The dust in the earthen courtyard swirled around their feet and over the hems of brightly colored skirts. It was hot, a dry heat, and the brown hills shimmered in the distance like a mirage. The line of mainly women and children snaked on and on, doubling in upon itself, winding through the village. The people’s faces were blank with exhaustion, and many limped barefoot through the dust, leaning on sticks or on one another. Some women carried babies with swollen bellies and thin legs, the tell-tale signs of starvation, and the arms of other mothers hung limply at their sides, their empty hands grieving for the children who no longer filled their arms, the lifeless children who had to be left a few miles back by the side of the road. Yet the people had heard that there was hope in this dusty courtyard. They had heard that there was food here, salvation from the imminent death that stalked them. They had heard that here, the gnawing in their bellies could be soothed and the crying of their children comforted. And so they poured over the brown hills from miles around, walking and clinging to the thin thread of hope that was pulling them to this place. In the center of the courtyard, sweating under the hot African sun, were followers of Jesus Christ, scooping some kind of porridge out of a big kettle into bowls and passing them, passing them to the waiting crowd, one little bowl after another, seemingly without end, replacing desperation with hope, one meal at a time.
We can’t read today’s Gospel reading about Jesus feeding the crowds in Galilee without thinking of the famine that looms today in Somalia, where almost 400,000 starving people have walked across the border into Kenya, seeking food. Here at St. Thomas, we are faithful in bringing food every week to the Eastern Area Community Ministries food pantry right down the street, and in bringing it forward into God’s abundance along with our offerings at the Eucharist. But it is easy for us to wring our hands in helplessness when we are overwhelmed by the terrible reports of starvation in far-away places like Somalia. Often, our feelings of helplessness cause us to shrug hopelessly, and to push the images of the dying babies as far from our minds as we can. As Jesus’ disciples, it is easy for us to identify with the Twelve in today’s Gospel, as they tried to understand what their Master expected of them on the shores of the lake. Think about it--it is the end of a long day for them. They have done their best and put in their service hours already, running around helping Jesus to heal the sick for hours under the hot sun. They figure that it is time to get rid of all of these pesky strangers and to settle down with their master around the fire to eat and talk in peace and quiet, so they suggest to Jesus, quite reasonably, that he send the crowds away to buy their own food in surrounding villages, before it gets dark and late. Jesus, however, refuses to send the crowds away. He says, “No, let them stay and YOU give them something to eat.” In the Greek grammatical structure, the pronoun “you” is especially emphasized. “You, YOU all take care of things. YOU all provide resources for the hungry ones,” Jesus demands. With divine power, Jesus could have called down manna from on high like Moses did; or all by himself, he could have mysteriously taken away the hunger pangs of the people, filling them from the inside, without the nitty-gritty trouble of dividing paltry rations of food. But he doesn’t. Jesus asks the disciples to find the resources themselves. Jesus’ feast, even in its miraculous abundance, places demands upon Jesus’ followers. With Jesus, helplessness is not an option. I was interested to learn that the word “ministry” comes from the Latin root for small things (think, “mini”). Our ministry in Jesus’ name works miracles through small things. Writes Martin Smith, “[Christ empowers us by] unlocking the secret that hidden and small actions have enormous transformative potential.”[1]The tragedy of hunger in our world is not going to go magically away. Just because we have already brought in our canned goods for the week, the starving crowds will not disappear. Just as God continually pours out God’s good gifts upon us, God expects us to share them just as continually with others in need: one can, one dollar, at a time.
Our Gospel lesson, though, is not just about literal porridge for the hungry, and we are not only to identify with the scrambling, laboring disciples. We are also the hungry crowds. Matthew purposefully frames the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 in a way that will make us think of the Heavenly Banquet. It is no coincidence that Jesus “takes,” “blesses,” “breaks,” and “gives” the bread to the people by the shores of the lake—the same actions that Jesus performs at the Last Supper and the same actions that Jesus performs at every Eucharist. For Jesus and his followers, the Heavenly Banquet at the End of Time was a familiar image for the Kingdom of God, for God’s presence on earth, for the joy and abundance and celebration that await us with God. We continue that imagery when we say in our liturgy that our Eucharist is a “foretaste” of that Heavenly Banquet in God’s Kingdom. What we need to notice about the Great Feast in our Gospel lesson, however, is the strange kind of Banquet that it describes.
In Matthew’s Gospel, our lesson comes right after the description of another great feast—King Herod’s gory feast, at which the King beheads John the Baptist and serves his head up on a silver platter. Herod’s feast is a meal in which court intrigue, abuse of power, sex, corruption, and vengeance result in murder. In contrast, Jesus’ feast is completely removed from the realms of power and prestige. When Jesus asks the crowd to be seated for their meal, he has them recline not on couches in an elegant Roman banquet hall, but on the ground in a deserted place. The meal that Jesus offers the people of God does not consist of aged wines and multiple courses of rich food, but of the simple peasant food at hand, of dry bread and salted fish. Where the earthly king’s banquet offers titillating entertainment, sumptuous food, inclusion in the realms of power, and even the violent murder of God’s own messenger, the banquet of our heavenly king feeds us in simplicity and peace, with pure compassion, healing, and overflowing love. In the heavenly banquet, we are offered abundant goodness, wholeness, mercy, and forgiveness. These are the things for which even we well-fed Americans are starving.
Not to diminish the pain of the starving people of Somalia, but we cannot ignore the similarities of that line, snaking through the dusty village, with the line that leads to the altar in our churches. Aren’t we limping, too, toward the hope of being fed, pulled inexplicably forward, despair sometimes clinging to our feet like dust, arms often longing for deceased loved ones, resentment often churning in our stomachs, souls often on empty? Behind the masks that we put on each week with our Sunday clothes, don’t we all have hidden wounds, remnants of secret battles, like Jacob’s wrestling with the stranger in the night? Don’t we all come limping and longing into God’s Kingdom, seeking blessing, seeking God’s Face? And at that altar, we receive a little piece of wafer that resembles cardboard more closely than it does bread, and a tiny sip of wine. And yet, miraculously, we are filled. The emptiness becomes purpose; the resentment becomes forgiveness; the longing is stilled. For awhile. Until the next time. As the old hymn goes: “Bread of the world in mercy broken, Wine of the soul, in mercy shed, by whom the words of life were spoken, and in whose death our sins are dead: look on the heart by sorrow broken, look on the tears by sinners shed; and be thy feast to us the token that by thy grace our souls are fed.”
As we are fed, so must we feed others, gathering up the remnants and building the Kingdom. Just as we know, from experience, that we do not hope in vain as we approach God’s banquet table, we know, by faith, that our best efforts to feed the world, physically and spiritually, will not be in vain, either. Out in the remote places, far from the banquet halls of earthly power, Jesus hands his disciples the bread, the disciples give the bread to the crowds. “And all eat and are filled; and they take up what is left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”
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