FINDINGS V By Harry T. Cook
     
 

Proper 13 - A - August 3, 2014

Matthew 14: 13-21    

 

 

Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
7/28/14

 

 

 

Matthew 14: 13-21 

At the time Jesus heard about John [the Baptizer's] death, he went away in a boat to an isolated location by himself. When the crowds learned of it, they walked out from the cities in pursuit of him. When he stepped on shore he saw a huge crowd and felt compassion for them and healed their sick. As evening advanced, the disciples came to him and said, "This place is far from anywhere and it's getting late. Why don't you send the crowd away so that they can find a village with some place open to buy food?" Jesus replied, "They don't need to go anywhere [because] you will give them something to eat." They said, "Well, we have only five loaves of bread and two [cured] fish." And Jesus said, "Bring them here to me." He told the crowd to be seated on the grass, and looking upward he gave a blessing and broke the bread into pieces, gave them to the disciples and the disciples distributed them among the crowd. Everybody had their fill, and still they put the remainder of the broken pieces into twelve baskets. It is said that the number of people who ate amounted to 5,000 people, not counting women and children. (Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

 

 

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Sometimes what precedes or follows a biblical passage is important to the passage itself. What precedes the so-called feeding of the 5,000 in Mark and Matthew is Herod's birthday banquet -- in Mark the scene is one recalled from the past. It is impossible to overlook the contrast between the goings on in Herod's house and the pastoral scene "on the grass" as hungry people are depicted as being fed under the care of the one who, as Mark puts it in his version, had compassion on them. (see Mark 8:2). Depending on how the reader or homilist interprets this story, one could say that in contrast to Herod's predictably dissolute banquet, the shared supper of the multitude foretold a different dispensation altogether.

 

The literal interpretation of the story is that five pieces of bread (think "pita") and two fish (think smoked herring or sardines) sufficed as food for 5,000 adult men (over 13 years of age) -- not 4,999 nor yet 5,001 but 5,000, not to mention women and children. The rational humanist's interpretation is that Jesus, whom the crowds are depicted as following as they would a guru, were not all of them improvident. Those who had brought some food along willingly shared it in common. The theological explanation is that whatever it was in actual terms, the event turned out to be highly symbolic with much of its telling affecting the development of the church's early eucharistic life, much as did Luke's Emmaus road story (see Luke 24: 13-25).

 

We are meant to think that such phenomena were what got Herod's attention (see Mark 6:14, Matthew 14: 1 and Luke 9:7). They are why the crowds followed Jesus -- not because they were hungry in the usual sense but because they had heard what Herod had heard. It may be that we are expected to understand that in the evangelists' imaginations the crowds had impulsively followed Jesus with little or no thought as to how far they would end up going and for how long. As Willa Cather's archbishop says to his aid Blanchet, who had insisted that their missionary journey had led them far enough, thank you very much: "Who knows how far?"/1

 

The feeding is depicted as beginning as an incidental housekeeping detail -- the hour is late, these people are hungry, send them away to buy food -- but ends as the central point of the narrative. So important did the story become in the era of the gospels' formation that it ended up appearing in all four gospels -- twice in both Matthew and Mark.

 

Several precedents and antecedents for this story quickly come to mind: the gift of manna (mah-nu, "what's this?") in Exodus, Elijah's meal with the widow of Zarephath in I Kings 17, Psalm 23 ("thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies") and the reprise of the manna of Exodus in Psalm 78: 24: "And had rained down manna upon them to eat, and had given them of the corn of heaven."

 

Whatever may have transpired on a given day or days in the public career of the Jesus variously depicted in the gospels, which had to do with his seeing to it that hungry people were fed by whatever means at his disposal, would fit the prototype of a god or god-like leader who looks after his own. The centrality of the eucharistic meal in Christian practice testifies to the importance of the connection of the idea of a benevolent deity and the fulfilling of human need as well as the image of the egalitarian table.

 

Not to be missed is the verbal sally between Jesus and the disciples, which all three of the synoptic gospels depict. In one way or another, the disciples are shown to have genuine concern for the people who had come out to see and hear Jesus, but could only see so far as to suggest that they be sent away as it was getting on toward suppertime. Though being aware of the problem, the disciples saw it as the crowd's concern, not their own.

 

The text at hand depicts Jesus as saying the problem of food and hunger was his disciples' problem -- and opportunity. No miracle is necessary, no setting aside of natural law, no magic is needed. It is the work of those who embrace or who have been embraced by the ethical wisdom of Jesus to marshal and to see to the equitable distribution of adequate resources to those who need them. The result is the 12 baskets remaining. It is a theology of abundance rather than a theology of scarcity.

 

 

* * * *

 

 

Business, cried the Ghost of Jacob Marley when it was seven years too late, Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity; mercy; forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business./2 In a similar vein some 200 years before, an actual Englishman, John Donne, wrote these words that have convicted many a self-centered human being: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind .../3

 

Charles Dickens's Jacob Marley, or rather his departed spirit, pilloried the selfishly affluent burghers of his time with the posthumous wisdom that, after all, a human being in need is a brother or a sister, however filthy and degraded by circumstance. The obvious need cannot, must not be ignored. Donne laid bare the truth that in death as in life all people are one, or, as the American Declaration of Independence would later contend, created equal.

 

Thus to say that hunger is the problem of the hungry is to traduce the law of human equality as poignantly illustrated by Donne and Dickens. Hunger is the problem of those who have or control the resources to assuage it.

 

That is the pointed wisdom that awaits us in this altogether familiar story of the feeding of the 5,000. It comes in the imperative announced to the disciples by their chosen leader, the disciples having noticed the lateness of the hour and the scarcity of provisions among the crowd. Their bright idea? Make the people go away and find food. Jesus'? You give them something to eat.

 

The disciples' heart was in the right place. They understood that hunger was upon the crowd. What they didn't understand is that they had the obligation to deal with it. If, indeed, some in the crowd were so careless as not to have provided for themselves or even if they could afford food if they could find some, that was still not the point.

 

It is not a work of supererogation to provide for any kind of hunger that is obvious to one who ought by definition to care. It is kind of like forgiving the same offense for the 70th time and to acknowledge that it may be necessary to do so for a 71st and for all the times thereafter.

 

The feeding of the 5,000 is a "miracle" only in that the story has the potential to excite in the human heart the ardor to provide whenever provision is necessary, never mind the details. It is only to communities whose ethos is of the kind that has the love of neighbor/4 as self at the center that any of this can make sense.

 

Those who are hungry need provide no positive ID, no proof of residence, no indisputable evidence of poverty in triplicate. Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat. (Isaiah 55:1). No questions asked. The unmistakable signs upon the faces of hungry persons are the only criteria. You give them something to eat. Why? Because mankind is your business, and because no one is an island.

 

 

/1 Death Comes for the Archbishop, New York, 1927, Random House, p. 41

/2 Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol, London, 1843, Chapman & Hall, p. 33

/3 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Ann Arbor, 1959, University of Michigan Press, pp. 108-109

/4The word "neighbor" in this context includes "enemies," real and perceived. See Luke 10: 29-37


Copyright 2014 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

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