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.

Scrapper-with-God (Genesis 32:22-32)

This dark little tale intrudes into the story of Jacob like an unwanted guest, like an unwelcome interruption in Jacob's headlong rush back to his family, and reading it, one of the first things I wonder is “why?”  What purpose does it serve?  Well, it does serve an obvious purpose, it explains why a couple of things are the way they are: first, how and why Jacob’s name becomes Israel and second, why Jews aren't allowed to eat meat from over the hip bone.  But why do that here? Why now, why interrupt the powerful rush of narrative redemption, the powerful suspense around the question of whether Jacob will be forgiven by his brother?

Well, you might say, that's pretty obvious: that's the way it happened, that’s why.  But that just pushes it back a ways, causing me to say “ok, God, if that's the way it happened, why did it happen that way?”  Which, I guess, is another way of asking “what does it mean?”  And that's not the only question this passage poses.  First of all, just who is it that Jacob wrestles?  The narrator just calls him “the man.”  Jacob is convinced that it's none other than God's own self, but he never identifies himself, even after he’s been asked he replies . . . why won’t he say who he is?  Indignant at the thought of the Almighty being beaten by a mere mortal, painters sometimes portray him as an angel.  In other interpretations, it's Esau, snuck across the river for some brotherly mano a mano; or maybe it’s a bandit, looking to steal some of Jacob's enormous wealth.  Maybe, some have suggested, it’s a demon, sprung up from Jabbok's cold depths: why else would he be afraid of the morning's light?

Well.  The first thing to notice is that it’s an interlude in the middle of a desperate flight: Jacob is fleeing one angry relative—Laban—and heading into the arms of another, his put-upon brother Esau.  He’d snuck out of Padan-Arram in the middle of the night, taking Laban's household gods with him, along with a huge household, much of it gained at Laban's expense.  Although Laban had come after him, after hearing from God he let him go, but not without a fair amount of grumbling and lingering ill will.

Now, as he heads back to the promised land, he's afraid that Esau still wants to kill him for that little birthright episode, and his fear is vindicated when he hears Esau is on his way to meet him with an army.   And our narrator skilfully builds suspense as Jacob first splits his wealth, so Esau won’t get it all at once, and sends him a series of bribes, a few at a time, in hopes of whittling Esau's anger away, a little at a time.

And now, on the eve of the confrontation, he sends his wives and children across the river Jabbok and waits alone in the deepening gloom.  Suddenly a man is there, and they are wrestling, and the scene is surreal, dreamlike . . . one minute, he’s alone, surrounded by his thoughts; the next, he’s confronted out of nowhere by a faceless menace.  One minute, he’s at rest, brooding about what awaits him in the morning; and the next he’s fighting for his life.  Just like that.

It's not just any kind of fighting, either, it's wrestling, one of the most intimate forms of combat there is.  It's not boxing, where you stand back and jab, parry and thrust, nor is it sword play, where your opponent is kept literally at arm’s length.  It’s wrestling, grappling where you are in close, sweaty contact from the moment you begin.  Jacob and the unknown man get the feel of one another. . . literally.  It may have been at night, it may have been in the dark, but they got to know one another, each curve, each nook, each cranny.  They compass one another, get the measure of one another, know each other in an intimate way, just like Jacob and Esau did, in the womb.

And they go at it all night, never speaking, with only ragged breathing and an occasional grunt of pain breaking the silence, and in that still moment before dawn, in the deepest dredges of the night, the man realizes that he’s not going to get the better of Jacob, so he strikes him on the hip socket, throwing it out of joint.  But Jacob hangs grimly on, with all the tenacity he showed hanging on to Esau’s heel in the womb.

Is there anybody else in Scripture we picture having this much tenacity?  Is there anybody else who would hold on after long, exhausting hours, after suffering the incredible pain of a dislocated hip?  I can’t think of anyone . . . it’s Jacob, that scrabbler after life and wealth and respect . . . and is that what drives him?  Was Jacob, man of the tents, favorite of Rebekah, laughed at by his brother and his father?  Was it always having to prove himself that fueled his ruthless drive to success?

Although this dime-store psychologizing is tempting—and plenty have done it, citing variations of Jacob wrestling with his better (or worse) nature—it takes the easy way out . . .  ha, ha, it was all a dream.  Jacob didn’t really wrestle someone who seems a lot like God, and he didn’t really fight him to a draw, and the man who seems a lot like God didn’t really cheat by hitting him below the belt, as it were, it’s all in Jacob’s mind.  But I think we have to face it in all its difficulty and ambiguity, and I think it’s all the more powerful if it leaves us wondering in the end,

The man says “Let me go, for it’s almost dawn” and is this the very first inkling that Jacob has that he is something more than a man?  Does he think he’ll evaporate in the morning air or burst into flames like some Palestinian vampire when touched by the light?  Or—and this seems really crazy—is the man looking out after Jacob and not himself?  Does he know that Jacob will die if he gets a good look at him?  Who else do we know like that?  Who else do we know that it is death to behold?

Well.  Jacob sees an advantage in everything, and he refuses to let go until the man has blessed him, and unlike with Isaac, he tells the man his real name when asked.  And at that, the man confers a new name upon Jacob, he calls him Israel, which means scrapper-with-God, because, as he says, Jacob has “striven with God and with humans.”  And thus is named both a person and a nation, for Jacob will go on to establish the nation of Israel.

And naming Jacob is a another big, fat hint as to the identity of the man, for who else but you-know-who confers names upon people?  As we all know, in the ancient world, names carried power and meaning, and the naming of someone implied a hierarchy of power and importance.  And Jacob, of course, knows this, so he tries to gain a little on the mysterious stranger by asking his name, because even knowing a person’s name gives one a certain power over them.  But the man is too smart for that, he replies with a pointed question: “why do you want to know my name?” (as if he didn’t know) and confers the blessing.

Note: he confers the blessing, in spite of everything that Jacob has done, in spite of the fact that he’s lied and tricked his way through two families, in spite of the fact that Jacob has just tried to weasel an advantage out of him, he confers the blessing.

And now Jacob is convinced that the man is God, and he names the place Peniel which means face (pen) of God (el) for, as he says, I have seen the face of God.  Which, you’ll note, is not strictly true . . . it was still dark, and one presumes that he would have been fried to a crisp if he’d actually seen God face to face.  Even Moses, first and greatest of the prophets, only got to see God’s back-side.  But hey: it’s Jacob, so we can cut him a little slack in the truth department.

The incident reminds me of another, earlier theophany when God appears in human form to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre.  There again, the identity of the visitor isn’t revealed until the last moment, when God speaks directly to Sarah in the tent.  Here, we’re convinced because Jacob’s convinced, along with all the hints in the text.  Together, these somewhat ambiguous stories well convey the inscrutability, the ultimate unknowability of God.

It’s a mystery that leaves many more questions than answers.  If the man is God, what’s he doing losing to a puny human being?  Couldn’t he just zap him where he stood?  Why did he have to cheat, why did he have to dislocate Jacob’s hip, when even then Jacob wouldn't give up?  Was it some kind of test?  To get the blessing, did Jacob have to pass the test by not giving up, by showing God, in that intimate, wrestling conflict—the same manner in which Jacob struggled with his brother in the womb, by the by—did he have to prove he was worthy of God’s blessing, of God’s forgiveness, before he could be forgiven?

Because make no mistake, that’s what this story is about, forgiveness.  Forgiveness and reconciliation.  Jacob becomes a new person, with a new name: no longer was he Jacob-sniveling-heel-grasper, liar and conniver extraordinaire, but Israel-scrapper-with-God, striver-with-the-almighty.  And that became the story of Israel the nation, as it strived with God, wrestled with God, throughout it’s history.  Israel was (and is) no milquetoast nation of sycophants, toadying up to God, never arguing, never questioning.  When I picture this aspect of their relationship, I always think of that marvelous scene in Fiddler on the Roof, where Tevye confronts God, asking if it would it upset some divine plan if he were a richer man?  Israel was, and continues to be, a scrapper with God.

And as Christians, we have been engrafted into the family, the people of God, through our participation in the grace of God through Jesus Christ.  And like Jacob, marked with a perpetual limp, we are marked with a cross, a sign of weakness to the world, but one of strength to God.  And like God did there at Jabbok Ford, becoming weak, taking on human form to redeem Jacob, to welcome him back into the family, God became human, became weak once again to redeem us.  What was it the Apostle Paul said about God’s action through Christ?  God emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and humbled himself . . . isn’t that what’s going on here, God effecting Jacob’s redemption through God’s own weakness?

Like Jacob, who carried the mark of weakness in his hip, we carry our mark of the cross on our foreheads, conferred at our baptisms, and every year on Ash Wednesday.  And the good news is that like Jacob, we don’t have to be perfect to be redeemed.  If God can forgive the conniver Jacob, if God can forge in him a new identity—scrapper-with-God—he certainly can, and does, forgive us.  And as he does, he bestows upon us a new identity as well:  we are named Beloved, we are named Child-of-God.  Amen.