Eleventh Sunday after Trinity.

Date: 3rd August 2008

Preacher: Revd. Rachel Firth

Matthew 14: 13-21

The following sermon relies heavily on both direct quote and paraphrase from the book The Meaning of Miracles by the Very Reverend Dr Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2001. ISBN 1-85311-434-0) which is highly recommended to anyone wishing to explore and reflect further on the themes of the Feeding of the Five Thousand and the other miracles of Jesus.

Does familiarity breed contempt?

I have been a member of the Anglican Church for the whole of my life - 35 years give or take a month – and as such have developed a certain patchy knowledge of the Bible. The common worship lectionary provides us with readings for Eucharist, morning and evening prayer every day of the week, 365 days a year – and if you were to follow your own discipline of regular daily offices this would more or less take you through the vast majority of your Bible on a quite regular basis (NT much more often than OT!) This ensures that for the disciplined or enthusiastic the readings for these services provide a framework to explore the whole of the Bible – often including whole chapters from more obscure books about the appropriate method for the sacrifice of animals or the war stories of ancient kings.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if for most of us here, myself included for most of my life, the time when most Bible readings have been heard has been in this context here, in a regular Sunday morning family Eucharist service – and for this the lectionary is specially designed to ensure that as we move through the Church year we don’t miss any of the gospel highlights, all miracles and major events are covered in the Sunday morning readings just on the off chance we don’t pick up our Bibles on the six intervening days (surely not!!!) This clearly gives shape and sense to the Christian year, taking us through points of celebration as well as through the darkest and hardest times in the life of our Lord, giving us the opportunity year upon year to reflect again, reflect anew on the good news of Jesus Christ.

But I will here return to the question I asked as I began to speak... does familiarity breed contempt? This is the first thought which came to me as I considered speaking to you here this morning on the reading from Matthew – the feeding of the 5000 – one of the most familiar miracle stories in the gospels. Is it too familiar? Does our familiarity with this story begin to stand in the way of seeing and hearing anew the message God’s word may contain for us? At this point I must beg the forgiveness of anyone here who has heard this story for the first time today, or for the first time in years – firstly thank you for your patience and I promise you I’m now going to move on to some more specific stuff about how this miracle has been understood in our tradition.

In his book about the meaning of miracles the Very Reverend Dr Jeffrey John, current Dean of St Albans, recounts the first teaching he received on the meaning of the feeding of the 5000, from two very different RE teachers. The first teacher, a Mr Davies, was an old fashioned Welsh non-conformist who took his Bible in its plainest and most literal sense, the second, Miss Tomkins was an Anglican with a desperate desire to interpret the Bible in a way relevant to young people. For Mr Davies the purpose of all miracles was clearly and simply to demonstrate the supernatural nature of Jesus, to prove his divine nature to ignorant humanity. For Miss Tomkins, miracles were explained away in terms readily understood in this-worldly terms. For Miss Tomkins, when Jesus fed the 5000 what really happened was that “Jesus and the disciples shared out their own loaves and fishes just with the people nearest them; but then others, seeing this splendid example of unselfishness, were inspired to share what they had too, and so there was enough to go round everyone.”

Forgive my flippancy but if given the choice between “It was because he was God, see?” and “It was because he was nice” – then for me familiarity really would breed contempt – this is God’s good news for all people, how could anyone reduce God’s dynamic action in our world to such basic and dull explanations? So let us now look to somewhere more edifying than Mr Davies and Miss Tomkins for our theological understanding of the story we have heard this morning.

In the 4^th century St Augustine too complained that many people never got beyond understanding miracles as more than Godly magic tricks – his suggestion was that we should “ask the miracles themselves what they tell us about Christ, for they have a tongue of their own, if only it can be understood..... The miracle which we admire on the outside also has something inside which must be understood. If we see a piece of beautiful handwriting, we are not simply to note that the letters are formed evenly, equally and elegantly; we also want to know the meaning the letters convey. In the same way a miracle is not like a picture, something merely to look at and admire, and to be left at that. It is much more like a piece of writing which we must learn to read and understand.”

There are many strands of meaning running through this morning’s gospel reading. One purpose of this miracle is to make clear that Jesus is the new Moses, and as such he is feeding the 5000 just as the Israelites were fed with manna from heaven as they fled from slavery in Egypt. Like Moses, Jesus crosses the water into the dessert; like Moses he sits the people down in companies, appoints helpers to distribute food, and feeds them with miraculous bread in such quantities that there are basketfuls left over. There are also echoes of the actions of the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings where 100 men are fed with 20 barley loaves at God’s command. So the first thing Jesus is doing in this miracle story is showing that in him the Law and the Prophets are to be fulfilled. It was foretold that just as Moses fed people with bread in the dessert, so the last Redeemer, the Messiah, would also feed his people with bread in the dessert eternally.

Important also is to note that while Jesus re-enacts these great events in the history of the people of Israel he changes them in one unique way, which reveals his divinity in a much more dynamic way than simply multiplying bread and fish. In Exodus and Kings, Moses and Elisha are witnesses to God’s divine action on their behalf. Here Jesus acts in the power and person of God himself, he is not asking a God other than himself or outside of himself to act for him, and so he shows himself to be fully divine. So we still have the straight forward Mr Davies on side, even if we are looking a bit deeper than the magic bit.

In both this version of the gospel story and that found in the earlier gospel of Mark this feeding of 5000 is closely followed by another feeding miracle, this time of 4000 (which I am ashamed to say came as news to me when I began to study the bible as part of my theological training – obviously the second feeding miracle must rarely make it inot the lectionary for Sunday morning services!). All the numbers involved in these stories are symbolic – for example the 12 baskets of left overs represent as the number 12 so often does in the bible, the 12 tribes of Israel – but the combination of numbers used in these two miracles points towards understanding them as firstly representing Jesus’ mission to the Jews, and secondly to the Gentiles. As we heard in tyhis morning’s reading from the letter of St Paul to the Romans, he was in dispair of his own people, who had been given so much – the Law and the prophets – but were refusing to see that God’s mission in Jesus was to all people. In the very earliest days of our Church it was by no means clear that Jesus’ ministry was to those beyond the Jewish community, and both Mark and Matthew tell these miracles as representing this two stage preaching of the gospel – in the words of St Paul ‘to the Jew first, then to the Greek’. The telling of the second miracle of the feeding of 4000 does not appear in the later gospels of Luke and John, perhaps because by the time they were writing, any contention over the mission to the gentiles was past, and it had become a fact.

Finally for this morning I turn to the main symbolic meaning of bread – the bread is the Word of God, the message of salvation, for many of us the bread of the Eucharist in which we are fully joined with God. In Mark’s recounting of the feeding miracle he does in fact use exaclty the same words as those used later in the gospel story at Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist. To early Christians the whole story would have been reminiscent of their Eucharistic worship, at which they too sat in orderly fashion while deacons brought round to them loaves blessed and broken by the celebrant – don’t get any ideas though – there’s only one of me and far to many of you – if you just form an orderly queue for communion as usual that will be fine thank you.

Returning to the story I told you earlier about Miss Tomkins and Mr Davies – while I find little to inspire me in their views I don’t want to completely dismiss what they had to say. Both interpretations held some truth – Jesus is showing his divinity in an act of wonder – he and his disciples are also living by an example of generosity which characterised Jesus’ ministry and which we try to follow in our own lives. But there is more to it than either of these explanations, which over simplify and encourage us to do the same – to put our gospel in a tidy box with a big tick on it as though we have read it, understood it and can now move on –leaving it to gather dust on a shelf as though this were not a tremendous demonstration of God’s free, miraculously overflowing generosity to all people.

I have spent much more time this morning questioning how we might understand miracles such as this, and a relatively short time looking at the various meanings which may lie in this word. I would encourage you to do what St Augustine suggested “ask the miracles themselves what they tell [you] about Christ” - don’t allow the regularity with which this reading crops up in our lectionary, or how familiar or unfamiliar you may be with the text to discourage you from asking again and again what is this telling you about Christ? Try to look and hear this story again with fresh eyes and ears – “because Christ is the Word of God, and all the acts of the Word have become words to us”, and as Jesus would say – let all those who have ears, listen.

As we move towards our celebration of the Eucharistic feast this morning I would like to finish with a few words of Jesus from John Chapter 6 which throw light on what it means to be fed the bread of Jesus Christ. Jesus said:

I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.

AMEN