Back when I was growing up, I had six aunts who all lived in the same town, and of course they were in charge of pulling together the food for every sort of family gathering, from Christmas to the 4th of July to the occasional funeral. And a special fear had clearly been passed down to my aunts: the fear was, that at a gathering you were in charge of, you’d run out of food. We don’t know where this fear came from, whether it was something they got growing up during the depression of the 1920s, or whether it went back much further to pre-history in the mountains of Croatia, where they were all from. Whatever the source of this fear, that running out was the worst thing that could happen, it resulted in not just a lot of pre-event anxiety but enormous tables of food and intense pressure on the rest of us to eat it, and in terms of leftovers, the 12 wicker baskets mentioned in today’s gospel to them would have meant they had come way too close to failure.
This story of the loaves and the fishes is one of the core gospel stories about Jesus, and one that we are meant to live very close to. It appears in the gospels six times, and yes, with four gospels, it appears more than once in two of them. That repetition is unlike any other gospel story, and it means several things. First, it’s evidence that something very much like this miracle did really happen in the life of Jesus. It also means that the writers of our gospels wanted this story to be one we remember, that a group of people who went out to the middle of nowhere to hear Jesus and weren’t smart enough to bring food with them, or were too poor to have any to bring, all somehow ended up being fed by Jesus anyway.
It’s a story that’s meant to remind us of so many other stories, especially in the Old Testament, the manna in the desert for the starving people of Israel, the prophet Elisha feeding people so easily in the first reading today, even the 23rd psalm we just sang, with the pasture that has everything we need to eat and drink. So many stories about food, about the incredible relief and surprise that comes from there being enough.
What is the real message to us of all this talk about food, and not just food but abundant food? It seems to be not really about food, of course, but about God, what God is like, they’re stories about how God provides more than enough of what we need to live, independently of anything we do to get it. And in theory, we think we understand that. Sometimes we even say things like, “The Lord will provide.” But this gospel, these six times we’re told this story about the way God really is, tells us that God creates abundance for us now, that God is offering us so much love and so much presence that there are baskets of leftovers. And that’s an experience of God we aren’t always sure we believe in.
It’s so hard because we tend to think that a relationship with God, experiencing God’s presence in prayer, or in the events of our lives each day, we think that relationship, that knowledge that God is with us, is a very scarce commodity. We think awareness of God is given out in tiny moments, if ever, mostly to people who have expertise in the area and work really hard at it. We don’t see that God is the one pursuing us, trying to give us more. We think that God is so hard to find, that the love God offers us is so scarce, that instead we prefer to worry about running out of all sorts of other substitutes.
It might not be food we are stockpiling, like it was for my aunts, it might be money, or a sense of security, or a sense of stability, or a sense of peace and quiet and routine that we love, or a sense of being needed, all those things we think are indispensable to our lives, that we work so hard to keep. We want those things because we think that they are what we need to keep going, that we have to count on them, that if we ran out, we’d be lost.
It takes a lot of energy to keep that process going, of making sure we don’t run out of all these substitutes. Thomas Keating, a great writer about prayer, says that what interferes with prayer and our relationship with God the most is what he calls artificial programs for happiness, the things we do to try to save up more and more of what we think will keep us safe and happy. When it comes to a relationship with God, we don’t have confidence that it is what we really want and need, that it makes so many other things seem less necessary. But as Jesus says later on when he is trying to explain this miracle to this disciples, what he is offering is better than anything, even the miraculous manna in the desert, even the food that these five thousand people ate, they didn’t understand the point of the story, that was only food, he says. What I was trying to show you was the bread of life, the love of God overwhelming us every day when we turn towards God and ask for it. It looks like there can’t possibly be enough, but there is. That’s what these stories are trying to convince us we can have, that it happens the way it happened to the people in this gospel, they followed Christ out to a field, and without their having to do anything, were given everything.
If you were at the loaves and fishes meal down at the Trenton cathedral earlier today, you saw yet another image of that gospel, people showing up for a meal and having it given to them, no questions asked, all done just out of love. If you were a server at that meal, now realize that in reality, in the rest of your life, you are the guest, someone who will be given that much of God’s continuing love and presence just for showing up and sitting down.