There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?
Our Gospel this week tells us about a time when 5,000 people gathered with Jesus and his disciples. Now this was just one of many times that Jesus had large crowds following him.
The gathering recorded in this Gospel takes place on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. It could have been somewhat uneventful, but instead, we are allowed to experience one of the most beloved miracles in all of the New Testament. Why? Because first the disciples and then the crowd learned how to make a miracle by opening their hands and letting go. . . They all learned the miracle of sharing. They all learned that to open their hands and to let go is always better than to clench their fists and to hold on.
Can you sense their hopelessness when they say, We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish. You could argue that they were just being judicious at the end of a long day, and perhaps the sensible thing would have been to send them home, but ask yourselves, how many times in the church has a really good idea for outreach been squashed because of judiciousness before it even had a chance to be fully explored?
As it turns out in this Gospel, it is naive generosity rather than sensible judiciousness that Jesus uses to transform scarcity into abundance. And that is exactly the point of the Gospel.
In the book Stories of Awe and Abundance the author, a Franciscan nun, recalls this personal story:
One Saturday afternoon when she was a little girl, she could hear the whispered voices of her parents’ discussing money in the next room. Her anxiety grew as she listened, and she wondered if there would be enough to live on for the next week.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, her mother burst into her room and handed her FOUR dollars saying, Honey, go get some of your brothers and go to the store and buy some strawberry ice cream.
Overcome with disbelief the little girl thought she better check with her father to see if her mother had some sort of mental lapse. He just smiled and said, Honey, your Mamma is right. When we start worrying this much about a few dollars for ice cream, we’re better off having nothing. Go get your brothers and buy that ice cream.
How I wish we could practice some of that naive generosity when it comes to refugee children coming to the richest country in the world looking for an open hand. We judiciously debate the cost, and while the debate continues, rather than an open hand, those children are met by ICE or the National Guard.
Politicians point fingers at one another and members of both parties try to figure out ways to send them home. It just seems downright shameful in light of this Gospel. Christians, it seems, have a special calling to step up against this treatment. These children are not illegals, they are images, images of God.
Christians have been called by the Easter experience to celebrate out of abundance, not dwell on scarcity.
Someone posted a quote on Facebook that struck my eye in light of our Gospel. It said, Everything you want is on the other side of fear. I believe Jesus addressed that when he said, You are the light of the world. But isn’t it true that so often it is the light within us and not the darkness that is the most frightening to us? Even church communities, I would say especially church communities, carry a certain amount of insecurity and self-doubt, and those fearful thoughts tend to rear their ugly heads whenever we’re about to embark on anything new. I pray we don’t let that happen in our churches! I pray we can extend our hands and invest in God’s abundant life!
I don’t pretend to understand exactly what happened to those five loaves and two fish that day on the other side of the Sea of Galilee with those 5,000 people. I only know that Jesus accepted smallness, scarcity and insignificance in the sight of the people, and turned it into a reason to celebrate abundance. I also know that he was able to do all of that because a very few folks decided to extend their trembling but open hands.
This shouldn’t be a strange notion to us, because this is exactly what we reenact in our celebration of Holy Eucharist every single Sunday morning. One small loaf is extended to God with an open hand, and then it feeds a whole church filled with people. It wouldn’t matter if there were 25 of us or 250. It would feed us all! One of the theological niceties of using an actual loaf, as I did in my ministry, is you can’t count out the number of wafers. We just feed everybody and then worry about the leftovers.
We can bring to this Communion Table all our worries about scarcity, and we can turn them into celebration of abundance, and we can do the same thing when we ourselves become communion for the world outside the walls of our churches. The only thing we have to do is extend our hands, open our clenched fists and LET GO.
Alleluia! All things are possible with God!
Thank you! Didn’t know that the 5000 fed by Jesus is today’s church sharing the weifers. The miracle of giving.