How many loaves does it take to feed 5,000 people?

9th Sunday after Pentecost sermon delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY 

Text: John 6:1-21

This story of Jesus feeding the five thousand is the only miracle (or as John describes it, a sign) that appears in all four Gospels. And with a few variations, nearly all of the details are the same in all four Gospels. This similarity is significant, because the Gospel of John was written completely separately from the Gospel of Mark, and separately from Matthew and Luke who were reading Mark as they wrote their Gospels. This story was already a meaningful part of the life of the church in the years that the Gospels were written, and it was a way of telling the world who Jesus was. This story opens chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, which is so important to us now that we will read it for the next four Sundays as an interruption to reading through Mark’s Gospel this year. It is about Jesus, and bread, and much, much more.

The story opens by telling us that the disciples, faced with a large crowd approaching them, had nothing to offer the crowd to eat as an expected act of hospitality. Jesus sets up the disciples with a question, how are we going to feed all of these people? They reply with the admission  that they don’t have enough money or food with them. So, Jesus himself feeds the crowd of five thousand with just five loaves of bread and two fish, and when he instructs the disciples to pick up the leftover bread, it is more than what he started with. Later on, the disciples get into a boat to cross the sea of Tiberius and they run into rough weather. From the shore, Jesus walks toward them on the water. They don’t understand why Jesus is doing that, and they don’t understand why so much bread was left over.

This lack of understanding is part of tension in the story, tension between common, predictable experience, and of an unnatural, mystifying experience. There is tension between Jesus as a single person and five thousand people who could easily overpower him; there is tension between the Son of God bringing salvation to the world and the crowd’s desire to make him King of Israel; tension between the limited resources of mortals and the unlimited gifts of God; tension between God’s power and human effort. The tension is unresolved because the crowd doesn’t understand the significance of being fed by Jesus, and the disciples miss it because they are too focused on their own problems. Even today, we experience the same kind of tension when something happens that we just don’t get.

At the end of a winter workday downtown several years ago, I met a young woman on the street who asked me for money. This happened about once a month, and my response to her, like my response to others asking for money was “When was the last time you had something to eat?” She replied that she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, and I asked her if I could buy her a sandwich at a nearby shop. As we walked to the shop, I asked her her name and about her situation. Jessica told me where she was from, and how she had ended up homeless. She also mentioned that she needed twelve dollars for a state ID that would let her apply for jobs.

As we approached the shop, she was a step ahead and held the door open for me, but once we were inside we reversed roles and I said to her to get whatever she wanted. The first question from the person behind the counter was what kind of bread did she want for her sandwich. This was bread that would feed her body like the five thousand looking for bread from Jesus. But she needed more than that to feed her soul, something to lift her up out of her difficult situation. I said to her that I would pay for her ID, and that all she had to do was look for me where she had met me before, but earlier in the day.

The tension in the Gospel reading was present in that sandwich shop: for Jessica it was the predictable experience of people brushing off her request for help versus an unusual experience of someone listening to her, buying her a meal, offering to help; someone of limited resources receiving something from someone who had much more than she had. The tension would be partially resolved because she would no longer be hungry for food, but her hunger for purpose, and for affirmation as a person of worth would not be resolved. I never saw Jessica again after that day. She may not have seen the path to salvation from hunger and homelessness, from aimlessness and hopelessness because she didn’t understand why I was helping her, or what it meant. Her lack of understanding may not have let her have faith that I would be looking for her, ready to go to the DMV with her and pay for her ID card. She may have been afraid of what receiving help would mean: that she would be led into a life she didn’t think was possible based only on faith in a stranger who fed her. I imagine that the disciples had the same fear, not knowing where Jesus was leading them or what his signs meant for them.

We’re not used to receiving help or support without strings attached, so when someone offers help without expecting anything in return, we are wary and anxious. It’s hard to believe that someone with power would bring it to bear on our problems, so when it does happen, we are unsure about what is going on. The resolution of the tension from the disciples' lack of understanding came when they saw Jesus walking toward them in rough water and blowing wind. It was the realization with fear that God was near them in their troubles when Jesus said “Do not be afraid.” The resolution for Jessica, and for us is similar, a realization that God is near and has acted in some way to feed us in body and spirit, whether from sandwich bread or the host from the altar. God’s power is unlimited, but it is directed toward us in such a gentle way, like feeding someone, that it’s hard to believe in it unless it is dramatic, like walking on water. It is those small, gentle things that are a sign that God is near, and that we don't need to be afraid, not of our situation, not of the future, and not of God’s presence. Even if we don’t understand how five loaves could feed five thousand, or one person with means could have compassion on a homeless person, we do understand what God’s love and power can accomplish. We just have to look carefully, look for the signs, and have faith in them. Do not be afraid.