Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Today, the Church of the Multiplication, near the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus is said to have prepared dinner for 5,000 hungry people by "multiplying" two fish and five loaves of bread, is a holy place. The flood of tourists hasn't done much to diminish that. The present church building is only eight hundred years old (only!), but it was built on the ruins of a much older church that had stood there since the 300s. Inside, in front of the altar, carefully preserved, is part of the old floor of that original church, and there (in those ancient mosaic tiles) you can see them as plain as day: two fish and a basket with five loaves of bread. Christians believed, from very early times, that this was the place. And they come here to be near the power of God.

All four Gospels tell the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Mark tells it twice, with five thousand people in one version and four in the other. (Did it happen twice, and the other three Gospels simply combined the two events into one? Or did it happen once and Mark, unknowing, had before him two accounts of the same event? It doesn't matter much.) Either way, this story was obviously very important to the first Christians, for many reasons.

As a miracle, it was staggering -- a dramatic increase in what Jesus was willing to reveal about himself, about his power, about his relationship to God. It was a courageous thing for Jesus to do, to feed 5,000 people, in public like that, because such a deed would surely be seen as an upping of the ante in the deadly game Jesus was playing with the religious kingpins of his day. It was "in your face." And, thus, by this dramatic act, Jesus took one more fateful step toward his own death. (At first, you see, he had only healed a few people, and the authorities took little notice. There had been healers before. Their miracles could be explained away. But then, before the authorities knew it, he was healing so many that the whole countryside was in a frenzy, and they could not be so blase. Now Jesus takes a giant step, moves from the minor leagues to the majors: he feeds 5,000 people from practically nothing, and (John hints) the crowd is beginning to think of him as king, or messiah. The authorities now understand that Jesus is an immediate and serious threat to their way of life -- which, indeed, he was.) Later, when he raises Lazarus from the dead (another upping of the ante), John says, this was the last straw. After that the good people, the religious people, the holy people looked for ways to kill him.

I was disappointed some years ago, by the comments of a young woman minister who had just heard me preach on the Feeding of the Five Thousand. I had said how it looked a lot like communion, and how it was a continuation of the old Biblical theme: heavenly food, manna in the wilderness, water from the rock, and how it spoke of Jesus' ability to turn a small good into a blessing for many. And she said, "I don't know how you think of all those things. The last time I spoke on that text I talked about the importance of eating right." As the years have gone by, however, I have come to see that that is one meaning here, the simplest meaning, to be sure, but honest. Jesus truly cares about people's everyday, mundane needs. He is not too good, too important, too high and mighty to be concerned about the things that concern us. If we are worried that our money won't make it to the next pay check, Jesus is worried about that, too. If we are worried about our marriage, Jesus is too. And if we are hungry (not starving, just hungry for dinner) Jesus cares. One of the cruelest things we can do, when people come to us for help, is to turn preacher on them, or philosopher. We must meet people where they are. There are philosophical issues behind most human misery. (There are philosophical issues behind everything, for heaven's sake, if you're of a mind to see them!) But Jesus said, simply, "Feed the hungry." He didn't say, "Tell them where they've gone wrong." He didn't say teach them how to fish. He didn't say to the crowd that day, "You idiots. Why didn't you plan ahead? You should have packed a lunch, or picked up something along the way to tide you over." He could have said that, but he didn't. He just met the need. Because he cared, as he tells us we must care. We don't want to make Christian charity too complicated. It's just caring and helping where we can.

But there is far more than that in the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and it would be a terrible mistake to stop here, with the feeding of people's bodies. We've been guilty of that at times. We've been tempted to a pure humanism that makes the care and feeding of needy people all there is. Sharing our possessions in the name of a common humanity looks like religion, walks like religion and quacks like religion, but is not religion. It is far short of true faith. Dostoevski called humanism the most dreadful form of atheism, because it leads us to treat people's bodies and ignore their souls. It sounds a lot like faith and makes us feel good. The first temptation Satan threw at Jesus, in fact, was that he should turn stones into bread. In a land like Israel, where bread is scarce and stones are plentiful, that's quite a temptation to a person of a charitable mind. Think of all the people you could feed, if the stones were bread. But Jesus answered right: "Man does not live by bread alone," he told Satan, "but also by the Word of God." There are human needs larger even than the need for food. America's standard of living is the envy of the world -- plenty of bread to go around. But America is spiritually starving.

Remember the old legend about the lighthouse keeper who knew that there were poor people living nearby, in hovels, who were cold at night because they couldn't afford oil for their heaters He pitied them greatly, so he doled out to them the oil that was meant to keep the light lit. The people were a little warmer for a while, but the great light eventually went out, and, as the result, there was a shipwreck, and hundreds died. It is a good parable to illustrate how we can be so concerned to meet people's immediate needs that we neglect their larger needs. We need oil to keep us warm, but we also need a light to show us the way. We need bread, but we also need the Word of God.

Our needy neighbors need both. It can't be one or the other. Should the church spend its time and resources feeding the hungry and meeting human need, or should the church spend its time and resources teaching people about Jesus Christ and leading them to salvation? The answer is "yes." Should we heal the body or should we save the soul? The answer is "yes." When James wrote that faith without works is dead, he meant that when there are no deeds, all the pious words in the world mean nothing. Such faith is, by definition, dead. It is no faith at all. But, at the same time, works without faith, will not save us. Which is it, faith or works? The answer is "yes." The Feeding of the Five Thousand teaches us that. The people came to hear the Word of God, but they also needed to eat, and Jesus did both for them.

I like the little boy in John's version of this story. It is he who originally has the two fish and five loaves, and it is Andrew (the saint of the rank and file, who is always being helpful behind the scenes) -- it is Andrew who brings him to Jesus. One preacher imagines that little boy going home that night, bursting in the door and saying to his mother, "Ma, you should have seen what happened to the lunch you packed for me! You should have seen the miracle that Jesus and I did!" And that is "right on" isn't it. Amazing what Jesus can do with our little offerings. When we are generous in little things, he can multiply our generosity into something huge -- as a speck of yeast makes a whole loaf rise. We can make a difference. A small contributions on our part, in the hands of Jesus, can be (as the song says) the start of something big!

Today's wide-spread depressing belief, that human beings are what they are (by our genes or by our upbringings), and cannot change, is a lie. It does not take into account free will, but more than that it does not take into account the power of God. When Jesus asked Philip how they could feed all those hungry people, Philip said just what you and I would have said: "No way, Lord! You couldn't feed all these people if you had a ton of money -- which we don't." I'm sure the little boy had similar hopeless feelings: how can all these people eat out of my little lunchbox? Even Andrew, bringing the boy, seems to start with a modicum of hope (reporting to Jesus that there is a boy who has some fish and some bread), but then he seems to lose heart, almost to be embarrassed at his own childlike faith, and he says, "but what are they among so many people?" And Jesus says, "Tell them to sit down." Andrew forgot the power of God, strong to save. When we get depressed (hopeless, faithless, whatever), we see the enormity of the challenges before us and give up. The obstacles are too great. It is too much. And we close down our hearts so we won't have to feel our failures. But, in Jesus' way of thinking, there is no reason to give up. All things are possible. We are only asked to do a small part. God does the lion's share. "Reach up just as high as you can, and God himself will reach all the rest of the way down." And what is too much for God?