Bread for the Hungry (a)

Preached on 4 August 2008 at Bolton St James, Bradford.

You can listen to a second-service version of this sermon by clicking here …

Note. Under Marmalade you will find a hymn that I wrote in 2006 and that strongly relates to the theme of this sermon. It is also called Bread for the Hungry and it is sung to the tune of Morning Has Broken.

Matthew 14.13-21.

Well, there we have it. The feeding of the 5,000. It has to be one of the best-known stories in the New Testament, hasn’t it? But I wonder how many of you know that it is the only story of a particular miracle performed by Jesus that appears in all four gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all see this event as of such importance that they have to include it … though each then writes about it in his own special way. And, just like different newspapers all covering the same story, each includes things that the others miss-out and vice versa. Only Luke tells us, for instance, that the miracle took place near Bethsaida — a village at the top of the Sea of Galilee and a little to the east. Only John tells us that it took place at Passover time, that the loaves were barley loaves, and that they belonged to a boy. Only Mark tells us that the grass was green (grass is not often green in that part of the world) and that Jesus saw the crowds as being like sheep without a shepherd, and that Jesus made the crowds sit down in groups of 50 or a 100. And only Matthew tells us that Jesus healed the sick as well as feeding the crowds, and that there were women and children there as well as the 5,000 men.

But, fascinating though it is to compare the four versions of the story in that way, the differences between them are not what is important. What is important about this story is the big question that hangs over it, just begging to be answered.

Question? What question? Oh … you mean how did Jesus do it?

No, no. no … That’s not the big question. The big question — and the one I want to try to answer this morning — is why did Jesus do it?

You see, as God’s son acting under the authority and in the power of God, Jesus could do anything … anything at all. And even the devil recognised that for, right at the start, just as Jesus was about to begin his ministry, he came to Jesus and made a suggestion … a suggestion that it’s quite important to remind ourselves of when faced with the mystery of the feeding of the 5,000. For the suggestion was, of course, this: “Why don’t you turn these desert stones into bread?”

The devil was inviting an all-powerful Jesus to perform the very miracle that now, using slightly different raw materials, Jesus has actually gone ahead and performed. Yet in the wilderness, Jesus would have nothing to do with the devil’s invitation. For it was an invitation to win the support and adulation of the masses by putting food in their bellies, and Jesus told the devil, “I won’t do that. It would defeat the purpose for which I’ve come into the world.” But now it looks as if he just has! And, predictably, as John tells us in his gospel, the crowds immediately want to make him king!

So what is going on? Why did Jesus do it? Why did he feed the 5000? Why didn’t he just send them away as the disciples made it clear that they thought he should? After all, people in Galilee were used to going without. It would have been no big deal. They would have cleared off back to Capernaum round the top of the lake with their tummies rumbling, and that would have been that. But Jesus was having none of it. Why?

I think there are at least four things going on here that made it imperative that Jesus did what he did.
The clue to the first was in the opening words of our Bible reading this morning — “When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.” So what had happened?

Well, what had happened was that King Herod had, at the behest of Salome, beheaded Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. John’s disciples had buried the body and then come to tell Jesus the appalling news.
So was Jesus in a state of grief? Yes, surely he was … but surely more than that. Surely he was thinking: “If the powers of this world do that to the herald — to the one who merely proclaimed my arrival — what will they do to me?” And this is not conjecture or supposition. If we go forward just a little way in Matthew, we read, “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed …”

If the fact that he would have to die had been only in the back of Jesus’ mind until this time, now it was well in the forefront of his mind.

The second thing that was going on was that it was Passover time. John tells us so in his account of the feeding of the 5,000; and that too was in Jesus mind. Passover was the defining moment in Jewish history. It was when the angel of death had passed through the land of Egypt but had passed over the houses of the Israelites because, smeared on their doorposts, was the blood of the Passover lamb — a lamb that died so that those within the house might live. Passover was the night of freedom and liberty, when a nation of slaves became the people of God. And it seems to me that Jesus must have been asking himself at this time, “If I am to die as John the Baptist has just died, am I to die as a Passover lamb?” He knew what his cousin John had said of him: “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And now he is thinking: “Is that what lies ahead … maybe just a year ahead?”

The third thing that was going on was the growing belief, throughout Galilee, that in him, occupied Israel had found its new revolutionary leader; and there was a build-up of forces that now had either to be used or defused. All the gospels talk of 5,000 men who had come round the lake to where Jesus had retreated. As Matthew notes, there were women and children too, but it was mainly men. Why men and why so many of them? After all the “towns” around Galilee were little more than villages. You would be hard pushed to find even 100 men in somewhere like Capernaum. So who were all these men and why had they followed Jesus to where he was temporarily holed up in the Golan Heights? Because the multitude that had come here to Jesus was an army looking for a commander. Because they were a potential guerrilla force that was ready, willing and able (they thought) to take on the occupying armies of Rome … if only someone with the power and charisma of Jesus would stand at their head and cry “God for England, Harry and St George!” or something similar. The momentum was building. Galilee was a hot-bed of revolution. And everything Jesus did was increasing the temperature. So he had to do something about it … and that too must surely have been in his mind.

And last, but by no means least, there was the sheer lostness of the crowd in front of him … and indeed of the sea of humanity of which this multitude was just a token. An army without a commander? No … sheep without a shepherd, that’s how Jesus saw them. You sometimes hear people saying that Jesus fed the 5000 out of compassion because they were hungry. But, no, it doesn’t say that. Only Mark tells us why Jesus had compassion on the multitude and it was because they were lost … because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

So, putting all this together — the execution of John and the pointer it gave to his own execution too, the proximity of Passover and the idea of a lamb dying for the freedom of the world, the building-up around him of a revolutionary force who were, in truth, just lost sheep needing a shepherd — putting all this together, Jesus took five barley loaves and two little pickled sardines and fed the multitude.

But hang on, you say. Surely that would only make things worse so far as the crowd-in-search-of-a-leader issue was concerned. Yes, it would … and yes, it did … and yes, it was meant to. According to John the Evangelist (as I’ve already mentioned) the 5,000, once Jesus had fed them, were all set to take Jesus and make him king. But what did Jesus do? He turned his back on them and walked away, up into the hills. Having finally ignited the flame of rebellion, he blew it out. They would never try and make him their leader again. They had looked for a Barabbas and found a Jesus by mistake. They had shouted for the wrong man. Well … they would never make that mistake again.

So, all right — feeding the 5,000 solved the practical issue of bringing the crowds’ hopes of rebellion out into the open and then crushing those hopes; but what had the miracle to do with those other things that I have said were in the mind of Jesus at this time … the need for him to die, the lostness of the world?

To find the answer, let’s go back to the beginning of this miracle and see how Jesus approached it. “Taking the five loaves and the two fish” we are told, “and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples …”

Sounds familiar? It should. It is the language of our Eucharistic prayers that speak of Jesus “who in the same night that he was betrayed, took bread and gave you thanks; he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying: Take eat; this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
The crowd on that hillside by the eastern shore of Galilee would not understand it — not then — but they were participating in a kind of prequel to the sacrament of holy communion. There was, in the actions of Jesus, a looking-forward to the next Passover, one year later, when Jesus would again take bread, for the last time, in the privacy of an upper room, and break it and give it to his disciples saying “This is my body, broken for you. Take, eat …”

Am I being fanciful? Not a bit of it. It’s all there in John’s gospel. There, when some of those who have eaten of the loaves and fishes catch up with Jesus back in Capernaum, he tells them: “I am the bread of life … Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. … Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.”

John sees the feeding of the 5,000 as so much an anticipation of what Jesus did with the bread at the last supper that, in his gospel, he doesn’t record Jesus as doing anything with the bread and wine at the last supper. Nothing at all. It’s true! Read John 14, 15, 16 and 17 — four whole chapters devoted to the last supper — and you will find that there is no mention of the bread and the wine. Because, for John, the feeding of the 5,000 is the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine. For John, it is here, in the story of the feeding of the 5,000, that Jesus is spelling out, more clearly even than at the last supper, what his death is all about.

And it is about life for the world. In Jesus is life. Zoe. Real life. Life that pulses to the heartbeat of God. Life that will endure throughout eternity. Eternal life. The kind of life that the men and woman and children in front of him — indeed all the men and woman and children in the whole wide world — should have, but don’t. Just as their bellies are empty so their souls are empty too. So how can they be filled? Taking the barley loaves, Jesus shows us how. The loaves must be broken … and so must he. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he tells those who have eaten of the loaves and fishes once they are all back in Capernaum. “If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

The feeding of the five thousand was, if you like, an enacted parable. It was a parable showing how, in Jerusalem a year later, Jesus would offer his body to God and how it would be broken on the cross to bring eternal life — the life of God — to this dying world. And for John, the feeding of the multitude by the shores of Galilee hammers that message home in a way that the feeding of the disciples at the last supper in Jerusalem doesn’t quite match.

So is that it then? Is that everything that this enacted parable is meant to teach? Well, no, not quite. It is my belief that it teaches one more thing that I must just touch upon before I close, because that one more thing is simply too important to be ignored. And it is this. The broken bread was carried not by Jesus himself but by the disciples to the hungry crowds. Jesus gave the pieces of broken bread to the disciples “and the disciples gave them to the people”.

And nothing has changed. That is still the job that Jesus gives to each one of us. Our task, our ministry, in whatever way we can, using whatever gifts God has given us, is to distribute the bread of life to those around us. To share Christ crucified with a lost and empty world.

And if we are obedient in that, we shall, I know, find that the bread of life is not used up, and does not grow less, but is rather multiplied as we give it away … so that at the end, there are still twelve baskets left over — “twelve baskets full”.

Twelve baskets full. Do you see the significance? There is a basket for each disciple. As each one — Andrew, James, Bartholomew, Thomas, Philip, Peter etc — set about his task of giving away the bread and fish, a basket of bread and fish was being filled for that disciple himself. How tempted each one must have been to just stop and satisfy his own hunger with what was in his hand, but perhaps, had he done so, that would have been the end of that. No more multiplying, no more increase … and certainly no basket full at the end of the day.

There is a serious point here and we will do well to heed it. You often hear Christians saying they are hungry and “needing to be fed”. You often hear churchgoers grumbling about “not getting much out of it”. But if that is so, I wonder whether their hunger, their dissatisfaction, has come about for no other reason but that they are not giving away the bread of life. Only when we share the broken bread of Christ crucified are we guaranteed to share in the abundance.

You know, one of the privileges of being a Reader is being able to press a wafer into outstretched hands at the communion rail and say “The body of Christ keep you in eternal life.” But let’s remind ourselves as I close this morning that we all, without exception, have the privilege — and the duty and joy — of doing just that every day of our lives, one way or another, as we pass on something of Jesus to the people all around us, at home, at work, and at play.

Amen.