Matthew 14:13-21
Now when Jesus heard [about the beheading of John the Baptist], he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
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One of my favorite comic strips is the snarky, sarcastic, and often unwittingly theological strip “Pearls Before Swine,” whose main characters are a sardonic and insulting rat and his happy-go-lucky and a bit dim-witted friend pig. Among a handful of favorite strips that I’ve saved is this gem, where Rat and Pig are philosophizing about happiness.
Rat, in the first frame, muses “What does it mean to be happy? Is it something subjective? Or is there an objective component? Is it simply the absence of pain? Or is it something more? How does a dumb guy like you answer a question like that?”
Pig, in the next frame, gives Rat a blank stare and says, “I think happiness is finding a couple extra fries at the bottom of the bag.”
For a french-fry lover like me, this is gospel. It also reads like one of Jesus’s parables about the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of heaven is like finding a couple of extra fries at the bottom of the bag. See, it works? We can extend the metaphor, if you want. The kingdom of heaven is like getting the first scoop from a new batch of fries hot from the fryer. The kingdom of heaven is like a friend who offers you French fries off of their plate when you hadn’t ordered any yourself. The kingdom of heaven is like finding a crispy french fry at the bottom of the pile after you thought you were left with only soggy ones.
This is the way that Jesus has been talking for a few weeks now:
The kingdom of heaven is like a sower who casts seed indiscriminately on all types of land.
The kingdom of heaven is like a man who lets both weeds and wheat grow abundantly in his field.
The kingdom of heaven is like planting a tiny mustard seed that grows into a giant, well-rooted plant.
The kingdom of heaven is like mixing in enough yeast to successfully leaven three bushels of flour.
The kingdom of heaven is like investing everything you have into a real estate deal for the sake of buried treasure.
The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl that you use all of your life savings to purchase.
It’s honestly hard to stop talking like this once you’ve started. Wednesday morning, I was preparing communion before Helen Farwell’s funeral service, and I was emptying a package of wafers onto the communion plate, and two times over, when I thought I’d gotten all of them, I noticed an extra wafer hiding in the package. And I heard myself mutter under my breath, “The kingdom of heaven is like an a package of communion wafers that never seems to run out.”
Two things are common to all of the parables that Jesus has been telling in Matthew’s gospel these last weeks: 1. The element of abundance, and 2. The element of the irrational.
Abundance. Leavening three bushels of flour. Selling everything for a treasure or a pearl. Dumping out all the seed on all of the land.
The irrational. Why would a good farmer waste seed on inferior land? Why would anybody plant a mustard seed? Why would a good landowner let weeds grow up with the wheat? Why does anybody need to leaven three bushels of flour? Why would you sell everything to buy a pearl, leaving you with nothing except for a pearl?
Jesus has been priming his disciples through these parables for exactly a moment like today. He’s been teaching us that the kingdom of heaven is surprising and abundant. He’s been training us, so that when we see the kingdom of heaven at work, we know what we’re looking at.
Except that in today’s gospel, when Jesus puts the kingdom of heaven to work in the multiplying of loaves and fishes, the disciples seem to have forgotten everything that Jesus has taught them. Faced with the living, breathing needs of the world around them, the disciples quickly default seeing the world on human terms: There are a lot of needy people. It is evening and it is time for dinner. The sensible, rational thing to do is send them away to find food for themselves. Doesn’t matter that the disciples can scrounge up a few loaves and fishes. There is too little food and there are too many people.
They can’t see that the irrational and abundant kingdom of heaven might be able, in this very moment, to do exactly what Jesus has promised that it would be able to do. They can’t see that the parables about the kingdom of heaven are not just nice words and nice theology, but that they are a concrete directive for how faith interacts with the world.
We, too, say that we believe that God is an abundant giver, who blesses and multiplies goodness in the world through us. We say we believe that God calls us to be advocates for surprising, irrational, upside-down justice. We say that we believe God empowers us to be humble and to take risks to work for peace and love for all of God’s people.
But when we see sick and hungry and need crowds around us and we look at the handful of bread in our pocket, we often disconnect what we believe about God with what we believe we are able to do, or what we believe God is able to do through us.
Because the world is filled with messages of scarcity. We are told that we should be afraid of people who are different than us, and so we tighten security at the airport and we tighten our borders, even though God places in our hands the ability to show abundant love to our neighbors. We are told that the economy is bad and that we aren’t going to have enough money and so we cut back our charitable giving, even though God puts in our first-world hands enough wealth to buy food for the whole world. We are told that five loaves and two fish will never be enough food to feed a crowd of five thousand, and so we try to send people away so that we don’t have to deal with hunger, poverty, and need up-close.
The alternative message of faith, however, is that Jesus multiplies all the gifts that he gives us and sends us out, and gives us his power to show compassion in real and tangible ways in the world. Jesus tells us that we are enough, and we don’t need to be more or different for God to love us, and we don’t need more or different stuff for God to use us in the world.
The point of the loaves and the fishes is not the miracle itself. The point of the miracle is to show us and remind us yet again that God is a God of abundance. That God is a God of irrational generosity, who takes a little and turns it into a lot. That there is no need in our world that is too big for God to use us to address. The loaves and the fishes remind us that God is abundant in real life, and not just in our heads.
So maybe, in order to learn everything that this miracle has to teach us, we need to re-read it, but this time, read it like it is another one of Jesus’s parables; one more series of one-liners about what the kingdom of heaven is like and our place in it as disciples.
The kingdom of heaven is like a grieving man who yet has compassion for the needs of others.
The kingdom of heaven is a place where our own brokenness gives us special tenderness for the brokenness of others.
The kingdom of heaven is like a hungry crowd in the middle of a desert, longing for even a bite of bread.
The kingdom of heaven is filled with people who are longing for something that satisfies.
The kingdom of heaven is like a man who gives thanks to God for the blessing of food before breaking the meal for others.
The kingdom of heaven blesses us and breaks us open for the sake of others.
The kingdom of heaven is like five loaves of bread and two fish, that when broken, become enough food for an entire city.
The kingdom of heave is a place surprising abundance.
The kingdom of heaven is like a man who gives his disciples handfuls of food for them to give to others.
The kingdom of heaven is a place where we can trust God to give us what we need to serve others.
Jesus doesn’t ask us to understand the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. But he does ask us to trust it. To be surprised by what God empowers us to do. To be surprised by the heights and depths of God’s love for the world. To be surprised by the abundance that God shows in all things, and especially things that look irrational and crazy to the rest of the world.
Logos
by Mary Oliver
Why worry about the loaves and fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don’t worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.
Because the kingdom of heaven means abundance of life for us and for all people. Jesus thrusts bread into our hands here at this table and gives us all grace, all mercy, all forgiveness, all power to take that little bit of bread into the world so that he can turn it into more.
We don’t have to understand the miracle in order to trust it. And don’t have to understand God’s abundance in order to look for it, and see it, and trust it, and lean into it, over and over again in the world. Because the gifts of God really are like two extra french fries at the bottom of the bag. They bless us. And they amaze us. And they come to us exactly when we are sure that we have nothing left to give. And like the bread and the fish, like all of God’s gifts given in love, these fries, too, always taste better when they are shared.
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