the multiplication of the bread? When we were looking earlier at the storyline of Luke’s gospel we noted what has sometimes been called the “great omission” in Luke’s gospel. Luke not only leaves out the story of the walking on water and the second multiplication of the bread but he leaves out a whole lot more too. In fact, Luke jumps from the story of the feeding of the 5000 all the way to Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah and the scene in which Jesus asks his disciples who people are saying he is and finally who they say he is. Gone are the stories of the walking on water, Jesus’ healing of people at Gennesaret, Jesus’ debate with the religious leaders about what makes something clean, Jesus’ encounter with the Gentile Syrophoenician woman whose daughter is healed, Jesus curing a deaf man by putting saliva on his tongue, Jesus feeding the 4000, Pharisees demanding a sign, Jesus upbraiding his disciples in the boat for their failure to understand, and the double healing of the blind man. That’s a lot of material. Frankly, we just don’t know why Luke left out all this material. As we mentioned earlier, perhaps Luke had a version of Mark’s gospel that did not contain this material. It seems unlikely that he would have simply mistakenly left out all these stories. It is easy to understand why he might have dropped the story of the double healing of the blind man – Matthew also got rid of that story. But there is really nothing in all the others that should have moved Luke to leave them out. Like Matthew he may well have softened Mark’s harshness – Luke did that in plenty of other places. In the end we may just have to live with this mystery. We don’t know why this material is absent in Luke’s gospel.