The Ups and Downs of Being Human

THE UPs AND DOWNs OF BEING HUMAN
Homily on Matthew 14:13-21

Bruce Jennings

Grace Episcopal Church
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
August 3, 2008

Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, 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 it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves." Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish." And he said, "Bring them here to me." Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. 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. And all ate and were filled; 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.

Good morning.

A famous book review begins by observing: “What is new in this book is not important, and what is important is not new.”

What new is left to say about our Gospel this morning? The story of the loaves and fishes, the feeding of the multitude—surely this must be one of the most familiar stories in the Christian tradition. The account of this is in all the Gospels, including terse Mark, so there must be something irresistible about it. I will try to say what I think that is. But I hereby promise that I am not going to say anything new. But I AM convinced that the text before us contains messages that are fundamentally important.

There are two things in the lesson that I want to focus on.

The first is the portion most often noticed and talked about: namely, the miracle of multiplying five loaves and two fish into enough for “about five thousand,” with twelve baskets full left over. (Isn’t the writer of Matthew charming with the earnestness and the precision of these numbers? There must have been accountants in the audience he was trying to convince.)

The second is something much less dramatic, but no less significant. I’ll say what it is in a minute.

* * *
1. The miracle. I heard Bishop George Packard, then our Rector here at Grace, preach on this text years ago in this very pulpit. He said: When we focus on the magic—the creation of material substance out of thin air—in this text, we focus on the wrong thing and miss a more important lesson. This story is not about magic. It is about changing scarcity into abundance. And it is about finding abundance where God’s grace and love have put it—right inside the human heart and in the human capacity for sharing.

At the wedding in Cana, Jesus was faced with a wine situation (John 2: 1-11), here it is food. Clearly, Jesus could handle these crises, but he is not fundamentally a caterer.

He is a teacher. He reveals how much we have in common even though we are blind to it. He tells us that we are surrounded by an abundance of love and goodness, if only we would open ourselves to it. What keeps us closed is our anxious, grasping, scarcity-obsessed selves. Selves who can’t see past the world of material scarcity to the world of spiritual abundance.

Fr. George invited us to imagine that many of the people in the crowd had packed their lunch. It was a remote location after all. What Jesus created there, the bread and fish aside, was the spirit of love, community, and sharing among them. They reached into their private stash and began offering what that had to the people around them. Now that’s a miracle!

Material things like bread and fish can be scarce; sometimes there is not enough to go around. But as to making a connection of mutual support and caring for others—that isn’t scarce; that doesn’t get used up; that increases the more we use it. It expands the more we consume it.

Our lesson says: “And all ate and were filled...” What filled them was not just food. What was satisfied that day was not just the hunger of the stomach.

* * *
2. Isn’t this enough to think about for one lesson? It sure is. But, wait, there’s more. The second thing I want to focus on is how Jesus teaches us to live as beings who go up and down. What do I mean by that?

When our text begins, Jesus has just been told about the horrible execution of John the Baptist, his cousin and a person dear to him (Matt 14: 1-12). When he heard this “Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them...” It is not hard to understand why he would want to be by himself in his grief, but people would not let him alone. Even under these trying circumstances, compassion won out.

Have you ever wanted some quiet time alone, and the phone rings or a neighbor shows up at the door? At such times—and at more serious moments in our lives—we face the choice between withdrawing from the world and embracing it. Between getting away from pesky human beings and inviting them in.

As I recall, in many places in the Gospels Jesus is shown in a pattern like the one Matthew give us here. Jesus is always moving back and forth between withdrawal to isolated places, where he usually confronts God the Father and tries to come to grips with his own divinity, and then returns to the world of humanity. On occasion, he takes some of his disciples with him out of the world, because they need special instruction and insight for the task that lies before them. At such times they are usually completely befuddled, for they are no longer in a merely human place.

Jesus embodies the touching of the human by the divine. He is unique. But doesn’t our nature partake, in some way hard to understand, of this encounter too? Don’t WE have to wrestle, as Jesus did, with being pulled in two directions? Pulled up or out by the longing for the more-than-human, and pulled in or down by the longing for human co-existence and community?

It is NOT self-evident that the divine—the up and out—necessarily wins. Not at all. Human co-existence—the in and down—has its glories, and its appeals, and its value. I do not believe that our faith tradition teaches us to slight the human dimension of being, or to turn our backs on our own humanity. We need to reach up beyond ourselves, to be sure; but then we also need to come back to ourselves.

* * *
3. It is not only today’s Gospel that makes me ponder this question. About three weeks ago a very dear friend and colleague of mine died of cancer.

I have a sense of grief and loss right now, for sure. I saw this man almost literally every working day for the past 25 years. I talked to him virtually every day, was in his presence virtually every day.

My friend was a philosopher. His conversation and learning enriched my life more than I realize even now. His death has left a hole that is hard to fill.

He was a philosopher of this world. He vigorously embraced the COMING DOWN or COMING INTO the world. He cherished human co-existence and community. He was skeptical about the going up, the touch of the divine that takes us beyond our humanity. He was skeptical of the pull of the transcendent. “Rather than reach up,” he would say to me, “the trick is to reach within.”

Beyond the world or within the world? The MORE THAN human or the MORE FULLY human? Up or in?

Which is it? I think maybe it’s both.

“And all ate and were filled...” To be filled is to face upward toward Jesus addressing the crowd. But you won’t be filled unless you also look beside you into the face of the Other sitting there, where you see the possibility of human connection.

To see Jesus you need to look sideways as well as up. Jesus taught us to call that love.

My friend and I went back and forth on this for years. You will know something about me when I tell you that this is my idea of fun.

What fun I had with that man! Great, serious, life-affirming fun. We sought out works of literature to illuminate our debate, and one of my favorites is a poem by Robert Frost called “Birches” written in 1916. In closing I would like to share just a few lines from this poem with you.

The poem describes a game that boys in rural Vermont used to play. They would climb high into a large birch tree, grasp the end of a flexible but strong branch, and throw themselves out into space, riding the branch to the ground.

Frost uses this as a metaphor for the conflicting pulls he feels (to leave earth and not to leave; to ascend but not to die)...the conflicting pulls he feels especially when life gets hard—when one lashed eye is weeping.

(What an image! Frost is not a genial, avuncular poet; he is a terrifying poet with a keen understanding of human loss and despair.)

At the poem’s end, Frost leaves us with what to me is an extremely appealing reaffirmation of faith:

...So WAS I once MYSELF a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good BOTH GOING AND COMING BACK.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Amen.

Robert Frost, “Birches,” in Selected Poems of Robert Frost, (New York: Holt Rinehart, and Winston, 1967), pp. 77-78.

Available online at http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/birches.shtml