Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 28, 2024 - 2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 4:1-6; John 6:1-15
I have a very dear friend, just about a year or so younger than myself. A very bright woman, who spent her whole life in teaching, and a very, very faithful Catholic who brought up her children to be faithful Catholics. Once, a long time ago, she told me that Jesus didn’t really multiply the loaves and fishes. That every intelligent person knows that what really happened is, when Jesus took the five loaves and the two fish, people were so impressed with the attempt at generosity, that they all started taking out the lunch they had brought for themselves and sharing it with the person next to them. And so, everybody got to eat because everybody shared their lunches. And she really believed that this is what happened; that the real miracle was a miracle of sharing, not a miracle of creating an abundance out of nothing. She was both very, very wrong and quite right. Let’s talk first about how she was wrong.
The story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes was so popular among the first Christians, that it’s told six times in four gospels. In two of the gospels, the story appears twice. The first time, Jesus feeds five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, and they have twelve baskets left over. The second time, he feeds four thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, and they have seven baskets left over. There are some questions about maybe two or three of the miracle stories in the gospels, but there is no doubt that this was one of the firmest memories of the apostolic group who went out preaching after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Absolutely bonafide. But there are some things to notice about the story.
Notice, for example, when I started my homily, I told you a story about an incident from my past but I structured the story so I could use it as a lead-in to my homily. So, in essence, I changed what really happened between me and my friend in some small way, so I could use it for another purpose. So, we can expect that, when the early Christians told and retold this story, they structured it in some way to help them make a point they wanted to make. And one of the points is hidden in numerology, in Hebrew numerology.
Number twelve is a sacred number for several reasons. The most important reason is because there were twelve tribes of Israel. So, they tell the story about Jesus feeding all of Israel that’re expecting a savior. Number seven is a perfect number because it can only be divided by one and by itself. And so, the other story talks about how Jesus feeds, perfectly, everyone that comes to him. It’s a slightly different emphasis, one story from the other. The other thing is the way in which most of the descriptions of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes happens. It says “Jesus took, said the blessing (or blessed), often broke, and gave. Those words - take, bless, break, give - are the words they used for the consecration of the Eucharist, since the earliest times. We find them in a letter of St. Paul, when he describes how the Eucharist was celebrated in Damascus, around the year 50. Take, bless, break, give. And so, the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes is told as a Eucharist story to tell us that, when Jesus feeds, he feeds us with the Eucharist. And that there is always an abundance, so that there’s something left over.
Now, I asked you to pay close attention to the dialogue that takes place in this story before the multiplication. Jesus says to Philip, “Where are we going to get enough food to feed all these people?” Philip says, “Even if we had two-thirds of the year worth of wages in our pockets, we couldn’t buy enough food for all these people.” Andrew says, “There’s a kid here who has a couple of fish and a couple of loaves, but what good is that for so many?” In another one of these stories, when the disciples ask what they’re going to do about all of these people, Jesus says, “You feed them. You give them something yourselves.” The dialogue going on here is about human insufficiency and divine sufficiency. That’s where my friend was right. That none of us, by ourselves, has the skill or the strength or the power to solve many of the problems that we encounter in our daily lives, and some of the problems that are way above our pay grade. But all of us, as Catholics, get something every week that is sufficient and abundant for solving problems. We get the power of God in the Eucharist.
We don’t often think of it that way because we always talk about the Eucharist as a meal. But, for a few brief moments, until our body begins to do its digestive work, we have God dwelling inside of us. None of us the least bit worthy to have such a thing. But that empowerment is very different from our own empowerment. You and I all are empowered in some way, even from the time we are little kids. We have skills and talents. They’re part of what makes us unique and different from everybody else in our family and everybody else in our community. And then we are trained to have other skills and talents or to hone the skills and talents that we have. And then life happens, and we’re forced to learn how to do other things we never imagined we could do or ever imagined that we wanted to do. That’s what life does. So, we are skilled and empowered, to a certain extent, but we always come across the thing that says to us, “You can’t do this.” But we say back to it, “Oh my God. This is too much for me. This illness. This death. This challenge in my family. This loss of a job. This (fill in the blank) is too much for me.” And, yes, it is too much for me, with all my skills and talents. But it’s not too much for God.
So, we come to Eucharist the weekend after that happens, and we’re not really sure we want to be here because we are so overwhelmed. And what can coming to Mass do to solve this problem? And we pray about it. And Jesus says, “You give them something yourself.” And we say back to him, “What good is what I’ve got for this big thing?” Then Jesus takes and blesses and breaks and gives. And there is suddenly just enough for us to take the next step.