The Feeding of the Five Thousand

I’ve been thinking lately about the feeding of the five thousand.

Every three or four weeks, I meet with a monk, a Jesuit, with whom I talk about my prayer and spiritual life. About a month ago, I mentioned to him that I wanted a more personal relationship with God. Sensations of God’s vastness and transcendence come pretty easily to me, but it’s harder for me to feel the particularity of God’s presence in my own personal daily life—washing the dishes, responding to email, listening to others. That day, I was longing to feel taken care of. Being a good, Scripturally minded monk and priest, he asked me what Bible stories came to mind when I think of Jesus being especially caring. The first that came to mind was the scene in the feeding of the five thousand—not just the feeding part, but the part when Jesus tells everyone to sit down. 

Since then, I’ve been spending a lot of time with that passage (not just the sitting part, either). It’s a scene that is repeated in all four Gospels—the details are a little different in each, but in all four, the people have followed Jesus out into the middle of nowhere. They are hungry, and it’s late, and the disciples are worried.   In the Gospel of John, there’s just one little boy who has some food with him.  And Jesus makes them all sit down, and the food is distributed, “and all ate and were filled.”

The people sit down—they stop milling around, stop shouting for their kids, stop looking around for something to eat. They sit. And all are filled, and there are twelve baskets left over.  A second miracle, one which isn’t named in the Gospels, is that all the people ate together—in a society so governed  by ritual purity, the chances that those 5000 would consent to eat together in any other circumstance was pretty much zero. The miracle was that they were together—not just that they were fed (we talked about that in our “Connect” class last year—thanks to Dylan Brewer for the point).

We’ve been talking a lot in vestry about how to manage the constant use of our building—four congregations worship here on Sundays, and we are about as different as they come.  Our church walls hear French, Spanish, Luganda, English, the “thee’s” of Rite One and the “You’s” of Rite Two.  It’s a lot. As I mentioned in my annual report, some of our building use is motivated by the need for income, but a lot of it is for the sake of hospitality. We share a special relationship with St Peter’s because we share the heritage of the Anglican Church, and it’s with us that the Diocese of Massachusetts connects to St Peter’s.  But how do we balance being welcoming to others and being faithful to the needs of our own ministries? How do we help each congregation respect the other? It’s not as simple as writing down some times of day on a calendar.   

And all ate and were filled. God has a dream of abundance that is far greater than anything we can imagine, but it can be so hard to see it. Whenever I pray that story I am always amazed at the sheer quantity of human bodies that must have been present.  There were five thousand people!  The Gospel of Luke says they sat down in groups of fifties. That’s as many as we had in church last Sunday--multiply that by one hundred.

The story begins—Jesus had compassion on them. Jesus has compassion for us—even when you are one out of a crowd of five thousand people, that compassion and feeding is there, enough for everyone—enough not just for “everyone,” a crowd of faceless people, but enough for you and me, too.  Put yourself in the story—what is it like when you sit down at Jesus’ invitation? Who are you sitting with? Is it cloudy or warm? What is it like to be filled? Let’s pray for the grace to eat that bread of compassion and to drink the wine of kindness.