With apologies to vegetarians and lovers of pachyderms everywhere, I’d invite you to recall that old adage: “How do you eat an elephant?” Yes…”one bite at a time!”
Some things just appear too big to tackle, a job so enormous that simply the thought of it paralyzes and stymies. We see it all the time – in friends’ lives, in our own lives, and in our community and country.
I mean, can anyone really fathom what $14.3 trillion really looks like? Or what it means to pay annual interest of $200 billion. To put it in slight perspective, these interest payments are taking up more federal spending now than federal outlays on education, transportation and housing and urban development combined – numbers too large and overwhelming to really get a grip on.
I’m old enough to remember when a million dollars was a lot of money! Million, Billion, Trillion – after a while, as the saying goes, you’re talking about real money!
Problems of enormous proportions are numbing and induce motivational paralysis.
Crime stats in the city, drop-out rates, unemployment, prisoner re-entry, homelessness, eroding tax revenue and city services are all complex, interrelated quandaries that are difficult to unravel or approach, much less solve. Many have tried to conjure solutions and programs, all have failed, the social ills persists, and even when we might consider taking a run at them, we back off, knowing that really, the problems are simply too big to solve, and so we walk away or ignore.
Even something closer to home – deciding that our house is no longer appropriate for our needs and it’s time to downsize and move to a community that offers some needed services can be completely daunting. Cleaning out basements, attics, closets of decades, if not generations of “treasures” is a lot of work for anybody – perhaps overwhelming when one factors in age and the emotional energy required. I know plenty of people who say I’d love to live somewhere else – I just can’t muster the oomph to get there!
Not hard, then, to empathize with the disciples when they saw that enormous crowd of hungry people, and said, “send them away!” They had no way of feeding them, no source of food, they were out in the boonies and remember – the Bible says that there were 5,000 men – to that add women and children and you’re well over 10,000 hungry mouths. It was an insurmountable obstacle that the disciples knew they couldn’t overcome and so, paralyzed and stymied, they wanted it to go away.
Yet the people couldn’t just hop the bus and head into town to the Hollywood Grill, the Kozy Korner, or Presto – they were in the wilderness, in the desert. Remember, Jesus wasn’t looking for a preaching venue – this all stated because he wanted to be alone.
It’s a natural reaction when someone gets bad news – to retreat, to isolate, to simply be alone with one’s thoughts.
Word had just come that John the Baptist had been executed by the state – his head displayed at a lavish banquet where food was plentiful and everyone satisfied to a gluttonous finish; quite a different story from the hungry mouths in the outback.
It’s been suggested that John the Baptist was the head honcho of a band of disciples of which Jesus was a member, perhaps even the second in command. News of John’s death meant more than the loss of a dear friend and a valued leader; it meant that Jesus’ moment had arrived—it was time for him to step up and lead.
Faced with that daunting challenge, Jesus needed time to figure things out, to gather his thoughts, to pray and surmise a path forward. John had been quite a charismatic presence and following in his footsteps was no easy task. Hard to blame Jesus for wanting to collect himself. After all, in spite of everything else, he was fully human!
We find Jesus in the wilderness. In the Hebrew world, the wilderness or the desert was a place of wandering and uncertainty; the desert was a place of rebellion against God; and the desert was a place of temptation, of testing, a place where Jesus had not very long ago pronounced to Satan that humans “don’t live by bread alone!” That may be true, but, as we’re learning in today’s story, humans also don’t live without bread!
The desert, for Jesus in this episode, was as far away from the Roman Empire. He was away from the Roman governors like Pontius Pilate, away from client kings like the head-serving Herod, and away from the local elites who took delight in oppressing many of the people who were chasing after Jesus—people who apparently just couldn’t get enough of him.
Jesus offered them an alternative world, one where compassion overturned status, and one that stood in stark contrast to the imperial brutality that was their everyday life. The alternative world also stood in contrast to Herod’s banquet and the brutal death of John the Baptist. Yet the alternative world has a problem: nothing to eat!
We don’t want to miss the juxtaposition in the move that Matthew makes – taking us from the lavish birthday party that Herod is throwing, something that the Gold Ballroom would aspire to, to the stark, barren, arid, rocky chaparral in which Jesus ministers. We also might want to know that in those days, Rome considered itself the “breadbasket” to the world and produced enough food to feed the global population – yet some of its own citizens either go hungry or are held as indentured servants just for bare subsistence. Rome used food as leverage and whether you ate or not wasn’t so much the government’s concern.
We might hear some of that today coming from Washington, that charity and social programs are not the prevue of the government, and we can argue and engage in intellectual debate but one cannot argue with hundreds of thousands of starving children in Somalia where food is clearly being used not just as leverage, but as a weapon.
It’s a problem that’s nearly impossible to fathom.
The combination of one of East Africa’s worst droughts in 60 years and Somalia’s relentless conflict has depleted the country’s food supplies, and tens of thousands of Somalis have died of malnutrition-related causes in the past few months.
“If we don’t act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia,” “Every day of delay in assistance is literally a matter of life or death.”
Speaking at the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that nearly half of Somalia’s population — 3.7 million people— were now in crisis. A total of $1.6 billion was needed to help, he added, with about $300 million of it required in the next two months to mount an “adequate response.”
The Islamist militants who forced Western aid organizations out of Somalia last year, right as the drought was looming, are now urging the groups to return. But aid officials are wary, citing the dozens of workers who have been killed in Somalia in recent years. Also hampering the emergency efforts, aid officials contend, are American government rules that prohibit material support to the militants, who often demand “taxes” for allowing aid deliveries to pass through.
Hundreds of thousands of children who simply can’t get enough, simply can’t get enough food to sustain life. Hospitals in bordering countries are full of malnourished babies taking their last breaths.
Jesus said, “you give them something to eat” yet the problem, the crisis, is of a proportion so complex and overwhelming, that even the most powerful countries in the history of the planet are paralyzed and stymied.
It’s nothing new… Biafra, Ethiopia, the Sudan: famine and starvation at the hands of war, conflict, and brutal regimes.
Jesus offers an alternative and the people can’t get enough. They followed him to a godforsaken land apparently without thinking where their next meal was going to come from.
Jesus offered them something they apparently valued more: compassion. He embodied an ethic of compassion. He responded to their need and was moved, figuratively and literally, to satisfy their hunger.
This story is frequently referred to as “Jesus feeds the five thousand,” but that’s not accurate. It should be “Jesus feeds the twelve, and the twelve feed the five thousand.” The same crew who were intent with dismissing the problem they couldn’t solve, are now the agents of relief and recovery. Jesus didn't distribute the food himself, he had help and assistance, people empowered for first-person ministry. The 12 didn't act at first; after all, they thought they had nothing to offer. When Jesus told them to give the crowd something to eat, at first they said, "but we have nothing...except some bread and dried fish." They didn't have "nothing" - they had something but they just didn't think it was enough. Meager is not nothing.
Now, at the risk of offending a congregation I adore...boy are we guilty of that. We have so much, so much more than the vast majority of churches in this country...and yet we behave as though we're on the brink of extinction.
Jesus called on the 12, and calls on us, to dream bigger. The 12 had to change their own perception about their power in the world. How many times have we turned away from something because of our fear of powerlessness?
God will give us the power to work for good in the world. The 12 thought that feeding was impossible--the need great and the resources meager, yet they had enough.
This story is the only miracle account that appears in all four gospels...some thinks it's important and some event think it’s the heart of the Gospel message. This tale tells us that not only will God give us the power to work for good but that God is the source of that power and God is love. God is love and God is compassion. Jesus approached the needs of the crowd not from a strategic or political position, not from one of first taking inventory or weighing risk vs. reward, but from a posture of compassion. It wasn't abstract...it was clear and concrete...it was need-based option for the poor. God's ultimate power in the universe intends peace among nations, an end to hunger, the wellbeing of all families, and spiritual wholeness for God’s people.
Yet, like Jesus and the hungry crowd, God doesn't do any of that alone: we are entrusted to be the body of Christ, the hands and feet through which God works. The hope for a new world is the blood of our veins, the struggle for justice is the beat to which our hearts respond, and God’s promise is the very stuff of which our bones are wrought.
There is no worldly situation to which we cannot respond. Our only limitation is a lack of faith-filled imagination and if we are to be the hope for a new world...of that, we can't get enough!
Amen!
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