Tag Archives: Mission

A Tale of 4 Banquets (10th Sunday after Pentecost, 8/2/2026)

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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.

At the Transfiguration: A “No!” and a “Yes!” (The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, 2/15/2026)

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Readings

In today’s Gospel we encounter a “no” and a “yes.”

The “no” is to Peter’s apparently quite reasonable proposal: “if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Jesus’ glory revealed, Jesus with Moses and Elijah, the “dream team” of Jewish piety: who could ask for more? Why not stay here…permanently? Down below so many needs…and the Pharisees…and the Roman occupation. Here, peace and glory.

Why the divine “no”? What’s at stake here? Perhaps the issue is the temptation to reduce discipleship or faith to the search for religious experiences. It doesn’t get more sublime or spectacular than what Peter, James, and John were witnessing.

But no. “This is my Son…listen to him!” And listening to and following Jesus means descending from the mountain, not hanging on to even the best of spiritual experiences, because Jesus is already down below; ahead of us.

Having said that, among us Episcopalians the more common temptation is to write off these moments on the mountain. Jesus knew that Peter, James, and John needed to be there. Jesus knows that perhaps most of us need some moments on the mountain.

But perhaps the “no” is about something else, the temptation to idolize a particular moment in the church’s history or in a parish’s history. “If only we were back in the 1st Century!” “If only it could be like it was under Father X.” And the text encourages us not to get stuck: we may even get the three dwellings built, but by then Jesus will be a considerable way down the mountain.

The glory of God on the mountain and the descent. That’s one of the rhythms of life, a rhythm this text encourages us to appreciate and fall in with. The “no” may help us appreciate that.

The “yes.” To focus the “yes” we need to wonder about what happened on the mountain. Why Moses and Elijah? That was important information for the disciples, for as good Jews they knew who Moses and Elijah were, but were still trying to figure out who Jesus was. Moses: giver of the Law; Elijah: representative of the entire prophetic tradition; Jesus? How does Jesus fit with Moses and Elijah? The Voice: “Listen to Jesus!” That is, when push comes to shove, let Jesus show us what Moses and Elijah; the institutions of law and prophecy, are about.

Now, once we recognize that the text is also about how Jesus relates to institutions, Jesus’ primacy over institutions, the text can really open up. That issue is our issue. How does Jesus relate to our institutions? The human being, Aristotle observed, is a political animal: we’re born into them, live, move, and have our being in them. Nations, the economy, custom: in their own way they’re as real as anything. Many cultures treat them as gods. Our culture says it doesn’t, but I wonder. We say, “The economy’s healthy.” “The economy’s sick.” More ominously: “The economy demands sacrifices.” TV and the internet give us instant access to competing priesthoods of the economy, a.k.a., the economists, with their competing prescriptions for what will make the economy happy.

As gentiles, our issue isn’t how Jesus relates to Moses and Elijah. Heirs of the Graeco-Roman world, it usually is how Jesus relates to Venus, goddess of love; Mars, god of war; Pluto, god of wealth, Athena, goddess of wisdom, etc.

So…picture Jesus together with whichever of these gods or goddesses are relevant to you. They’re talking. Imagine what they might be saying. Now comes the cloud and the Voice from the cloud: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

All of these authorities, institutions, etc. depend on and will be transformed by Jesus. This is one of the points of the Transfiguration, with Moses and Elijah as representative authorities. It is Paul’s point as he speaks of Jesus: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers [here we might say “systems, institutions, customs”]– all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:15-17)

It doesn’t matter much which gods seem to be most important to us. Without Jesus they’d blink out of existence; in the end they’ll be visibly in submission to Jesus. In the light of this future, a future prefigured in the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah as stand-ins for the many possible authorities, our challenge is our ongoing relationship with them today.

This is some of the hardest work we do as Christians. When we get it right, it’s wonderful (the abolition of slavery in the British Empire comes to mind, the non-violent end to apartheid in South Africa). When we don’t… Today we’re badly divided on any number of issues. What today’s Gospel tells us is that Jesus needs to be in our conversations about these issues from the start. Jesus—not my picture of Jesus. That’s an important distinction. If my engagement with these issues isn’t pushing me to encounter Jesus afresh through Word and Sacrament and through my sisters and brothers, then there’s a problem.

Friends, the issues the Transfiguration raises for us are not the sort that lend themselves to individual resolution. They, like so many challenges in the Christian life, demand a corporate response. They demand that we get better at listening to each other, talking with each other. I’m probably not better at hearing Jesus than I am at hearing the brother or sister with whom I disagree.

Deep breath. The Transfiguration: also an invitation to us to use our imaginations. Pluto, Venus, Mars, etc: what are the gods that claim turf in our lives? What will their visible submission to Jesus look like? How do we live that future now?