Satisfaction
Text: Matthew 14:13-21
We are not plants. We cannot make food from the sun, soil, and air. We need to eat, we depend on proteins that we recycle from other plants and animals. We are pretty big and active creatures. We get hungry quickly. We need to eat a lot and often. Otherwise we get sick, or cannot think straight, or get very weak. Hunger makes us search for food. Sometimes, though, food is hard to come by.
This story in Matthew’s Gospel is about feeding people who are hungry. And about why we often do not. And what God seems to think about that. Evidently the story is important for Christians to know, for it appears with some variation in all four Gospels, and appears in them six times altogether, twice in Mark and twice here in Matthew.
The people have gathered in the desert. They have followed Jesus there, because he was trying to get away for a little quiet time. The explanation is ambiguous, but Matthew implies that the death of John the Baptist, which immediately precedes this story in Matthew, was one cause of Jesus’ desire to withdraw for a while. Herod had executed John by beheading him at the whim of Herod’s daughter. It was during a big feast at a birthday party for Herod, and John’s head was served to Herod’s daughter grotesquely on a platter, like an entree. No doubt there was a ton of food at the birthday party, but who knows what the beheading did to the appetite of the guests.
This is not all just gruesome speculation. Matthew sticks these two stories together for a reason. In Jesus’ time there were two kinds of people in the world. The few who were rich and the many who were poor. Having enough to eat was a privilege and a sign of wealth. Herod and his buddies would have had plenty to eat. Everyone else didn’t. Most people were mostly hungry all the time. They were, as we say now, “food insecure.” They could not count on having enough to eat. These were the people Jesus was talking to and healing—not just a crowd of people, but the masses, the ordinary people. People who never had enough to eat. It is not surprising that they were not strong, that they were sick.
There is a miracle in this story. It is certainly remarkable that what seemed to be a meager amount of food should feed so many. But stories of never-depleted food are not uncommon in the Bible. The miracle was that all ate until they were satisfied. Unlike with most of us, to eat until they were full was extraordinary.
For those who rarely go hungry, the power of the story is in amazing production. Miracles remedy flaws, and for many of us the flaw was one of logistics. Poor planning, an inhospitable venue. But for the people who gathered to hear Jesus and be healed, the flaw was pervasive and constant hunger.
God wants people to eat. People are given food as part of creation. Food is essential and elemental. In the Bible, God provides food to the Israelites in the desert, and to the prophets during times of famine, and to crowds of starving people. In the psalms we acknowledge God for the harvest.
But more than subsistence, food is a blessing. A gift. One sign of the coming kingdom, or of the new age, is abundant food for everyone. Feeding people trumps all else. Politics and economics are secondary. The disciples wish for the people to be sent away, to fend for themselves, to make do. It it sensible. But Jesus has compassion for them. They do not have to go away, he says. To the disciples he says: you give them to eat [literally: the “something” is an addition]. You give them to eat. You provide the feeding of them. You satisfy their hunger.
This is not, as some suppose, a story about Christian unity or the rewards of faith. It has nothing to do with the nature of the people in the crowd or their thoughts about Jesus or their cooperative behavior. Or what they deserve.
They only need to be fed. Their hunger calls the disciples. As Matthew will say later in his book, what counts is whether we feed those who are hungry, without other qualification. And, as in the case of today’s story, without deciding ahead of time whether there is enough. Or whether it is logistically impossible.
The church has written for some time about what people call a preferential option for the poor, meaning that those who are poor call to us more compellingly to help them than do those who are not. Or another way to say it, when we think about what to do in the world, we should ask first about the needs of the poor. When we make political and personal decisions, we need to ask first how they will affect the poor.
Thirty years ago the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote that “Jesus takes the side of those most in need. As followers of Christ, we are challenged to make a fundamental ‘option for the poor’—to speak for the voiceless, to defend the defenseless, to assess life styles, policies, and social institutions in terms of their impact on the poor. … A fundamental moral measure of any economy is how the poor and vulnerable are faring.” Christian morality comes not from our own fired-up desire to feed people but from the call to us of those who need food.
This story is not about the power of Jesus. He did not feed the 5000 plus people himself, though he had a hand in it. His blessing was an act of reverence and thanksgiving, but it was not a magic food-duplicating spell. Jesus here is a leader and teacher. He gave the bread and fish to the disciples and the disciples gave to the people. The people ate. Each did his or her part.
The disciples at first complained that they had nothing. That was not true. As we often do, they turned a little bit into a little bit less by seeing “not enough” as “none.” For it is often easier to deal with nothing than with just a little.
The suffering of many—5000 thousand in the story, millions on the earth today—is overwhelming. One in every eight people in the world does not have enough food to eat … Each year, five million children die as a result of hunger-related causes [source: worldhunger.org]. The numbers are hard to comprehend.
We want the unmet need to simply go away. Send them home, as the disciples say. Send them home. Do not worry about whether they have homes and what they will find there. But Jesus won’t really let us do that. Give them to eat, he tells the disciples.
You have probably heard the story of the origins of Faith Kitchen. When Faith was just a handful of people, a member of Faith thought the church should do something for people in this neighborhood who were somehow needy. Lutherans like food, she said. Let’s serve a meal once a month. The first month, one person came. The second, no one. By six months, a dozen or so. These days Faith Kitchen serves two meals a month. In July it served 168 dinners. And there is always plenty. All eat and are filled. We do not have many resources, but we do have a little.
We are not able to feed everyone, but that does not mean we are unable to feed some. We are only called to be obedient to the commands of Jesus. Give them to eat.
It is not an accident that the story in Matthew makes us think about the Lord’s Supper. Holy Communion is a means of grace. God is present in the meal and the sharing. It is a gift to us. We are thankful. Feeding those who are hungry is not only a culinary event. It, too, is a means of grace. God is present in the meal and the sharing. It is a gift to us. We are all thankful.
