Readings (Track 2)
Some verses from today’s psalm:
“The Lord is loving to everyone
and his compassion is over all his works.
He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and helps them.
You open wide your hand
and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”
Matthew had linked Jesus’ birth with a text from Isaiah: “’Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means [Matthew explains], ‘God is with us’” (1:23). And in today’s gospel reading Matthew invites us to watch this play out: Jesus has compassion on the crowd, and “all ate and were filled.”
If Matthew had left it at that, we could all respond with a hearty “Hallelujah” and go on to the Creed. But he didn’t.
There’s that interchange with the disciples:
The disciples: “This is a lonely place, and the day is now over;
send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”
Jesus: “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
Matthew doesn’t dwell on it, but Jesus seems to think that the crowd’s hunger is the disciples’ problem. If pressed, the disciples might have pointed out that the psalm talks about the Lord satisfying needs, but apparently if you’re a disciple of Jesus a.k.a., God-with-us, it doesn’t work that way. Jesus doesn’t sit back and make them deal with it on their own, although it’s unclear if the story would have gotten anywhere had they not come up with those loaves and fish. Their action opens the door for Jesus’ action. But Jesus’ action doesn’t negate his “you give them something to eat.” We’ll come back to that.
The other thing Matthew does is position and narrate the feeding to evoke three other feedings: Herod’s banquet (the one with that dance and oath that resulted in John the Baptist’s beheading), the Last Supper, and the prophesied end-time banquet to which our first reading from Isaiah may be alluding. Let’s tease these out.
Herod’s banquet and Jesus’ banquet. Don’t blame the preacher; Matthew’s the one who put them back to back. What does Matthew want us to notice? Perhaps the contrast between how Herod uses power and how Jesus uses power. With John’s execution foreshadowing Jesus’ execution, there’s a noticeable difference between Herod serving up John’s head and Jesus offering his own Body and Blood. Perhaps the juxtaposition is a question to his hearers: to which banquet are you trying to get tickets? I’d guess many of us have moments in which an invitation to Herod’s banquet would sound attractive. (That’s one of the ways the seed in Jesus’ parable falls into the thorns.) Matthew would want us to think about that.
The feeding of the 5,000 and the Last Supper. Matthew’s narrated the two episodes so that from “when it was evening” to “all ate,” at multiple points the same words are used in the same order. Perhaps to emphasize the common elements, while Jesus receives the two fish, there’s nothing in the narration about what he does with them. What does Matthew want us to notice? Perhaps that Jesus’ compassion is also in play at the Last Supper. Perhaps that the Last Supper isn’t disconnected from dealing with physical hunger.
That last point is the issue Paul confronts in his first letter to the Corinthians. Recall that the Lord’s Supper hadn’t yet been separated from a parish meal. Here’s Paul: “When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing” (11:20-22a)?
For Paul the Lord’s supper can’t be disconnected from how those gathered deal with physical hunger, with their resources.
What of the prophesied end-time banquet? The classic text is in Isaiah:
“On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken” (25:6-8).
Recall this from the Gospel of John’s account of the feeding: “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’ When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (6:14-15). So the crowd makes the connection!
The feeding of the 5,000 and the end-time banquet: that may feel like a stretch to us, but not to Matthew. Recall his summary of John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ proclamation: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mat 3:2; 4:17). The New Testament authors assume that we’re in the last days (e.g., Heb 1:2). Were they mistaken? Perhaps. Or perhaps what’s happened is that in response to a significant portion of the Jewish people not acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah (recall today’s reading from Romans), God’s hit the Pause button.
In any case, perhaps a primary point is that Isaiah’s vision underlines an important dimension in our Eucharist: a foretaste, a dress rehearsal if you like, of that banquet. That’s one of the reasons we call it “eucharist,” the word being a simple transcription of the Greek word for thanksgiving. Jesus’ self-offering has secured a better future for this world than any that we deserved. But not, note, a better future than today’s psalm promises:
“The Lord is loving to everyone
and his compassion is over all his works.
He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and helps them.
You open wide your hand
and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”
We might say: the Eucharist is the celebration of the truth, the trustworthiness, of psalms like Psalm 145.
The other thing that happens with Matthew’s palimpsest of this feeding, Eucharist, and end-time banquet is that Eucharist isn’t about my or our needs, if we’re using “our” in any limited sense. But yes, our needs as part of the human family, which brings us back to Jesus’ “you give them something to eat.” Response to human hunger, to human need in its myriad forms, has characteristically been an essential part of Christian mission.
Shortly after Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire, the emperor Julian attempted to turn back the clock, which proved surprisingly difficult. In one of his letters, he complains “Why do we not observe that it is their [the Christians’] benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done the most to increase atheism [Christianity]? … When … the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”[1]
“You give them something to eat.” Today’s gospel reading is an opportunity to wonder about what that means for us today. What doors might our response open for Jesus’ action? How might our response to Jesus’ words let others celebrate the truth, the trustworthiness of those lines from the psalm?
“The Lord is loving to everyone
and his compassion is over all his works.
He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and helps them.
You open wide your hand
and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”
[1] Cited in Lohfink, Jesus and Community, p.163.
With Jacob at Bethel 