Feeding Five Thousand
II Chronicles 36:14-23
Psalm 122
Ephesians 2:4-10
John 6:4-15
Tim
Christoffersen
St. Timothy's
March 30,
2003
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Five little loaves of barley bread and two small fish; "What are
they among so many people?"
Our western trained mind balks before this mystery of how 5000 or more are fed with the two fish and five loaves of barley bread. Our intellect resists. Most of us choose to live in a bubble in which all that exists is what we can see, touch, smell, taste or measure. We believe we are scientific and we think we see things as they really are.
[Incidentally, have any of you noticed that you are 1.5 million miles away from where you were yesterday at this same time?]
Yet something in many of us says we cannot turn our eyes away from this mystery. This miracle story was important. It is the only miracle story told in all four gospels. How can we make sense of it?
Let's try to look at mystery with a second set of eyes. Have any of you heard of Rachel Naomi Remen? She is a medical doctor and is a professor at UCSF School of Medicine. When she was a young girl she was told she had Crohn's disease and would not live past her thirties. She is a pioneer in bringing an understanding of the healing power of spiritual awareness to the medical community. She has worked for over 30 years with cancer patients, most of them terminally ill, and their families. She is well known for the book Kitchen Table Wisdom.
She says we cannot understand or appreciate mystery with our intellect. We need to see mystery from our heart. One story she told that touched me was the experience a man had when he was 15. His father had had Alzheimer's disease for nearly a decade at this point. His father had not spoken for over eight years. When this man and his brother were old enough they would take care of their father so their mother could get out of the house. One day while they were watching TV, their father clutched his chest and fell forward onto the floor. The older brother appeared to him to be frightened and said, "Call 911." At that moment, a mysterious voice from their father who had not spoken for 8 years said, "Don't call 911. Tell your mother I love her. Tell her I will be ok." And then he died. This was a state where a sudden death required an autopsy. The autopsy revealed that the disease had destroyed the father's brain. In a sense, from whence came the father's voice was a mystery.
Let's shift to a focus on one little mystery in the gospel story. Jesus and the disciples had gone across the Sea of Galilee and up the hillside to be alone. But the crowd followed them around the lake and up the hillside. It was late afternoon.
Jesus turns to Philip, who is from this area, and says, "Where are we going to buy bread for these people to eat?" The subtlety, the mystery is initially locked in the Greek word for "where." The Greek word is pouthen. John uses it thirteen times in his gospel. Pou is 'where' and then has the sense of 'motion from a place or origin.' We get where, whence or from where.
John gives us a clear hint in the next sentence when he says Jesus asked this question to test Philip. The word 'where' has a double meaning as Jesus knew that the "from where" was Jesus himself.
Another place where John uses the word is when Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. They have an exchange over Jesus' request for a drink. Jesus tells the woman if she knew who asked her for a drink, she would have asked him and he would give her living water. She says, "Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep, where do you get this living water?"
In John 2 at the wedding in Cana, Jesus had told the servants to fill the jugs with water and then to draw some out and take it to the steward. "…the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew."
In John 8 when Jesus has said he is the light of the world, the Pharisees challenge him and Jesus responds, Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I come from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from."
All thirteen uses of this word by John have this sense of the mysterious origin either of things like the bread, wine and the living water or Jesus himself.
I think Rachel Naomi Remen is right. We can only appreciate and take hold of mystery with both our intellect and our heart. I believe Jesus' words in Luke 6:45 also lead us toward this conclusion. "The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart." The heart is our spiritual center.
Let me try to connect the miracle of the feeding of so many with so little, this mystery with a Jewish Hasidic tradition. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian and mystic of the 20th century wrote a little 32 page book called Who is Man? At the end of the book Buber tells the story of a famous Hasidic rabbi speaking to a group of learned men. The rabbi poses the question "Where is the dwelling of God"? The learned men are shocked and say what a silly question. "Is not the whole world full of his glory?"
If we see the world only with our intellect we are likely not to see the miracle, to see the mystery.
If we see also with our heart, if we are open to the mystery in our lives and around us, we are likely to answer the question in the same way that the rabbi of Kotsk answered his own question.
"God dwells wherever
man lets him in."
AMEN.
