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disciples, feed people, gift of love, give, Jesus, loaves and fishes, The Sophia Center for Spirituality
Today is the day when that formidable gospel appears. It’s a great miracle story – but has a twist that makes me groan and look inside myself every time. If I hear the words “feeding of the 5,000” I know I can’t just sail along to the end where everyone gets relaxed on the green grass and fed from 5 loaves and 2 fish until they’re more than satisfied. Jesus is interesting in this text from MK 6:34-44.
When the disciples come and suggest to Jesus that he send the people away after a rather long session of teaching so they can find food somewhere (and perhaps so they themselves can do the same), Jesus comes back with a challenge. “Give them some food yourselves,” he says. Imagine their surprise! How could he even think that was possible? They must have felt silly walking around asking everyone to contribute their meager meal to the huge crowd but they did what he asked. The results were not at all helpful: 5 loaves and 2 fish – for 5,000 people (men only!) but again they did what he asked, having them sit down in groups while Jesus said the blessing over the food and then distributing what became more than enough for everyone.
There’s so much to wonder about. Where did they get the baskets for distribution and collection of leftovers? How did that whole process of distribution start. “He broke the loaves…and divided the fish…” It reminds me of a family vacation where my father took my friend fishing and she came back with one very small fish that she joyfully cooked and distributed among the half-dozen people in attendance – a tiny but wonderful appetizer to the meal. A gift of love.
It doesn’t really matter, I guess, what is given as long as we do willingly what we believe we are being called to do. It is our “Yes” – spoken or not – that counts. God takes care of the rest.
Today my Church honors St. Matthias, a man who was mentioned only once in the Scriptures. The event was a momentous one for him and a lesson for people who live in consistent attention to their spiritual lives. The first lectionary reading today tells the story of how Matthias became the replacement for Judas in the band of apostles. (ACTS 1:15-26) He was one of the two nominees for the position because he had accompanied the apostles the whole time Jesus was with them “from the baptism of John to the day on which he was taken up,” having also been a witness to the Resurrection. He was clearly one of those folks who knew the value of staying close to the example and teachings of Jesus – without needing to be known as “one of the Twelve.”
This morning’s gospel (JN 14:1-6) has Jesus giving a sort of pep talk to his disciples. What we know that they didn’t is that Jesus will be leaving soon and he’s trying to prepare them to continue on without his physical presence. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says. “In my father’s house there are many rooms.” I often wonder if they had, by that time, caught on to his manner of speaking in metaphor. Even now we have trouble understanding and accepting that diversity does not necessarily mean division in religious belief and practice.
Although we are moving through the season of harvest here in our country now, the gospel for today reminds us of the necessity of sowing seeds on good ground. (LK 8:4-15) The disciples of Jesus didn’t understand the parable in which his message was “hidden” so he did something that rarely appears in these gospel texts. He explained the meaning! As he spoke of the different kinds of “soil” in which the word of God might be sown, they heard the pitfalls of life in how the yield of what was sown might be more or less. In the end, we find that as for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who, when they have heard the word, embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance. (vs.15)
Today Christians celebrate the great feast of Pentecost (from the Greek for “the fiftieth day”), the commemoration of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that enlivened the disciples of Jesus to spread the message of God’s love for the world. Lest we think that Christians are the only ones who celebrate faith at this time – 50 days after Easter, we need to look further back to recognize that there is a linkage to the Jewish festival of Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, which falls fifty days after Passover. In speaking of this connection, Fr. Dwight Longenecker writes from the Christian viewpoint: This [feast] was kept as a commemoration of Moses receiving the Divine Law on Sinai. The Christians understood that as the law came down from heaven to Moses for the people of God, so the Holy Spirit came down on the church. The age of the Mosaic Law was therefore fulfilled and completed by the new age of Spirit and Grace. (CRUX, June 3, 2017)
Today’s gospel recounts the wonderful beginning of John’s 21st chapter that takes us from an early morning fishing experience to breakfast on the beach with Jesus. In this post-resurrection story, seven of the disciples were together at the Sea of Tiberias in Galilee, probably still wondering what to do now that the bottom had fallen out of their world. Peter, leaning into all he had known before meeting Jesus, said to the others, “I’m going fishing.” They all jumped at the chance to do something familiar so off they went. Unfortunately, they caught nothing all night. It was at dawn, John records, that Jesus yelled to them to try again with the nets in a new way. In his version, they didn’t quibble with the seemingly ridiculous dictum that just moving the net to the other side of the boat would be a good solution; they just did it. And the rest, as they say, is history: 153 fish in a net that should have torn under the weight of so many but didn’t. Even stopping right there in the story gives a great deal of food for thought.
The word “trust” keeps floating to the surface of my thoughts and experience these days. I think of how often we exercise trust in another person or group or organization without naming it or even recognizing that we are allowing it to function. We get in a car and trust that other drivers will obey the rules of the road and that we will be able to do the same. We get on a plane and trust that it will not fall out of the sky even though it is extremely heavy and is resting on nothing solid (like a road). We travel to a new city and trust others to take us to places that we could not find ourselves.
The gospel for today is Matthew’s version of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain. I understand the desire of Jesus to take time away in a quiet place to be alone as it seems he often did. I might have chosen the Sea of Galilee as my getaway, but the hills might have been a better bet for Jesus as a total escape from people. One could wonder why on this particular day he chose to take Peter, James and John with him. Did he know what was going to happen? Was he afraid he would need help if the depth of experience got too intense? Or did he just have a desire to have some quiet time with less than a dozen companions?
