How often have we heard the
same basic story or account of an event take on variations in smaller details over
time, while still preserving the main point or truth, the more often it is
re-told? Those of us who are parents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, or
otherwise relatives or caregivers to young children: When we read that bedtime
story for the fiftieth time, might we not improvise a small variation, or
perhaps add voices to various characters in the story, which we had not added
the previous forty-nine times we had read the story? I have done this when I
have cared for small children, especially now my niece and nephews. Anybody
among us who is a teacher: Have we ever varied some details of our teaching,
each time we teach the same material, to direct greater attention toward the
main point we are teaching? Have teachers ever used this technique with any of
us when we have been students?
The basic structure of the
multiplication of the loaves and fishes account we hear today from John’s
Gospel is old and frequently-repeated. Even within the Gospels, the
multiplication of the loaves and fishes appears twice each in Matthew and Mark,
once in Luke, and once in John. It must have been especially memorable among
the earliest disciples of Jesus, because this is the only one of Jesus’ miracles
to figure in all four Biblical Gospels. And yet, each time it appears in the
Gospels, some details of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes differ
slightly from other accounts of the same event: In two variations of the
account, four thousand men, in addition to women and children are fed; in others,
Jesus feeds five thousand. In two accounts, the disciples bring seven loaves
and “a few small fish,” whereas other versions specify five loaves and two
fish. John’s Gospel has not Jesus’ disciples but a boy bring the loaves and
fish to Jesus.
And this multiplication of
food motif is not limited to the Gospels. We hear of a similar event today in
the second Book of Kings, in which Elisha orders his servant to feed “a hundred
people” with the “twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack.”
I wonder: When Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed thousands, would
the people he fed have said, “Wait, is this not like what Elisha did years ago,
only there are more people here than when Elisha fed the hundred, and today
Jesus started with fewer loaves than Elisha did, and a few fish”?
Would the people Jesus fed
have recognized him through the multiplication as a kind of prophetic
miracle-worker, like Elisha but maybe even greater than him? With the many
repetitions in the Gospels of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, would
Jesus have multiplied the loaves and fishes only once, or several times,
whenever he had great crowds following him who had become tired and hungry and
were out of food? Why the differences in detail of this multiplication of food
motif, from 2 Kings to the Gospels, and from one Gospel to another? Are these
differences in detail, while maintaining the basic structure of the story each
time, due to the different Biblical authors arranging and then re-telling this
event in their own way and each for their own purpose or to their own
particular audiences?
I would answer “Yes” to all
these questions, but then what does it matter if details change from one
account of a feeding of the multitudes to the next, as long as a central truth
or message is present across the many versions of this story? And if there is a
central truth or message across all the repetitions of this multiplication of
food event in our Scriptures, what is it?
Let me suggest that a key
starting point for us in drawing a consistent central message; a central truth
from the multiplication and feeding episodes in 2 Kings and in John is that
both events begin with a free gift from God. In both cases, even what appears
to be insufficient food for the size of the crowd is already God’s gift to the
people; to us, before the food is
miraculously multiplied.
If we think in logical,
mathematical terms, might we be tempted to question why, in 2 Kings, twenty
loaves would not be enough for one hundred people? After all, this would be one-fifth
of a loaf per person. Depending on how large and dense the loaves were, should
this not have been enough to satisfy one hundred people? And yet, in John’s
multiplication of the loaves and fishes, we have the opposite problem if we
think mathematically: Five loaves and two fish would give each of the five
thousand people one-thousandth of a loaf of bread and one-twenty-five-hundredth
of a fish… Unless they were big fish, it would seem that God was being mighty
stingy with the people following Jesus that day!
But, if we think in these
mathematical terms, we lose track of the key truth of both multiplication and
feeding accounts: Both are centered not on the multiplication and feeding
actions of Elisha and then Jesus, but on God’s free gift that is present
beforehand, so that the multiplication of food and feeding of the people can
take place at all.
In the historical context of 2
Kings, the man who brings “food from the first fruits to Elisha” is most likely
somebody concerned with bringing an amount of food, the “twenty loaves of
barley and fresh ears of grain,” set by the religious custom of Israel as the
appropriate amount of one’s food stores for a sacrifice to God. Somebody
recognized as godly, like Elisha, would be the ideal person to offer the servant’s
food sacrifice to God.
Surprisingly to Elisha’s
servant and maybe to us, though, Elisha asks his servant not to offer his food,
which in fact is God’s gift to him, back to God through Elisha as a burnt
sacrifice, but to the hundred hungry people. Only when Elisha’s servant trusts
God enough to obey Elisha does the initially small amount of food the servant
had been carrying become more than enough to feed the one hundred people. In
other words, whenever we receive a free gift from another person, or especially
from God, we are given the responsibility in turn to use this gift for the
greatest good possible, not only for ourselves or in religious devotion or
worship (as good as devotion and worship are), but for one another, especially
those most vulnerable and in need of our material goods, our presence, and our
service.
Our use of the gifts we
receive for the greatest good, especially of one another, necessitates growth
in trust toward the gift-giver, in this case God. As we pray in our Psalm
response today, God opens his “hand to feed us; [to] satisfy all our needs.”
And although God could feed and satisfy us all by himself, God chooses to give us the
freedom and the ability to receive God’s gifts and then to make them even more
abundant for one another. We then become the
gift from God to one another.
This movement from initial
gift or “first fruits,” to the gift recipient trusting in God, to the gift
being multiplied beyond our wildest imagination, to our becoming the gift is shown as much in our reading from John today
as in 2 Kings. In John’s Gospel, the Apostles Philip and Andrew take the place
of Elisha’s servant of 2 Kings. Philip and then Andrew size up the crowd and
their amount of food. Of course, the amount of food is too little for the size
of the crowd, until Jesus rhetorically and yet ever-so-gently draws Philip and
Andrew beyond their purely logical thinking toward trust that God will
miraculously satisfy the five thousand people. And then Jesus makes Philip,
Andrew, and his other disciples his greatest gift to the people. Jesus gives
his disciples a central part in his miracle: “Gather up the fragments left over,
so that nothing may be lost.”
Insofar as we trust in God to “satisfy all our
needs” and ultimately to bring us to salvation, God gives us a part in his
sustaining, saving miracle of which this Eucharistic celebration is a sign, a
sacrament. In this way, God sends us
forth to be his gift, to gather in the abundance, so that nothing and
nobody may be lost.
