Eat up

There are crowds that follow Jesus Christ around all the time.  Here and there, traipsing around him all over the countryside, following wherever he may lead, and why not? He is there performing miracles, healing the sick, raising the dead, and restoring to health those who are compromised.  And the people following him all over the place do so with little regard for their own well-being, safety, or how they will look after themselves.  And after they have been wandering with Jesus for a while, we get to the reading that we have from Matthew for today, where they end up in a desolate place, where there was no food to be had.  Now, Jesus had actually been trying to get away from the crowds, but when he saw them, he dealt with their presence, healed their sick, and spend all day working with them.  When evening came, the disciples came to Jesus and said to him 'This is a remote place, and it is getting late.  Send the crowds home so they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.'

The conclusion, the reasonable conclusion that the disciples had reached was that Jesus should send these people home so they could tend to themselves.  They needed to take care of their own needs, according to the disciples.  And that makes sense.  Desolate place, no place to get food, no place to get resources, all of that.  And the disciples, knowing this, put the responsibility to Jesus, saying that he should tell them that they should go away, and feed themselves.  But Jesus puts the onus right back on them - "That isn't necessary.  You feed them."

That deft movement cuts through what the disciples had wanted Jesus to do.  And truly, it cuts through what the vast majority of preachers want Jesus to do, too.  For what the churches want Jesus to say is that the people who have needs, who have difficulties and hangups, who don't know what to do or how to navigate their lives, that Jesus should tell them to go and take care of themselves.  Wouldn't that be easy?  That would be so straightforward, but that's not what Jesus of Nazareth says or does.  We ask him to dismiss the people, but he responds by saying 'No.  You feed them.'  And that's where we all have the same response 'We have only five loaves of bread and two fish.'

We want Jesus to send people away. He puts the question back to us - You feed them.  And that's when we tell Jesus, straight up, that we are inadequate, and cannot get that job done.  Because we can't.  There is no way that we can get that job done, given the meager resources that we've got.  And that's a sobering thing.

Hopefully you've worked that out by now, though.  These unprecedented times should have shone a massive light on your inadequacies.  2020 is the year in which we all had to come to terms with the reality that we are incapable of getting that job done.  What job?  Gosh, any of them. Even the simplest jobs, the most straightforward jobs that we had assumed that we could do forever.  We figure that we could keep our families safe, buy food, get to markets and gather resources.  We figured that we could go to graduations, that we could come together with friends, go on vacation, all those things that we were absolutely sure that we could do.  And nothing.  This is the year where you are rudely confronted with the reality that you actually can't do what you planned to do, and that you can't accomplish what you had planned to accomplish.  People in the scriptures are confronted with this reality all the time, where they had been comfortable, happy, full of themselves, and then saw that they were miles off from where they wanted to be.  God was the only one who was able to accomplish what they wanted,  and they themselves were incapable.  When the disciples gather their resources, they pull together an amount of food that wouldn't have given each person who was there even a crumb.  

And so, yes, this story on its surface seems to be about holy tricks, you know, but in reality, it is, as they all are, also a story about you and Christ.  It's a story about you and me, and you and I, and Jesus Christ.  When people get needy, we want Jesus to send them away for us.  When their needs manifest themselves, we sort of want Jesus to dismiss them, and to give them a swift exit.  They should got and meet their needs themselves, right?  But Jesus doesn't do that.  He doesn't say to us that these people should meet their own needs.  Rather, he puts the question back to us: Why don't you feed them?  Impossible!  If we gave everything we had, at ever moment, in every way, we would never be able to satisfy all the needs of the world.

Normally, understanding that would lead us to despair, to give up, and to not bother.  But think on this for a moment: Think of how much food the disciples had even for themselves. They're not coming into things with massive resources for themselves either.  For the 12 of them (13 if you count Christ, which you'd better), they only had five loaves, and two fish. In another story, remember, that's about what one boy had for himself. Something you have to remember about this story is that the disciples didn't even have enough food to feed themselves. Forget sending everyone away to tend to their own needs, the disciples couldn't even handle their own needs.  Even if Christ sent everyone else to meet their own needs themselves, the disciples were going to go hungry, if you see what I mean.  When Jesus tells them that they should give the people food, and the disciples respond that it would be impossible, then they should think about their inability to feed themselves, much less anyone else.  

And that's when Christ steps in.  If the people can't satisfy themselves, and you can't feed them, then what is left?  It is the power of Christ to feed and to sustain.  Not just to give food for a moment, but satisfaction for eternity.  The bread of life, the bread of heaven, the food of salvation.  The water that you don't have to draw over and over again.  This power of Christ that we see at work in this reading is, as usual, a foretaste of the greater matter that we have to consider.  The final resolution of all scarcity and want.  The end of everything that is an immense lack and destruction.  Christ multiplies loaves and fish on that day, but it's always in service of a much bigger miracle - that of the restoration of the eternal kingdom to all of us.