“And
all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken
pieces, twelve baskets full.” From the Gospel for today, the Gospel according
to Matthew, the fourteenth chapter, verse 20.
In
the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’ve
preached on this Gospel before, three years ago. It doesn’t seem like that
long, but there it is. I resisted the temptation to look up my previous sermon
and rewrite it. Once, many years ago, in a parish in Toronto, where I was deacon
and scheduled to preach, I pulled a sermon out of my file, thinking that I
could save myself the trouble of preparing a new talk. And so I proceeded to
deliver that homily, only to realize halfway through that I had in fact
preached exactly that sermon, to that very congregation, three years before!
There was nothing for it except to push on, which I did, hoping that no one
would notice. Well, of course, they did notice. “We forgave you!” said one very
generous member of the congregation. That was a good reminder to the young
preacher, as I was, not to look for shortcuts or to fall for deceptively easy
solutions. So when I discovered that I would be preaching on the story of the Multiplication of the Loaves
and Fishes, as the old translation calls it, I resolutely decided not to look
at my previous remarks. I didn’t want to give in to my anxiety that maybe there
was nothing new to say about today’s story, that maybe all I could and should
do was repeat what I said before. After all, this story is so familiar, and
there are stock responses to it which preachers have resorted to, that it would
be easy just to give in and go with the familiar, the tried and true.
The
problem that this story presents is, of course, its impossibility. In the world
that we know, bread and fish don’t miraculously multiply hundreds or thousands
of times, and that beyond the actual needs of a hungry crowd. We call this kind
of story “mythology” or some such word. Whatever the word, we don’t recognize
the world that this story comes from. It is not our world, and for some people
that is the end of the matter. And for them there is nothing more to say about
it.
But
there is more to say about it. It’s true that the story isn’t 21st
century news reporting, but that doesn’t mean that it’s false. The meaning of
the story is not restricted to its surface detail, but also includes what it
says about the world that it portrays. And it’s that portrayal that can speak
to us today.
The
Evangelist placed this story between the death of John the Baptist and Jesus’s
walking on water. We may think of it as a kind of response to the death of John
the Baptist, and a preparation for what is to come. The grisly realism of the
execution of John is followed by stories of an unselfish, very generous, living,
and life-giving, reality. The reality that Jesus reveals in this incident is as
unlike the worldly power of the story of John the Baptist as it can be. The
story reveals a deeper reality, whose power Jesus uses to feed the crowd. There
is nothing wrong with taking the story literally, as a report of historical
fact, if we believe that Jesus is the Incarnate Lord, who can act freely in the
world in such a way as to reveal his own nature and the real nature of the
world in which we live. But we are not limited by hearing the story in any
particular way, and we are free to interpret it creatively.
Basically, this story is about the freedom of God, and about the freedom
of people to respond to Him. To tell such a story about Jesus is to say that
there is more to reality than its surface appearance. Because Jesus is free to
act in his very creative and generous way, so are we free to respond in similar
ways. The story is about possibility, about the appearance in the world of
something totally new. There is nothing in the everyday world that we know,
that could make such an event possible. But the fact of this event means that
real freedom is built in to the world, both God’s freedom and ours. In other
words, we are not limited, and God is not limited, to our usual, common-sense,
cause-and-effect, everyday understanding of how the world works. We may think
of this story as part of the long preparation in the Gospels, for the ultimate
free act of God in the Resurrection. And that free act is what gives meaning to
all the stories of signs and wonders and miracles in the Scriptures. All the
signs and wonders are, so to speak, incomplete on their own. They find their
fulfilment in the ultimate freely life-giving, life-affirming, act of the
Resurrection.
There
is nothing inevitable about the response of the people in this story. They
could easily have chosen not to see what was happening; they could have been
blind to it; they could have turned down the food that was freely offered to
them. They could have doubted Jesus; they could have doubted themselves. But in
faith they accepted the possibility that Jesus opened up before them. “And all
ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces,
twelve baskets full.” The possibility that opened up before them was not
limited to them alone; in other words, there was enough left over to include
others who were not there, but who would be there in the future. The
multiplication of the loaves and fishes is an ongoing event, to which all are
invited.
It is
possible to understand this story as a description of church life, especially
liturgical life. “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to
heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and
the disciples gave them to the crowds.” That’s as neat a summary of Eucharistic
liturgy as I have ever read. If we in our liturgy place ourselves in that crowd
with Jesus, we are present with him and open up to ourselves that experience of
freedom and possibility which Jesus represents, which, indeed, he is.
In
our society and economy, we are very good at multiplying, if that is the right
word, foods and products and who-knows-what-else, in profusion. Yet there are
still many, millions actually, here and around the world, who don’t have enough
to eat. I’ve been hearing lately that we Americans typically waste something like
40% of our food. This is a stunning contrast to the “twelve baskets full” of
leftovers after the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Those leftovers were not
wasted. We can be sure that they fed others not mentioned in the story. Our story
is a clear reminder that we must do better in making sure that all are fed. And
we can actually do this. We don’t live in a subsistence economy, as the people
of the Gospel story did. Yet even in that economy, Jesus taught people that
real generosity is always possible. Always. In fact, to emphasize the point,
the story is repeated, in chapter 15 of Matthew’s Gospel.
Even
the head-count in the two stories reminds us of the possibility of real
generosity. “And those who ate were about 5000 men, besides women and
children.” Or, “those who had eaten were 4000 men, besides women and children.”
Women and children were not included in the head-count (age-bias and gender-bias, we call
this, in our time) but they were definitely included in the distribution. No
one was left out. And our liturgy, which echoes these events, must always
remind us that no one is to be left out of the distribution, not only
liturgically, but also among all the hungry of the world.
The
freedom of Jesus in this story is our freedom as well. The generosity which he
teaches is available to us as well. We can be, must be, as generous as he is.
The possibility which Jesus puts in front of us is there for us to respond to.
Our Eucharistic liturgy reminds us, empowers us in fact, to do this.
“And all ate and were filled; and they took up
what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.”
In
the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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