Give and Take (Matthew 14:13-21)

What can we say about this passage?  It’s an iconic one, right up there with John 3:16 and the Sermon on the Mount.  It’s the only miracle story that’s in all four of the gospels, and Matthew likes it so much he includes it twice, once here and once a few chapters later as “the feeding of the four thousand.”  It is thus the quintessential miracle story, and one might be tempted to leave it at that, as an example of the wonders that Jesus performed, so we can all ooh and ah and tell ourselves how wonderful he is and how lucky we are to be Christians.  And don’t get me wrong, he is wonderful, and we are lucky to be among the chosen, but certain features of the way Matthew tells the story make it more than that.

First of all, the setting: where does Matthew place it in his gospel?  Well, Jesus is in his hometown where, you’ll recall, he gets no respect.   “Prophets,” he says, “are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.”  They are also likely to get themselves killed, because right after we hear about that, Jesus—and we—find out that John the Baptist has been beheaded by Herod and delivered to Herodias’ daughter on a dinner plate.  Remember?  Herod had imprisoned the prophet because he didn’t like it when John preached that he was sinning by taking up with Herodias, who just happened to be his brother’s wife.  Matthew makes it clear that Herod wanted to kill John, but “feared the crowd,” feared a popular uprising if he put the prophet to death.  But he was boxed into a corner, and forced to do what he wanted to in the first place, serve up John’s head on a platter.  Now, as our passage begins, Jesus hears about this and leaves his hometown, heading for the desert.

What could the beheading of John possibly have to do with the feeding of the 5,000?  Well, it describes a murder of a prophet by the state, and for a pretty capricious reason, too: on the surface, to placate Herod’s lover.  But underneath, as Matthew makes clear, Herod gets what he wants: the elimination of a potentially dangerous political and religious figure. Matthew has quickly sketched, in ten short verses, a devastating picture of the capricious, debauched, corrupt government under Roman rule.  And when Jesus hears about all of this, he leaves that place, leaves the place of corruption and debauchery, and takes a boat—presumably across the Sea of Galilee—to a “deserted place.”  And I think this can be read as an empty place, a place without either the debased Roman government or his carping relatives, who couldn’t see past the worldly, couldn’t see past Jesus’ status as a carpenter’s son.  It’s almost as if Jesus is starting over, building something new in those desert places, away from the Herods and their corruption.  By placing these stories back to back, Matthew draws a contrast between the human-ruled world, with all its vice and fraud and chicanery, which not only disregards prophets but kills them, and the place where Jesus holds court, which is a symbol of the Kingdom of God.

Well.  As so often happens, a crowd gets wind of where he’s gone, and follows him, and when he goes ashore there’s this great mass of people, and what’s the first thing Jesus does when he sees them?  Does he groan and say “Oh, no . . . I wanted to be alone?”  Does he get right back in the boat and look for a place where he can be that way?  No.  He has compassion for them and ministers to them.  And although our translation has it that he cures their sick, the Greek here can also be translated more generally, as in “restores the weak,” or “serves the powerless.”

But more interesting than that is the word “compassion” and the Greek it is translating.  The Greek verb translated here as “has compassion” is derived from a word for bowels, for entrails, and has the connotation that Jesus feels for these people deep inside of him, in his guts.  The English translation is just as interesting: com means “with” and passion means, originally, suffering.  For instance, the phrase “passion of Christ” refers to his suffering on the cross, not his emotional state.  And so com-passion connotes a “suffering with,” so Jesus isn’t just feeling sorry for the people in the crowd, he’s suffering right along with them, in a deep and visceral way.  He identifies with them, deep down, in his core.

And so the very first thing about this new place, this place where Jesus rules, is that unlike in the world, where the people are persecuted and oppressed, in this place, where Jesus is, they are ministered to and healed.  Instead of capriciously killing his subjects, the leader of this realm—geographically symbolized by the desert—feels for the people so deeply that it hurts him in his guts, so much that it’s like he becomes one with them.  In a sense, Jesus is filling this empty place with compassion.

And as a concrete example, we’re told that as evening draws near, the crowds show no signs of dispersing, so Jesus’ disciples—and are they like Herod, fearing a riot?—his disciples tell him to send them away into the villages to buy something to eat.  Seems there’s just one problem with this new realm:: there’s no food . . . yet.  And the disciples’ suggestion is not at all out of line, for the worldly realm they are used to, anyway.  In that world, the world of commerce, where the powers that be rule with an iron hand, it's natural that you’d buy something to eat . . . that, or you’d starve.  But Jesus just looks at them and tells them “You give them food.”  He tells them to feed the crowd themselves.

But still they hesitate:  “We have only five loaves and two fish,” they tell him, and so he takes the food, and looking up to Heaven he blesses the food, then he breaks the loaves and gives the food to his disciples who, in turn, gave it to the people.  And lo!  There is plenty to go around, and what's more, there’s twelve baskets of leftovers!  Imagine: five loaves and two fish feeding a crowd of five thousand, and that’s not even counting women and children.

And that’s what this new reality is like, this new world order formed from sand and desert grit: its ruler has compassion, and as a result of that compassion, the sick and weak are healed and ministered to and the hungry are fed.  But notice who it is that does the feeding: it isn’t Jesus who hands the food out, is it?  Oh, it's his miracle that make it possible, all right, but he gives the bread and fish to his followers, to the disciples, and they hand it out.  And lest this be thought of as mere logistics, mere expediency, remember that when they first come to him, asking that he send them away to buy food, he tells them to feed them.  “You give them something to eat,” he says, and it’s clear that that’s what he wants for them all along: he wants them to do the feeding.

 Well.  There’s one more thing we need to see here, and it has to do with the way Jesus handles the food.  Listen to the way Matthew puts it: “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.”  This should be a familiar sequence: he takes the bread, blesses the bread, breaks the bread and gives the bread.  Four movements, four actions: takes, blesses, breaks and gives.  We see them enacted every month, we saw it last month: these are the four actions, sometimes called the four movements, of the Lord’s Supper: take, bless, break and give.  What we see here is a foreshadowing of the Eucharistic feast, which we enact every month right there at that table.

Like Jesus, I take the bread off the table, I bless the bread by giving thanks to God, then I break it and give it to the elders, who—like the disciples did on that long-ago day—give it to the people who have come to the table.  Take, bless, break and give.  And the surrounding story—of the crowd coming to Jesus in this deserted space—puts some theological meat on those action-verb bones: the grace of God comes from humble, small beginnings.  Just like that mustard seed, that grows into a luxuriant tree, providing shelter for birds of the air, so God’s boundless grace comes from small acts.  From five little loaves and two measly fish, an entire crowd, the size of a good-sized town in those days, is nourished.  Similarly, when we take the bread and bless it and then break it and give it, just one little loaf and a couple of cups of juice, we believe that it feeds an entire congregation until we do it again.

But, this being a foretaste of the Eucharist, it also foreshadows the crucifixion, in which the sacrifice of one person enables the salvation of an entire planet.  The in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, dramatized out there in the empty desert, begins tiny.  Like a grain of yeast, that leavens an entire loaf, the Kingdom of God, the work of God, begins with a something you wouldn’t think would be enough, but through the action of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, it turns out to be plenty.

Sisters and brothers, like the disciples in the cool of that Palestinian evening, Christ asks us to do his work, to minister to his people.  After all, we are his body, as Paul would put it, we are his arms and legs and hands and feet here on this earth.  And like those first disciples, we often take a look at what we have and say “what we have is not enough.”  But through this passage, and countless others, we are assured that if we are doing as Christ asks—he asked them to give them food—if we are doing God’s will, we will have more than what we need.  Amen.