When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he said to Phillip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do. Phillip answered him, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?” (John 6.5-9)
In 1978, after his wife had left him and he had lost his job, William Least Heat Moon, a 38-year-old teacher, decided to take an extended road trip around the United States, following the blue highways, those small, off-the-beaten-track roads that pepper the rural parts of America. Traveling in a van he outfitted with a bed, a stove, and a portable toilet, he spent three months on the road, driving from small town to small town.
At the end of his 13,000 mile journey, he wrote a book that he called Blue Highways, published in 1982, a compilation of his experiences on the road and his conversations with people alongside the roadways. One such story that he writes about occurred just six days into the trip when he came to a place called Nameless, Tennessee and met a man there named Madison Wheeler, a one-time farmer and a one-time store owner.
Talking to Heat-Moon, Wheeler explained that his store was doing a good business for five years, but then bigger supermarkets opened in bigger nearby towns and soon everybody went there to shop. “This tar road under my shoes done my business in, and it’s likely to do Nameless in,” he commented, accepting the changes that come with changing times.
As Heat-Moon got back in his van and started the engine, Wheeler said to him, “If you get back this way, stop in and see me. Always got beans and taters and a little piece of meat.” As Heat-Moon drove away, he couldn’t help but wonder why “it’s always those who live on little who are the ones to ask you to dinner.”
Perhaps that is the question at the center of the Scriptures that the evangelist John presents to us today in the story of the miraculous feeding of the crowd in the well-known chapter six of his gospel, also called “The Bread of Life Discourse.” With few, but exact words, John tells of the crowd that followed Rabbi Jesus as he made his way to another part of Galilee.
Seeing the crowd, the Galilean Teacher immediately thinks of their hunger and says to one of his apostles, Phillip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” As the evangelist tells the story, the Rabbi already knew the answer, but he wanted to see if this disciple also understood the truth already demonstrated in the changing of the water into wine at Cana, the truth that God provides enough for his children.
Unaware that he is being tested, Phillip answers that even months of pay wouldn’t be enough to feed this crowd in front of them, immediately deciding it was impossible to do. His answer was simple, “There is not enough.” Another disciple, this one named Andrew, interjects that a boy in the group had packed a small sack lunch consisting of five barley loaves and two fish. “But,” Andrew says, “what good are these for so many.” Again, he concludes there is not enough.
Not to be overlooked, the description of the loaves as made of barley tells us that the boy was poor, people with means always using wheat for their bread, while poor people used barley, a rougher grain and more difficult to digest. So, not only is it a large crowd, which the evangelist points out, but it is a crowd of poor people, with next to nothing of their own to eat.
If the passage that is presented here beckons to the Exodus story wherein the Hebrew slaves, similarly destitute and desperate, cross the Sinai, looking for a Promised Land, it is with good cause. While in the desert, they also experience hunger and thirst, which the Lord God remedies with a bread from heaven called manna. Intentionally, the evangelist recalls this story, preparing the way for Rabbi Jesus to discuss the manna that God provided to the slaves and the living bread that he now will provide to hungry souls.
And that is exactly what occurs, with the Rabbi taking the boy’s loaves and fish, giving thanks to God for providing enough to humanity, and passes portions of the food to the people, who, taking the bits and pieces, find themselves satisfied and, miraculously, baskets of food are left over after all have eaten. So primary to the life and ministry of Rabbi Jesus was this story of the feeding of the crowd that all four gospels repeat it, the only miracle story with that distinction.
Countless exegetes have attempted an interpretation of the story, some more cleverly than others, but almost all seeking to explain it away, rather than accepting it at face value, assuming the evangelists failed to describe the event in full. The better approach, also theologically more sound, goes with the facts as they are presented, no effort made to offer a rational explanation for an inexplicable event.
As with the Exodus story and now with this story, the simple fact is that God provides when and where the people have little or nothing. It is a theme as old as creation and it is a theme that reappears consistently throughout the long history of God and his people. With the God of Israel, there is an abundance of everything.
Knowing well the stories of the past that showed God’s generosity, Rabbi Jesus, strengthened by faith, believes that the God of Israel will again provide for his people, blessing them with an abundance in their need. And therein we find a critical difference between the Rabbi and his followers, Jesus seeing abundance, while his disciples see scarcity, summarized by Phillip in the statement, “There is not enough for each of them to have a little.”
Hence, the challenge to us, many of us also seeing things from a perspective of scarcity, to change our outlook to one of abundance, coming to believe that there will be enough because God always gives enough. Radically different perspectives, the mindset of abundance or the mindset of scarcity determines how we live our everyday lives, either generously because we believe there is enough to go around, or selfishly because we believe there is not enough to go around.
A story some years ago in the New York Times exemplifies this difference well. Witnessed by an onlooker, a homeless man was sitting on the curb near St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in midtown Manhattan, his hat placed in front of him for change that people might drop into it. After a while, a shabbily dressed homeless woman walked by, dragging a cart filled with garbage bags, her sole possessions in the world.
Seeing the homeless man, she paused for a moment. Then, as without second thought, she reached into her worn and torn coat pocket for two crumpled dollar bills. She gently placed them into the man’s hat on the sidewalk and continued on her way. Unimaginable to us, the woman, her circumstances little better or perhaps equal to the homeless man’s state, shared what she had, exhibiting Rabbi Jesus’s belief that there would be enough for her as well as for the poor man in front of her.
That woman, willing to share the little she had, becomes the boy with five barley loaves and two fish, reaching into her pockets to offer what she had to someone who had nothing, just as the boy had offered to the Rabbi his meagre sack lunch to feed the many hungry souls that had followed the Rabbi up the mountain. It happened again in midtown Manhattan just as it had happened on that mountain in Galilee.
The question put before us today is a simple one, at least in what it asks. Our response, however, may be more complicated. The question that stares us in the face is this–can we become the poor boy with five barley loaves and two fish, willing to share what we have, believing that there will be enough for us and for them? Or will we decide that there is not enough, choosing to see scarcity rather than an abundance?
Years ago, the Jesuit priest and writer John Kavanaugh proposed that “our attitudes to the poor and our attitudes about our security are the best indicators of our discipleship.” Acknowledging that this guideline does not reassure most of us, hampered by our modus operandi of scarcity, he said these remain the call of the gospels, nudging us to share rather than to hoard.
He said the same truth came home to him one day as he was waiting for his brother and sister-in-law on a corner in Oxford. Admitting that he “was aloof and abrupt whenever he spotted a hand held out by someone who looked lazy, dirty or irresponsible or appeared to be in a drug haze,” he stared in disbelief as his brother came along and quietly gave a few coins to the very people who had rankled him.
In that moment, he said, he saw a glimpse of the truth that he had ignored for too long. Acknowledging that his brother and sister-in-law were not solving poverty in the world nor were they solving the immediate problem of one person on the sidewalk, he suggested that they will were doing something quintessentially gospel-like. What they were doing “was just reaching out to another human, surely broken and less blessed, and sharing something of what they had.”
And that, finally, is what Rabbi Jesus is asking us to do. He wants us to change our viewpoint from one of scarcity, whereby we have convinced ourselves that there is not going to be enough, to one of abundance, whereby we choose to believe that there will be enough to go around, our trust in God stronger than our fears in having to do without. With the former approach, we become tight-fisted and uncaring people. With the latter approach, we become the boy with the fish sandwich, offering it to somebody else who is hungry.
Speaking to her grandson one day, a wrinkled and wise woman told him that the world is divided into givers and takers. She said the takers eat well and the givers sleep well. There is something of the Rabbi’s teaching in her simple words, a reminder that the little boy in the gospel story went home and slept well that night, while the disciples tossed and turned throughout the night.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 