This morning’s Gospel Reading is another popular story that we all learned in Sunday School, or on which we’ve heard countless sermons. It’s called “The Feeding of the Five Thousand”, or “The Feeding of the Multitudes.”
According to the story, by this time in his ministry, Jesus has built up a large following. He’s become well-known, and apparently is followed by the crowds. In this story, he’s just worn out with the crowds. And he gets into a boat, and heads for a deserted place – somewhere further along the shore – of the Sea of Galilee. We can all identify with just getting tired of people and wanting to be alone. And they didn’t have jet planes and cruise ships back then. If you wanted to “get away
from it all”, you did what Jesus did in this story. But we’re told that the crowds followed him, on foot, around the shore line of the lake. And when he got out of the boat, there they were.
The story doesn’t say that he taught them, like he usually did. It just says that he saw them, had great compassion for them, and cured their sick. But then it started getting dark, and the crowd needed to eat. We get that well known passage where the disciples tell Jesus to send them away so that they can go buy food and eat. But Jesus knows that they don’t have the money to buy food and eat. And he tells the disciples to get together whatever food they have. And he blesses it, and they all eat, and they gather up twelve baskets of scraps.
Well, there’s actually a lot of stuff going on in this story. First, at this time in the Holy Land, the people were starving. Prior to modern irrigation and land management, the Holy land produced very little food. In fact, population was pretty well determined by available food. If the population got too large for the limited food supply to support, then they had a famine, and a lot of people died, or they migrated to places like Egypt that could support them. It was just natural population control.
But at this time in history, the Holy Land was occupied by a large Roman army. The land could support the army, or it could support the people, and you can guess which got the food. The people were starving. And as Jesus looked out on the crowd, that was probably far less than 5,000, but still a lot of people, he would have seen starving faces. And he knew that they had no money to go to the villages and buy food, and the villages had no food to sell. If they were going to be fed, he would have to do it. And he has his disciples find the few loaves and fishes, and he blesses them, and he feeds the people, with baskets left over. Now, I said that this story has several levels, and it does. One of the most obvious is that this story is seen as a “foretaste” of the Messianic Banquet, the great feast that the righteous will have with Jesus in the Kingdom of God, at the end of time.
There are a whole bunch of Biblical stories that are seen as “foretastes” to that Banquet, but this one, and the Last Supper, are the two big ones. And in this one particularly, we see the good, simple, downtrodden folk, faithful to their Lord, joining the Master for a special meal, as will happen in the Kingdom of God, at the end of time. This is a really big “plug” for the common man. This isn’t kings, and princes, and priests, and the wealthy, eating with the Messiah. This is the common, the downtrodden, the starving.
So, that leads us to another theme – what we today call Social Ministry. It becomes a basis for the church’s reaching out to the less fortunate, with feeding, and housing, and healing, and anything reasonable that can be done to make the lives of the unfortunate more bearable. If Jesus did it with this starving multitude, and it is a foretaste of the Heavenly Banquet, then it’s a model for ministry by the Church and the basis for all of our outreach efforts. And lastly, this becomes a model for our Eucharist – a tiny little sip of wine, and a tiny little wafer of bread – spiritually feeding and satisfying a multitude of people. Like the Last Supper, this feeding story is part of the basis of our Eucharist, but in this case, we are the recipients who are fed and sent out to minister to those in this world who are lonely, sick, suffering, hungry, or whatever. The idea is that we are fed here on Sunday morning, so that we can go out to minister.
Well, if you read the Biblical commentators, it’s almost comical the extent to which they go to explain this feeding. There are books written on it. But last night, I was reading someone else’s on-line homily on this passage. And her position was that scholars have to explain this event rationally or scientifically, or they have to admit that a miracle happened. And for scholars, a miracle is a very frightening thing because it can’t be explained, and scholarship’s purpose is to explain. And she said: “It is frightening to stand in the real presence of the creative energy of God!”
And I really liked that. The creative energy of God is not something that can be explained. It happens because God wants it to happen, and it’s that simple. Don’t even try to explain it. It just happens. And sometimes it is frightening because we can’t explain it away.
Now, God’s creative energy doesn’t get expressed just to a group of hungry folk, standing around the Sea of Galilee 2,000 years ago. It still happens today, and it happens to us in our simple little lives. Sometimes it heals us, feeds us spiritually, answers our prayers, or fixes something in our lives. Sometimes it enters us, and uses us, as vehicles for the Creative Energy of God.
How many times have you done something very special, and you stand back, and you think, “Where did that come from? That wasn’t my idea. I don’t even do things like that? I don’t know how to tend to something like that. Well, maybe not. But God can do it through you. Occasionally we look out there at our personal multitude – something big – that is more than we know how to handle. And then, we look back down the road a little and think, “How did I ever get through that?” or “How did that ever work out?” We’ve met that Creative Energy of God, and it can be wonderful, and it can be frightening, all at once.
So, I really like this story. I don’t ever want to have it explained to me – no theories of mass hypnosis, or ideas about mistranslation, or eating wild mushrooms, or whatever. Let me just know it as a story of God’s Creative Energy acting in a situation around that Sea of Galilee, as from time to time God’s Creative Energy acts in your lives and in mine. Amen.
The Reverend Richard O. Bridgford
Church of the Epiphany, Norfolk, VA
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Matthew 14:13-21
