132 Free Food

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Free Food”, originally shared on July 19, 2021. It was the 132^nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   How many people did Jesus feed at the Feeding of the 5,000? What does the answer to that question tell us about our salvation? Today, we’re going to find out.

   The pandemic has been up and down and is now starting to creep-up again. Ten thousand people were infected in L.A. County in just the past week. The virus variants have been hitting hard, almost entirely among the unvaccinated, and that is pulling us back a step. It’s discouraging, but today we’re going to look at the source of our hope.

   The event in which Jesus feeds at least 5,000 people with a little boy’s lunch, and has lots of leftovers, is the only miracle of Jesus that is found in all four of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and in today’s passage from John.

   I think that one of the reasons for this is that it centers on a universal human need for food.

   Some of it, though, goes right past us in that food scarcity of the kind that was commonplace at the time of Jesus is so rare for most of us in Southern California.

   In fact, the food in our diet is fresher and more varied than that of most royalty throughout human history.

   Just take a mental trip down any main thoroughfare around you and you will find that food dominates the landscape. It’s everywhere, in every form you can imagine, and it comes from all over the world.

   You’ll see fresh food, fast food, fine food, junk food, fun food, organic food, decorative food, food that is locally sourced and food from all over the world, along with survival food, and food that is given away for people who are experiencing food insecurity.

   Walk into a grocery store and you’ll find one of the main reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union. Lines to buy basic food necessities are almost unheard of anywhere in the United States. They were rare even during the worst of the pandemic. And when the communists found out what life was like for the average person in the United States, their dissatisfaction boiled over.

    Have you ever been hungry? It affects you.

   When I was about 5 or 6, I remember sneaking down the stairs after I had been put to bed to listen to the TV, but that night the TV wasn’t on, and my parents were talking. My dad wasn’t going to get paid for a few days and my mom was saying that there wasn’t much food in the house. I thought we were going to starve, and I started to cry. My parents heard me and brought me downstairs with them. They explained that we were going to be fine, and my mom made a big bowl of popcorn and I sat on the couch in between my parents and we ate popcorn until we were full, and then I went to bed.

   When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated when I was in college, the food service allowed students to sign out of the meal program for three days and to fast; the money saved was sent to civil rights organizations. By the second night, I was dreaming about food. It was almost the only thing I thought about.

   There is enough food in the world to feed everybody, several times over. Our main problem is that it’s not evenly available, and there are major issues of distribution and will in getting it to the people who need it. Scientists all over the world continue to develop methods of sustainable agriculture in every corner of our planet to help people eat. The famines that were commonplace just decades ago are rare today.

   In our country, the two most popular kinds of books are cookbooks and diet books.

   There are still pockets of need throughout the world, even in our own country, and when I am reminded of them, I think of the comic strip I saw when I was in seminary of the cartoon character praying, and saying, “Lord there are so many needs in the world. Why don’t you do something about them?” And a text bubble comes down from off the strip and says, “That’s funny. I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

   Jesus lived in a time where nobody ate like we do. As a skilled worker who had now become an itinerant, Jesus was probably muscular, and thin.  

   Jesus has been in Jerusalem for a Jewish festival, where he healed and taught. We pick up the story at John 6, verse 1:

After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. ² A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. ³ Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. ⁴ Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.

   The Sea of Galilee had been renamed the Sea of Tiberias by Herod Antipas (a petty and ruthless tyrant who had recently killed John the Baptist) to curry favor (I guess that’s a nice way to put it) with Emperor Tiberias in 29 A.D.

   The crowd walked around to the northeast corner of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus was taking his disciples for a retreat by boat. The Sea was ringed with villages, so they would have had to walk a way up the hills to find room for them all on the green grassy fields of the Spring. They were excited to do this because they had seen the healing miracles that Jesus had done, and medical care in those days was almost non-existent.  They were poor.

   John then drops in a little detail that the Passover was near. Why was that important? We see as the story continues with verse 5:

 ⁵ When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” ⁶ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. ⁷ Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.”  

   Hospitality was a major social obligation in the honor and shame culture of Jesus time. Jesus wanted he and the disciples to be good hosts. Everyone was to be treated as close family.

   Phillip stated the obvious that their resources were so small in light of their needs, a situation almost every church in the Western world can relate to.

   Suppose you were hosting a large family meal. How would you prepare?

   Suppose you were hosting a large family reunion? It would be difficult, but you could do it.

   Suppose 5,000 people just showed up and you were responsible for feeding them? Here’s what happened, continuing in John 6: verse 8:

⁸One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, ⁹ “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” ¹⁰ Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. ¹¹ Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. 

   It’s a sign of our relative affluence that many of us hear that part of the story and think, “Woah, that’s a lot of carbs! Of course, now some dietitians are saying that carbohydrates are good for you. <sigh>.

   But for people who didn’t regularly get enough to eat, except at weddings and festivals, this was a huge deal.

   Back to my parents. I was their first, and they were young, as were most parents of their generation, so I was the one they learned on. I remember when I was invited to my first party for boys and girls. I was about 12, and I think that my mother was more excited about it than I was. When I got home, she wanted to know what had happened, who was there, what was served, did I dance? And she asked me what I liked best about it. I said that the thing I liked best was that they let us eat until we were full. She was shocked! Didn’t I get enough to eat at home? Sure, I said, just not until I was full. So, after that I started getting a whole peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and larger portions.

   It was a huge deal for first century people to have as much food as they wanted!

   And there were leftovers (!), another rare event. Jesus knew the needs of the people, and he didn’t want anything to go to waste. We pick up the story in verse 12:

¹² When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” ¹³ So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. ¹⁴ 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.”

   I just want to mention here the naturalistic explanation for this miracle. Some have given the plausible explanation that people of Jesus time would not have gone anywhere without taking some food with them. The miracle here is not the multiplication of loaves and fishes, but that there was something about Jesus that inspired people to share, and when they shared there was more than enough. It’s plausible, but I don’t think that that’s the story here.

   It doesn’t seem to me that such an event would have made the cut for all four gospels. Nor does it seem likely that people would be able to hide that much food in their clothes.

   Plus, look at how the people reacted. They declared Jesus to be a prophet and wanted to make him King. I don’t think that that would happen if Jesus had merely drawn a spirit of sharing out of them.

   The people were looking for a military leader. They were looking for someone to take up the throne of King David and get rid of the occupation of the Roman Empire! They were like sheep without a shepherd, and they wanted a strong man to lead them. They acted not from faith, but from fear.

   John the Baptist’s execution was fresh in their minds. Things were happening. They just didn’t know what they were.

   Then things got worse, in the concluding verse of this story, verse 15:

¹⁵ 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.

   Jesus had already rejected the offer of the devil to gain political power, to rule as an earthly king, and he rejected all the efforts to politicize him and all the efforts to make him chose a different path than that to the cross.

   Jesus is shown in this story to be like a prophet, but as in the prophetic ministry of Moses, a deliverer of another kind.

   Like Moses, he crosses the water, the people follow him, he goes to the mountain, and food is miraculously provided in the middle of nowhere. Twelve baskets of leftovers were collected, which is the same number as the number of tribes of the children of Israel. And remember that little detail John adds at the beginning of the story? “Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.” (v. 4)

   The night before he was betrayed, Jesus recast the Passover with himself as the sacrificial lamb. His death on the cross would set God’s people free from sin, death, and all the forces that defy God.

   The free food given in the feeding of the 5,000 was Jesus. It points to God’s redemption of all who believe and are baptized.

   Miracles are not suspensions of the laws of nature but acts that point to God’s intention for the world at Creation, and to God’s redemption of the world in the new heaven and the new earth that is to come. In fact, in the gospel of John they are often called “signs”.

   The cross lies at the center of human history, providing the means by which our sin, our separation from God, is overcome by Jesus, fully God and fully human being, in his sacrificial death on the cross.

   But that’s not what the people wanted from Jesus. We’ll see that once Jesus scales back on the healing and the food, and points to his coming death on the cross, his popularity sinks like a stone.

   The greatest miracle was yet to come, but the people couldn’t see it and, I suppose, most people can’t see it even today.

   The greatest miracle is the cross.

   We don’t know how many people were fed at the feeding of the 5,000. The Greek word used in the Bible could be 5,000 men in the specific gender sense of the word plus women and children or 5,000 men in the generic sense that includes women and children.

   What we do know is that Jesus is the bread of life, and that that food is given for free for all people to receive. Receive Him today.