Matthew 14:13-21

There are six accounts in the gospels of Jesus feeding thousands of people from almost nothing: two in Matthew, two in Mark, one in Luke and one in John.  The accounts are similar in most details.  In each one Jesus is moved by compassion for the crowd and uses the very meager resources at hand, five loaves and two fish in some accounts or seven loaves and a few fish in others, to provide so much food that baskets of leftovers are collected afterward.  In John’s version, the loaves and fish are provided by a young boy who has been watching Jesus from the edge of the crowd.  

In a world where 783 million people will go hungry today—34 million of them in our own country—in a world where 45% of all child deaths are caused by hunger or hunger-related illness, these stories of Jesus feeding multitudes serve to remind us that we have a responsibility to feed a hungry world and we’re not doing a very good job of following his example.  

Hunger in our world and in our country is a solvable problem.  The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 130 billion pounds of food is wasted every year in this country alone—that’s more than 200 pounds per person being dumped into landfills while 34 million people go hungry. 

Each of the gospel accounts of Jesus miraculously feeding thousands begins by telling us that he was moved by compassion for the hungry crowd, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s the thing we’re missing when it comes to feeding our hungry world.  When grain shipments bound for food-insecure nations are blown up at the dock by the misguided missiles of a needless war, it’s hard to believe that food production is the problem.  When voices in Congress are trying to reduce or eliminate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, it’s hard to believe that inflation of food prices is the main reason people are going hungry.  When 67 counties in our country are food deserts that don’t have a single grocery store because the big grocery corporations decided that a supermarket in those counties would not be profitable, it’s hard to believe that the high rate of food insufficiency in those same 67 counties is because people are uninformed about the importance of healthy nutrition. 

The six gospel accounts of Jesus feeding thousands of hungry people are a clear invitation for us to consider how we are or are not following his example in feeding hungry people today, but there are other dynamics in these miracle stories, and if we only focus on the food we may miss something else that’s equally important.  

It’s also easy to miss something important by wandering down the rabbit hole of trying to rationally explain the miracle.  Some think that the people in the crowd were so inspired by seeing Jesus and the disciples passing out their measly 5 loaves and two fish that they all decided to share the snacks they had stowed away in the sleeves of their robes.  Sure.  That works.  Maybe.  I suppose it would be a small miracle in its own way and certainly a good example of sharing what we have to make sure everyone has something.  But the Gospel writers don’t even hint that that’s what’s happening in these accounts.  They seem to think that something much more impressive happened. 

I, for one, have no problem believing that Jesus made food appear where none had been before.  After all, God has been creating something out of nothing since the beginning of . . . everything.  

Nothing seems to be God’s favorite material to work with.  Nature abhors a vacuum.  Emptiness is meant to be filled.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, Horatio.  And just for fun, do a Google search on Miracles and Quantum Physics sometime.  That’ll glaze your donut.

There are a lot of similarities in the 6 miracle feeding stories, but the context for each one is different, and the context is particularly important in Matthew 14.

When the disciples of John the Baptist came to tell Jesus that John had been murdered by Herod Antipas, Jesus “withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”  It’s easy to imagine that Jesus wanted some privacy for his grief, some time to pray, some time to think about what this meant for the message of the kingdom of heaven that both he and John had been proclaiming.  But when he got to that lonely spot at the end of the lake, instead of a private retreat there was a multitude waiting for him.

When the crowds heard that John had been killed, they went looking for Jesus.  John had been important to them, and if anyone could speak to their fear, their loss, their broken hearts and their shattered hopes, it would be Jesus. 

“They followed him on foot from the towns.  When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.”

When Jesus saw the crowd he went to work.  He prayed.  He laid hands on the sick.  He hollowed himself out so all the power of the Holy Spirit could flow through him.  

And he let himself feel their hunger.  Spiritual hunger.  Intellectual hunger.  Hunger for a better life.  Hunger for justice.  Hunger for independence. Hunger for healing.  And just plain, old physical hunger.  He felt all of it.  From all of them.  A great chasm of hunger from the thousands on the hillside in front of him.

He loved them in all their hunger and his compassion moved him to do the impossible.  He took what he had, five loaves and two fish, which by every worldly measure was obviously insufficient, then he looked up to heaven, and he blessed it.  Eulogesen is the Greek word in Matthew’s text.  It quite literally means that he said good things about it.  “Thank you.  This is good.”  Then he broke the bread and told his disciples, his students, to hand it out to the crowd, trusting that in this God-made, God-blessed world, on that God-blessed hillside with all its God-blessed hunger what they had to share was good, and that by God’s power and presence and grace there would be enough.  More than enough.

“And all ate and were filled,” Matthew tells us, “and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

Jesus fed five thousand men, besides women and children—such a weird way for Matthew to say that women and children were also there but not included in the count.  Jesus fed all those people from five loaves and two fish, but the food that fed them wasn’t the only thing that Jesus created out of almost nothing that day.  He also created a community.  A community of companionship.

Meals were not merely utilitarian in first century Palestine.  Sharing a meal was a way to affirm kinship, friendship and good will. Sharing a meal was also a way to affirm or elevate one’s status in a world where status was important.  To put it plainly, it was a way to show that those gathered together for the meal recognized each other as “acceptable” in a world where some were regarded as clearly “unacceptable” or “unclean.” 

Jesus, had been criticized by some Pharisees for eating with “sinners” and tax collectors, people considered unacceptable in good company.  But in this feast on the hillside at the end of the lake, he included everyone, regardless of their social standing or ritual acceptability.  In that great crowd of all kinds of people, no one was turned away.  No one was excluded.  Everyone was equal in their hunger.  Everyone was equal in being fed.

In the book After Jesus Before Christianity, the authors tell us that meals were the primary social engagement for the early followers of Jesus.  During the first two centuries, the people who were loyal to Jesus commonly organized themselves into something that, to us, would look like supper clubs.  They would gather once, twice or even several times a week in someone’s home to share a meal, to sing, to pray together and to remember the stories of Jesus. 

In an era when the Church is in rapid decline, I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we followed the example of those early Jesus people today.  What would happen if we transformed our pews into long tables and benches and converted our sanctuaries into dining halls then gathered each week to throw open our doors and invite our neighbors in for a hearty meal, some prayer and some singing?   Who knows what kinds of hunger we might feed?  Who knows what kind of emptiness Christ might fill?

Those of us who come to church come with hungers of our own.  We also come to share a meal— a meal that reminds us that we are in Christ and Christ is in us—a meal that fills us with Christ’s compassion as we taste and see the goodness of the Lord.  We come to share a meal that calls us to trust that in this God-made, God-blessed world, that in this God-blessed place with all its God-blessed hungers what we have is good.  We come to learn again that we can share what we have even if when it doesn’t seem to be enough, and that by God’s power and presence there will always be enough.  More than enough.