Homily on Matthew 14:13-21
Bruce Jennings
Grace Episcopal Church
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
July 31, 2011
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. (Matthew 14: 13-21)
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Today we live with an ever present awareness of scarcity. There are not enough jobs. There is not enough money to keep pace with rising prices and taxes. Necessary services are often not available. There is not enough time or energy in our hectic lives; America is a chronically sleep deprived nation. We are running out of credit. We are running out of oil, gas, and affordable sources of energy. It is beginning to dawn on us baby boomers that we are running out of years ahead of us. We are running out...We are running...
This scarcity is paradoxical. Scarcity sits side by side with material wealth. Indeed, our riches may even reinforce our sense of scarcity. We are a stuffed people, a people of stuff; and as George Carlin pointed out in one of his brilliant comedy routines, when we aren’t accumulating stuff, we are arranging it, storing it, fussing over it, worrying about it, lest somebody mess with our stuff.
Scarcity is not primarily about how much we have, it is about how we relate to others and how we live. (In a moment, I will make the same point about the idea of abundance.) Also, scarcity is not the same thing as deprivation. Deprivation can bring people together in closer connection. Scarcity drives people apart and makes us anxious and insecure. Woody Allen had scarcity in mind when he remarked that as long as we are finite beings we can never truly relax. Deprivation, as in the times of rationing and hardship during World War II, actually brought about a sense of solidarity and connectedness; everyone had to help one another because they were all in the same boat. But this scarcity of ours today is not something we really share, even though it is something that afflicts all of us.
The culture of scarcity is a culture of competitive advantage; a culture of beggar thy neighbor. It is the kindergarten game, Musical Chairs, writ large and played on a society-wide scale, even on a global economic scale. You remember the game: while the players are dancing around, one chair is removed from the circle, and when the music stops the dancers must scramble to get a seat, which have now become scarce. Someone—the slow, the polite, the gentle—will be left out. An interesting educational tool.
Today’s gospel is clearly a corrective to this pervasive culture of scarcity, for it is a story about abundance and plenitude. It tells us that there is another economy other than the competitive one. There is a economy of love as an alternative to the economy of appropriation. Precisely because we are so enmeshed in the economy of scarcity and getting, it is very challenging and complex for us to see the economy of abundance and giving. Above all, it is difficult for us to focus on how authentically we connect rather than on how successfully we acquire and consume. We read today’s gospel lesson and say: “God will provide.” Yes, but with what provision? What is being provided and what does it mean to receive it? I think that the abundance presented here is not abundance in the sense of wealth or stuff or even—a much more nurturing metaphor—food.
Part of the meaning that I find in today’s gospel is that abundance is not primarily about having or not having, it is about connecting, caring, and sharing. Abundance does not challenge scarcity by replacing few things with many things. Abundance challenges scarcity by transforming it; abundance transforms scarcity from something that sets us apart into something that heals us and makes us whole even within our mortality, our finitude, our vulnerability, and our insufficiency. It is not only possible, but necessary to be able to live abundant lives within circumstances of scarcity. That is the hope that is given here.
To be sure, our faith tells us that ultimately the fundamental abundance is God’s redeeming love, which is a transcendent abundance, a newness of eternal life. This is contained in today’s passage by the anticipation of the Last Supper and the Eucharist. The text says: “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.” But I think that our story is also a teaching about how to live well as a mortal among other mortals. It is about how to bring a healing plenitude out of the scarcity of a broken, finite world.
In the first lesson, Isaiah (55:1-5) instructs us to correct our false perception of value. True nourishment can be purchased without money and without what we call “price” because its price is keeping faith through the covenant. This raises several fundamental questions: what is food, what is value, what is happiness, and what does it mean to be full? Material scarcity does not preclude these conditions of being, for they are fully available to the thirsty, to the poor, to those in want. And the reverse is also true: material abundance does not ensure fulfillment—those who have money spend it on that which does not nourish; those who have strength, labor to produce that which does not satisfy.
With these questions on the table, so to speak, let’s recall the context of the narrative Matthew presents. Prior to the encounter with the multitude, Jesus has withdrawn to a place apart when he is informed of the execution of John the Baptist and the horrible debasement of his body. In the midst of personal loss and grief, Jesus is not permitted the solitude he seeks for long. The crowds follow him. Why? Perhaps they follow him there in an act of solidarity, wanting to share his pain. In any case, though, this multitude, this many, carry a kind of scarcity with them; a noisy (and nosy) presence that creates a scarcity of solitude and quiet.
People are drawn to Jesus, and he responds. Jesus submits himself into service to the many, placing himself among them and healing them. This he does out of “compassion.” The solitary passion of grief and loss—scarcity in one of its most acute forms—is transformed into com-passion, the passion of being together with others who have bodies and who face death. When this presence is established, then healing comes in abundance all day long.
At dinner time, the disciples, benevolent but utterly clueless, are worried about the physical hunger of the people and urge Jesus to send them away. The disciples think the people should separate themselves from Jesus so that they can go elsewhere and get what they need to become full. This is a clean miss. The writer of Matthew’s gospel was not without a sense of irony.
Jesus initially responds to his disciples by questioning the premise that lack or scarcity is present among the people. They do not need to go into town to obtain that which will nourish them, they already have it right here. Where the disciples see scarcity, lack, and absence, Jesus perceives abundance, plenitude, and presence.
Next comes the climax of the story, the feeding of the multitude with scarce resources. Fives loaves and two fish fill five thousand, not counting women and children!, with twelve basketsful left over. I won’t belabor the interpretation of this as a physical miracle. I want to think about it instead as teaching us something new about true abundance and the transformation of scarcity from something that starves and empties us into something that fills us and makes us whole.
That abundance through presence is then enacted in a short, almost matter of fact narrative that has surely become one of the most dramatic and influential stories of the Western tradition. The enactment of abundance has the following three elements:
1. Abundance is a blessing or gift from God.
Jesus looks up to heaven. However, the abundance (embodied in the loaves and fishes) does not drop down from heaven. Unlike the story of manna in Exodus (16) and Numbers (11), we are not given a clear sense of exactly where the food comes from. If we want to speculate about that, it seems to multiply and materialize from within the multitude, not from above; it comes from within the world not out of this world. But perhaps this detail is left vague in the text so we won’t dwell on these questions at all, because what we should dwell on and what is central here is the emergence of abundance out of initial scarcity. The material medium is secondary, and in any case the “abundance” we are learning about here is not simply a lot of material stuff, like a super-sized order at Long John Silver’s. It is the community and the giving, not the food and the eating, that is at the center of this story.
2. Abundance does not elicit or reinforce competition or a system of fair distribution.
As we know from the Gospels as a whole, Jesus is not a teacher who avoids the question of fairness and distributive justice in his lessons. Just think for a moment of all the parables and encounters where he addresses precisely that issue, albeit in ways that often turn ordinary moral common sense about justice (both in his day and in ours) upside down. But this text is striking for its silence on this important topic. We are just told that the disciples “gave” the bread and fish to the crowds. So this is not about justice, this is about the gift. And it suggests that there was some internal structure to the multitude, perhaps they had grouped themselves together as families or in some other way. They were not an undifferentiated mass, nor were they a group of completive individuals each looking out for number one.
Here is yet another element in the story to consider. The mention in passing of women and children is perhaps deliberate and more significant than it first seems. Men may go on an outing without taking food along, but women with children in tow ordinarily do not. And then as now, women are the symbol of sharing, caring, and making provision. Women know how to turn scarcity into abundance, or if not abundance precisely, then enough to go around.
3. Finally, abundance has a very paradoxical property: it does not diminish when it is drawn upon.
The more people partake of it, the more people who are filled by it, the more it grows, the larger it is, the more abundant abundance becomes. This is the point made by our narrative’s mentioning that after the multitude had eaten, there was still plenty left over.
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Sharing makes small portions filling. Selfishness, grasping, makes large portions unsatisfying. The abundance that does not diminish the more it is shared is what transforms even scarcity into plenty. The abundance that makes possible a community of compassion and caring even in the worldly condition of scarcity is the exact opposite of our society’s extended game of Musical Chairs.
In God’s version of the game, there is no need to live in anxiety about when the music is going to stop and no need to push and shove others aside when it does. Chairs are added while the dancing goes on, not taken away. And everyone will have a place to rest when the music stops.
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