"Three Miracles at Jesus' Spontaneous Dinner Party": Proper 13, Year A

Memorial Episcopal Church, Baltimore, Maryland
July 31, 2005
Nehemiah 9:16-20 - link to NRSV text
Psalm 78:1-29 - link to BCP text
Romans 8:35-39 - link to NRSV text
Matthew 14:13-21 - link to NRSV text

Have you ever wondered why it is that, when we gather as the church to remember Jesus, we do it with a meal? If you think about it, it could have been anything. We could have built statues to remember Jesus, or held a dance. We could have made it a poetry reading, a teach-in, a weekly golf tournament -- but we didn't. When we gather as the church, our central act together in remembrance of Jesus is to have a meal -- the Eucharistic meal.

I know, it doesn't seem like much, as meals go. I have a friend who likes to say that when he receives one of those communion wafers, he finds it easier to believe that it's really Jesus' body than to believe it's really bread. But this is supposed to be a meal -- a feast, even. An abundant and lavish one, held in remembrance of someone -- Jesus of Nazareth -- who had a reputation for being, as the Irish scholar John Dominic Crossan puts it, "a party animal." We have a feast to remember Jesus, complete with breaking out the wine (which really ought to be our best stuff) before noon on a Sunday, because Jesus was remembered, as Matthew 11:19 puts it, as "a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners."

This is not the Jesus a lot of us grew up with, whose hair may have been a little long for our parents' taste, but whose name came up mostly when our parents wanted us to behave, hang out with the right kind of people, behave like the good citizens they may have (rather naively) thought we were. But today’s gospel doesn’t fit in with the picture of the well-mannered Jesus of popular conception anywhere near as well as it does with the “party animal” Crossan describes, and that’s the point I want to start with today.

I know that this isn't what usually comes to mind first when we think about the feeding of the five thousand. Usually, when people think about this story, they think about the miracle, by which they mean the multiplication of the loaves. Admittedly, that part of the story is pretty impressive. Not only did God's power produce enough food to feed five thousand people -- not counting the women and children, as Matthew emphatically points out (Matthew 14:21) -- but there were twelve baskets of leftovers. Twelve baskets, like twelve tribes of Israel -- in effect, this story tells us that there was such plenty represented in this feast that there were enough leftovers to fill doggie bags for all of God's people. Truly impressive stuff!

But as far as I’m concerned, that miracle of mutiplying loaves pales in comparison to a couple of other miracles in this story that I think are even more impressive, even more miraculous demonstrations of God's power acting in Jesus' ministry.

To set the scene for those miracles, it's important to know that in Jesus' culture, people really took seriously the old maxim that "you are what you eat," and not from a nutritional viewpoint. I'm talking about purity, about keeping kosher. You are what you eat; if you want to be a kosher kind of guy, the right kind of person, you've got to eat the right kind of food. This might initially sound like a fairly simple matter: if it's pork for dinner, you just keep passing the plate. But if you've ever had a serious food allergy -- or if you've ever had a guest who did -- you know just how complicated things can get. Who knew that peanut oil was in some brands of ice cream? Think how complicated it is to try to avoid not just one ingredient, but anything not prepared in the right way.

If it's really important to you, there are only two ways to be sure that what you're getting is kosher. One is to be in the kitchen, not only hovering over everything on the ingredient list, but making sure beforehand that no surface has been contaminated. The other is dicier: if you know your host family very, very well, and if you know for SURE that they know how to keep their kitchen and what you can and can't eat, you just might be able to trust them to prepare a meal you can safely eat.

So there it is: keep a close eye on every ingredient and how it's prepared, or at the very least make absolutely sure that you don't eat with anyone unless she knows how to prepare it all AND she really understands how important it is to do it right, and you just might be able to share a meal.

And then think of this with respect to the story in this Sunday's gospel:

NOBODY KNEW WHERE THE FOOD CAME FROM.

Imagine those five thousand people at Jesus' spontaneous dinner party whispering: does anyone know who baked the bread? What kind of fish was this? Was it cleaned? This was some kid's lunch??! Does anyone know who his mother is? That would say something about whether the food is OK ...

But that didn't happen. Instead, five thousand people take one guy's word for it -- not a family member, not their best friend, not even someone they knew well -- and they sit down to eat food when -- and I mean this literally -- God only knows where it came from. Jesus inspired a miraculous trust in those who came to him, the trust that made everyone there willing to forget about years of "you are what you eat" conditioning to accept bread from Jesus without knowing or asking about where it came from and whether it was safe or kosher. Five thousand people -- not counting the women and children -- found their lives so transformed in encountering Jesus that all of their fears of dangers to be avoided, of what it would mean if they joined the ranks of those seen as impure, gave way to enthusiasm for sharing the feast before them.

Think about the kind of trust Jesus must have engendered in people to get that kind of response. That's real, life-changing spiritual power in Jesus' presence, a miracle at least as impressive as the multiplying loaves.

But that isn't the end of it. There's one more miracle in this story, and I think it's the most impressive one of all. In Jesus' culture, it wasn't just "you are what you eat"; it was also "you are who you eat with." Some of that was just a logical extension of purity observance, because it wasn’t just the ingredients that could make the food -- and you -- impure; it was also the hands passing the food. Imagine the scene of that spontaneous dinner party in this Sunday's gospel, and imagine that you'd just experienced that second miracle of being able to trust Jesus to provide you with food that's good. But Jesus isn't the peanut vendor at the ballpark; he’s not hurling individual portions with miraculous accuracy directly to you. Strangers brought the bread to Jesus, who blessed and broke it ... and handed the pieces to the disciples, who handed them to others in the crowd, who handed them to others, and so on across countless pairs of hands before it got to you. Take that bread, and you're taking into yourself not just whatever was in the field where the wheat was grown and in the kitchen when it was baked, but also what was on the hands of every other person in that crowd.

That's reason enough to be skittish about who you eat with, but that's not all. There's also the business of honor, crucial in Jesus' culture. A man’s willingness to do business with you, to consider allowing a daughter to marry your son, to acknowledge you as a person worth acknowledging, depended on how honorable he saw you as being. And "you are who you eat with" was the operative rule that said that your character would be assumed to be the same as the character of your companions at dinner. Eat impure food, and you're impure. Eat with a rebellious son or a tax collector and you're not going to be seen as being any more honorable than they are.

But along that hillside, over five thousand people were willing to receive not only Jesus and the bread that he blessed, but also the strangers with whom they shared it. Every one of them became, on that dusty hillside, one with every other. This was a completely spontaneous dinner, so there was no checking the guest list or asking for credentials. Distinctions between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, priest and tax collector -- indeed, all the distinctions around which wars were fought between nations, families, and brothers -- just didn't count any more.

And I'm not just saying that in the naive way that lets college-educated white people say “oh, I don’t pay any attention to the color of a person’s skin.” The privilege that comes with my skin color means that I’m not going to be pulled over because of it, that I’m unlikely to be shot because of it, that I’m more likely to get fair treatment in court because of it, and so I can afford to pretend that I don’t notice color. That’s NOT what I’m talking about when say that in Jesus has the power to make irrelevant all the categories we use to divide. What I'm talking about is that radical force that turns mountains and valleys to plains, bringing down the mighty and raising the lowly. What I’m talking about is the end of a world in which some people aren’t counted as a world dawns in which EVERYONE counts. I'm talking about real change, a world in which a child from any neighborhood in Baltimore has the same chance at education, self-esteem, and all of the privileges that a child from the suburbs takes for granted. I'm talking about a world in which a child from any village in the Sudan has access to the running water and lights to read by at night that is taken for granted by children from across Baltimore.

When I talk about that third miracle from Jesus' lakeside feast, I’m talking about the miracle that fires us up to give flesh to that vision of a world in which every child has a chance -- in which God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus taught us not only that this is possible, but that he was sending the Holy Spirit to give us what we need to make it happen. Every meal he shared with his disciples, with sinners and Pharisees, or five thousand strangers, was a living parable of that possibility, of that vocation that is his gift to us.

Thanks be to God!