Summary: The story in the gospel of Luke about feeding more than 5,000 people with two loaves of bread and two fish moves us to ask what is miraculous today. One important answer has to do with the way the Eucharist feeds us so that we can be the hands, feet and very heart of Christ in this wounded world.
When thinking about today's story of feeding 5,000 men and who-knows-how-many women and children with just five loaves of bread and two fish, maybe it helps to imagine a huge cathedral full of people and, for an after-Mass luncheon, serving them a total of one McDonald's "Happy Meal."
On the surface, the miraculous feeding recorded in Luke's gospel may seem like some kind of parlor trick that Jesus used to impress people and draw them in as supporters of his movement. And no doubt it got the attention of at least the thousands who experienced it -- and later of the temple authorities who already were suspicious about what this Nazarene fellow was up to.
But today we have the benefit of 2,000 years of hindsight. And that gives us the opportunity to move past thinking only about how astonishingly far five loaves and two fish stretched to feed so many people. Beyond that, on this Corpus Christi Sunday, we can and should think about how -- and why -- we are fed by the elements of the Eucharist, the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ Jesus. And what difference it should make.
For help with that, we can turn to Julian of Norwich, the great Christian mystic who lived in the 14th and early 15th centuries. She experienced supernatural encounters with the divine and later wrote at length about them. These experiences helped her to understand who she was in relationship to God and in relationship to the rest of the world.
She once wrote this: "If I pay special attention to myself, I am nothing at all; but in general, I am in the unity of love with my fellow Christians."
In his new book, called simply Mysticism, author and teacher Simon Critchley tries to unpack that thought as he writes this: "Julian only is through the unity of love with her fellow Christians. She herself is nothing. The threefold being of God finds its worldly incarnation only in the community of love. God becomes incarnate through the person of Christ and the being of God finds full expression in the institutional body of the Church ...."1 As for Julian being nothing, think of a talented baseball player on an otherwise-empty field. He is, in effect, nothing until joined by his full team.
What was true of Julian of Norwich is also true of us. We become who we are -- and whom we are meant to be -- only in the fullness of our community of faith, which is the gathering of Christ's followers. And it is when we share in the Eucharistic body and blood of Christ that we become connected to one another and to the God who made us and who dwells in us. We ingest God in this way so that the divinity we take in may be metabolized as redemptive acts of love and charity for others.
If we think of Holy Communion simply as a weekly or even daily stop at a refueling station for ourselves, we cut ourselves off first from the community of faith of which we are a part and, second, from the wounded world that needs our loving response to us having been fed at the table.
This was at least part of what Jesus seemed to be teaching his sometimes-slow-to-learn disciples when they gathered in a town called Bethsaida and discovered that a huge crowd had followed them to learn more about who this Jesus was.
So, in the passage we read today, Jesus "spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and he healed those who needed to be cured," as the New American Bible translation puts it.
But as the day was ending, the disciples came to him and asked him to dismiss the crowd "so that they can go to the surrounding villages and farms and find lodging and provisions; for we are in a deserted place here."
A deserted place full of thousands of people? That's one more thing Jesus' disciples got wrong that day.
In response to their request, things get both surprising and interesting. Jesus tells his disciples to feed the crowd themselves. But they protest that among them they have only two fish and five loaves.
What follows is the story of feeding all those people with that small amount of food. And it's not misguided to think of that as a miracle. But here, too, is where we find what we might think of the miracle of the disciples learning what Julian of Norwich later learned, which is that alone, they are pretty much nothing but in community they are exactly what the world needs.
If the disciples had gotten their way and the people had left, all of them would have missed the experience of acting as part of a generous community that day -- a community that could perform wonders. They became the hands, the feet and the very heart of Christ for people who were hungry -- not just for bread and fish but for truth.
And let's not forget that in Christianity, the truth is not a doctrine, a dogma or a written confession of faith. Rather, the truth is a person, Christ Jesus.
Sometimes people have tried to remove the mystery of this story of the five loaves and two fishes by suggesting that what really happened was that when the disciples began to share what little they had, others dug into their picnic baskets and added to what the disciples had -- added enough, in fact, that all those people "ate and were satisfied," as the passage says, "and when the leftover fragments were picked up, they filled 12 wicker baskets." Maybe that's a sweet, generous idea, but let's not dismiss the miracle so easily.
By the way, if you read the whole of chapter 9 of Luke's gospel, including the passage we read today, you'll find that it starts with 12 and ends with 12. Which is to say that it begins with Jesus summoning his 12 disciples and giving them "power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal."
And the passage we read today ends with 12 wicker baskets filled with food. Was that just a numerical coincidence? Or, more likely, was there some special significance attached to the number 12?
It turns out that 12 is a richly symbolic number in many ways, including the importance of the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles. And for people focused perhaps too deeply on the importance of church growth, it's useful to remember that Jesus started with 12 and ended up with 11.
But beyond that, the number 12 is associated with the heavens -- the 12 months of a year for Earth to circle the sun, the 12 signs of the zodiac and the 12 stations of the moon and of the sun. In fact, in some cultures with little or no connection to Christianity, what's called the "angel number" -- 12 -- is considered a symbol of completion.2
Yes, we can read this feeding story without paying much attention to such things, but the story becomes richer when we consider the sometimes-subtle ways that things connect. And let's remember, too, where this story is leading. It's leading to a vital confession in the history of our faith, which is to say the confession of Peter that Jesus is "the Messiah of God."3
Jesus had asked his disciples who people thought he was. Some said, "John the Baptist; others, Elijah; still others, 'One of the ancient prophets has arisen.'" But then he asked the crucial question that everyone in the world who has ever heard of Jesus must answer: "But who do you say that I am?"4
Again, don't miss the indirect but provocative wording Jesus uses. The term "I am" was a way that the Hebrew people referred to God, based on how God responded to Moses at the burning bush when Moses asked what he should say when people wanted to know the name of the god who was sending Moses to tell them God was about to lead them out of Egypt. God's answer was this: "This is what you shall tell the Israelites: I AM sent me to you."5
Friends in Christ, we are intrigued by the miracle stories in the Bible, stories of healing, of restoration, of transfiguration, of feeding a huge crowd with one "Happy Meal." But there is much truth found in this sad phrase from a Jewish prayer book: "We walk sightless among miracles."6
We need to learn that we ourselves are among the miracles when we join in community with fellow Christians to repair this broken world, to bring the good news of Jesus to the hurting, to the hungry, to the homeless, to the poor and imprisoned. When we feed on the body and blood of Christ Jesus, we become his hands, his feet, his heart. In some ways, we find ourselves only by losing ourselves in the resurrected Christ, who goes before us to show us who needs to be fed, to be clothed, to be housed, to be freed. And what is more miraculous than that?