“When it was evening, the disciples approached him and said, ‘This is a deserted place and it is already late; dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.’ Jesus said to them, ‘There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves.’” (Matthew 14.15-16)
When writing about his childhood, the Southern writer Rick Bragg doesn’t mind admitting he grew up poor. He often speaks of his mother in his books, telling the reader of the wonderful woman who had to raise her three boys mostly by herself, barely scraping by, but always making up for what they didn’t have with plenty of love.
He tells of how his mom sometimes would take them fishing and, “If we passed a store, she bought us Golden Flake barbecue potato chips and Grapicolas while she pretended that, ‘No child, I ain’t hongry, I’ll just ask them if I can have some water,’” her way of saying there wasn’t enough money to get herself something, but making sure her little boys could have at least a bag of chips and a bottle of grape soda.
Today, the evangelist Matthew tells us how the Galilean Teacher fed a crowd of people with next to nothing, just five loaves and two fish about all that could be found, but still enough that everybody sitting on the grass could have at least a few bites, enough, Matthew says, that they were satisfied.
At this point, the kindness of the Galilean comes as no surprise to us, because whatever the situation, he seemed always able to show kindness, especially to the people nobody else saw, the ones nobody cared about, the lost souls nobody else could be bothered with. “They moved Jesus,” the spiritual writer Henri Nouwen once wrote, “they made him feel with all his intimate sensibilities the depth of their sorrow.”
Nouwen describes this sensibility this way, “He became lost with the lost, hungry with the hungry, and sick with the sick. In Jesus,” Nouwen said, “all suffering was sensed with a perfect sensitivity.” Or, as the evangelist said, “He was moved with pity for them,” a word more often translated as compassion, but which the Greek word almost makes untranslatable, since it means he felt a disturbance in his guts.
Perhaps that is the word we should think about for a moment, that feeling that was stirred up in the Galilean’s gut when he saw hungry people or homeless people or haunted people, a feeling so deep, so discomforting, so desperate that it made him almost throw up. Yes, our English translation of the word is a puny second to the rumblings Jesus felt in his stomach, providing us with a clear picture of what God feels when he sees his children on earth go hungry, or go homeless, or go berserk because nobody else cares whether they live or die.
Biologists, it is said, evaluate life in terms of the capacity to experience pain, so that the more pain that is felt, the higher the life form. With this as a scale, they have decided that a worm is less evolved than a dog, because the worm feels little pain, while the dog feels a lot of pain. But, according to some writers, there may be another level, and that is the capacity, not only to feel one’s own pain, but to feel the pain of others. Some argue that this is a peculiarly human capability, separating us from the animals. Perhaps so.
And yet, in this story, the disciples clearly cannot feel the pain of the hungry crowd, not in their gut, instead wanting the crowd to deal with their hunger on their own. “This is a deserted place and it is already late. Dismiss the crowds,” they tell the Teacher, so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.”
To which, as we heard, the Teacher responds in a direct command, “Give them some food yourselves. There is no need for them to go away.” These words, uttered from his mouth, but coming from his gut feelings, challenge the disciples to feel pain beyond their own, feeling the pain of others who have no food, no drink, and no way to get either for themselves.
In this way, the Galilean Teacher called Jesus, at one and the same time, presents us with the picture of a God who feels the pain of his creation, who hears the cries of his people as he tells Moses when he speaks from the burning bush, while also showing us that humanity is still far from divinity because we cannot truly feel the pain of others, as the Divine One does.
This story, then, becomes a call to conversion, to growth, to stepping outside our own skins so that we can step into the shoes of another, one who suffers, who starves, who has sleepless nights because of the pain in their lives. We become our best selves–the truest expression of our humanness–not so much when we are able to feed ourselves, but when we can feed others.
The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked what marked the first sign of civilization in a culture, having studied so many different cultures across the years. The person asking the question expected her to give an answer that mentioned some tool or some craft or some art form. But Dr. Mead’s answer surprised everyone. She gave this simple answer, “A healed femur.”
When the initial surprise had passed, she was asked to explain her answer, which she did, pointing out that there are no healed bones found in ancient peoples where the survival of the fittest was the way of life. Whereas a healed bone, on the other hand, she explained, shows that someone cared for the injured person, hunting and gathering food for that person until the injury healed.
“Someone,” she said, “had to care enough to provide for the wounded and hurt so that the individual could heal. Compassion,” Dr. Mead said, “is the first sign of civilization.” Or, using the Biblical expression, we might say, “feeling a disturbance in our gut for somebody else’s pain.” That feeling for another is what marks a civilization.
That answer, like the Teacher’s answer, would have us ask how evolved we are as a civilization, how advanced our humanity really is, how close to the feeling in God’s stomach is the feeling in our own stomach when we see another person in pain. The answer we give will tell us if we truly are as civilized as we tell ourselves we are.
The Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C. is known for hosting what they call “The Welcome Table,” which is a worship service with breakfast and Bible study at 8:00 o’clock on Sunday mornings for about 200 homeless people. Guests are called by name and dine on real plates with real silverware while other members of the church pour coffee for them. When these guests leave after the meal, the host says, “Thank you for coming.”
One member explained that at first others in the church referred to this 8:00 o’clock service as “the homeless.” Gradually, they became “guests” and now “members who live on the streets.” More often than not, they are called by name. At first, the service had no traditional offering, but the homeless members insisted that their service should include one because, as they said, they wanted to give back to the church.
The priest explained, “They felt like they were not real members and asked if they could contribute also.” An 11 o’clock member of the church named Daniel recalled the first time he served as an usher at the homeless service. As the plate was passed down the rows, he watched poor people turn their pockets inside out and put loose change and crumpled dollars in the offering. The man almost cried. He said he learned more about giving that morning than in a thousand sermons.
Daniel said he felt it in his gut.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 