Who’s Feeding Who?

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Pentecost 10, Year B – Track 1,

7/28/24

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Alright, I’m gonna just jump right into the Gospel today. The feeding of the five thousand. This is one of Jesus’s most iconic miracles, so iconic, in fact, that it’s the only one of his miracles to appear in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, so it’s clearly important. Now, there are two common interpretations of this miracle and I’d like to lay them both out for you and then we’ll work on figuring out what we should take from this event. The first interpretation is that this is truly a miracle, a miracle of bread being physically multiplied by Jesus. The second is that it’s more of a miracle of people sharing what they already have. I’ll start with the first interpretation, the miracle of multiplication.

After a long day of teaching and healing the sick, Jesus and his disciples gather to a mountaintop. As dinnertime approaches, the disciples sense that stomachs are beginning to rumble and they start to panic about how in the world they are going to feed five thousand people. If you’ve ever planned a barbecue, you have a glimpse of what they must have felt. At our annual parish picnic on September 15th, we’re far fewer than 5000 people and the organizers of that picnic – bless their hearts – have already started planning for it and it’s over a month away! So you can imagine the anxiety of the disciples, so much so that Andrew sees a little boy who has a couple loaves of bread and some fish in his lunchbox and says “hey y’all, let’s start by grabbing that kids lunch, that should be a good start.” I’m kidding, hopefully they asked the young boy and presumably he was grateful to share what he had, which is where the miracle of multiplication begins.

Jesus gratefully receives this young boy’s generous offering and begins by giving thanks to God in heaven for the gifts they are about to receive. Here Jesus essentially says grace before the meal, and the Greek word used to describe his act of giving thanks is eucharistesas. Sounds familiar right? It shares the same root word as Eucharist, which is the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion. And the very word Eucharist itself, simply means, thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for the gifts of Jesus offering himself to us in the elements of bread and wine. Thus, many scholars have pointed to this feeding of the multitude as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist itself.

Then after giving thanks, Jesus breaks the bread. And breaks the bread. And breaks the bread. Presumably breaking the bread until there is enough to fill enough baskets to feed five thousand people – and there’s enough to have some leftover! This is where we can read the text in the first and traditional interpretation, as truly a miracle of multiplication. Jesus miraculously makes something out of nothing so that all are fed. And more than that, this miracle also casts Jesus in a particular, prophetic light. For the Gospel says that “when the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” (John 6:14)

Why would they say that? They say that because the miracle of feeding multitudes of people on a mountaintop would have obviously triggered some memories in their mind of a parallel miraculous feeding involving another prophet – the prophet Moses, who called upon God to feed the Israelites with manna, bread from heaven, as they wandered in the desert beneath Mt. Sinai after being liberated from Egypt. So in this way, Jesus is doing something more than just feeding people, he is in a way confirming that some of the suspicions about him are true – he is a prophet like Moses, which was one way of describing the long awaited Messiah who would come to fulfill the promises of the Old Testament.

So in essence, this interpretation, that the passage indeed recounts a miracle of multiplication, also does two other critical things. It foreshadows the sacrament of Holy Eucharist, the way in which we are perpetually fed by the body of the living God, and it casts Jesus as the true Messiah.

Now here’s the other, more modern interpretation that arose sometime in the 19th century, when German Protestant scholars were trying to reconcile scripture with a scientific understanding of the world. This interpretation we can call a ‘miracle of sharing.’ Scholars who are persuaded by this reading posit that at the time, people would set out for the day with provisions of bread and other snacks hidden under their cloaks to nibble on throughout the day. And Jesus, knowing this, used the generous example of the young boy who was willing to share from his provisions, to compel others to take the bread that they had been squirreling away under their tunics, and share it so that all could be fed. Thus, demonstrating that the scarcity that the disciples were fretting about was not really a concern at all if people just radically reoriented their perspective from caring for their individual needs to caring for the needs of the community. 

And I do like the moral of this story. It rings true on many levels even today. Many of our needs as a community, and throughout the world, could be met much more easily than we imagine if we all adopted the same spirit of cooperation and mutual aid, this is true.

However, I’m ultimately not convinced that the miracle of sharing is actually what happened. For one, it’s simply not in the text, and as I’ve said before, I think that we owe it to ourselves and to the Gospel writers to take seriously passages of scripture that confound our scientific understanding of the world, and not try to accommodate them to a worldview that makes more sense to us.

Second, if do this, we turn the story into a type of humanist Gospel, where human kindness and generosity is at the center, rather than God’s radical generosity. And then we miss out on the earlier points that this miracle is not just about people feeding people, it’s about Jesus, the long-awaited Messiah, doing for us what we are unable to do for ourselves. And I don’t know about you, but right now I need a messiah who can do for us those things we cannot do for ourselves, because I don’t have a lot of confidence that we’d be able to pull off the miracle of sharing right now. Maybe we in our community could, but throughout our nation? Throughout the whole world? I’m not so certain.

For me, taking seriously the thought that Jesus performed an actual miracle on that mountain by feeding an impossible number of people helps me to take seriously the belief that Jesus also feeds us in ways far deeper than meeting our physical needs. It helps me take seriously that we have a Messiah who comes to us and will ultimately save us from the discord and disunity that we see playing out again and again in our common life. And that is worth giving thanks for, my friends. So as we ourselves prepare to receive the spiritual food of the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, let us give thanks – give thanks that we have such a Savior to feed us. Amen.