Take, bless, break, give | a sermon on the feeding of the 5000

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Romans 9:1-5 and Matthew 14:13-21

The feeding of the five thousand… a story so familiar that we’re basically finishing it in our minds just as it begins to be read aloud. And yet there are textures to the story that we do well to keep in view.

So let me give you a quick “introduction to the gospels” sort of talk. This story appears in all four of the gospels, with both Matthew and Mark including a second similar story of the feeding of the four thousand just a bit further along in their accounts. Luke includes just this story of the 5000, while John’s account adds some very specific details not mentioned by the other three gospel writers, including having a little boy bring forward his own lunch of five loaves and two fish to be shared. That’s unique to John, but then again John’s account—written later than the other three—is in general very unique.

As for Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they overlap a great deal. The long-standing scholarly consensus is that Mark’s is the earliest gospel account, written in the early 60s of the Common Era, prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Mark’s gospel moves at a rapid pace—it can easily be read through in under an hour—and his favourite word is eutheos, which is translated “immediately.” That word appears forty-two times in Mark, with Jesus and the disciples immediately going here or there, and immediately doing this or that. The overall impact is one of urgency in Mark. He has a story to hurriedly share!

Matthew and Luke clearly had copies of Mark in front of them as they wrote their own accounts, which you can easily see if you read the shared episodes from these three gospels one after another. The chronology is basically the same amongst all three, and the wording is very similar in the sections they all share. Oh, and for the most part, Matthew and Luke drop that favourite Markan word, “immediately”! Matthew and Luke also flesh out the story of Jesus in their versions, sometimes with material the two of them hold in common, and sometimes with their own unique material. So for instance, Mark has no nativity scene, while Luke has the familiar Bethlehem story with the shepherds and the angels, and Matthew gives us the story of the visit of the Magi.

So, keeping those pieces kind of in view as the background, let’s take a look at this account and see what we can see.

First of all, here in Matthew as in Mark, news of the death of John the Baptist has led Jesus to withdraw to a deserted place to be alone. “But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns,” and before you know it, he’s engaging that throng of people with compassion, healing those who are ill. This continues for a good long time, so when the evening arrives the disciples come to Jesus and say that it really is time to send away the crowds so they can head to the nearby villages to get something to eat for dinner. That’s a totally logical and rational thing for the disciples to suggest. We’re talking a massive crowd here; thousands and thousands of people.

Five thousand, you say. This is the feeding of the five thousand! Yes, except… did you catch the closing line of this section? “And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.” Typical of that time and culture, the male writers don’t much bother with an estimated count that included the women and children, but rather just the men. Those were simply the cultural lenses through which they looked, so for sake of argument you might want to double the numbers in that crowd.

So there are the disciples looking at that vast crowd, when Jesus says to them, “The people need not go away; you give them something to eat,” to which they reply, “All we have here is five loaves and two fish,” perhaps silently adding in their own minds, “and that’s hardly going to do even for the twelve of us”! Jesus then quietly says, “well, bring what you have to me.” I can imagine the rather dubious looks on their faces, but they comply. He gets the whole crowd to settle down on the grass, and then takes the bread and fish, looks up to heaven, blesses and breaks the loaves, and begins to give it all to the disciples to distribute.

Quick pause. The language is intentional here. Jesus takes the bread and fish, blesses them, breaks the loaves, and gives it to the disciples to distribute. Take. Bless. Break. Give. This is classic eucharistic language, which was identified by Dom Gregory Dix in his 1945 book The Shape of the Liturgy as being central to the language of the New Testament and to the traditional communion practice of the church. As Matthew describes things in chapter 26, “While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’” (Mt. 26:26) In our own liturgy, we repeat this pattern, when the bread is taken or set out on the table, blessed in the eucharistic prayer, broken at the words “This is the Body of Christ; behold what you are, become what you receive,” and then given to each person who comes forward for communion.

Now in this story, as the disciples distribute the pieces of bread and fish, they discover something extraordinary. “All ate and were filled,” Matthew tells us. “All ate and were filled, and the disciples took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.” More, in other words, than what they had at the beginning.

So, twelve baskets left over, and twelve is an important number in the Hebrew scriptures; considered almost a perfect number. Most significantly, Jacob had twelve sons, and each of these came to represent one of the twelve tribes of Israel. When the temple was established, the book of Leviticus stipulated that twelve unleavened cakes of bread be set out each week, with frankincense set beside the bread. In a sense, the number is both literally significant—the number of sons and tribes—and symbolically important, as in the case of the twelve loaves of bread set out in the temple. Any first century Jewish reader would have instantly seen this connection in this story told by Matthew.

Now here’s a second quick pause before I bring things to a close. While both Luke and John tell only of the feeding of the 5000 in their renderings of the gospel, Mark and Matthew have a second feeding story. In Matthew it comes at the end of the following chapter, chapter 15. Let me read that one to you, and see what you might hear:

Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd?’ Jesus asked them, ‘How many loaves have you?’ They said, ‘Seven, and a few small fish.’ Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all of them ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Those who had eaten were four thousand men, besides women and children. (Mt. 15:32-39)

So a slightly different story, but the same fourfold movement is there: he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave it. The one major difference is that he begins here with seven loaves and a few small fish, and then ends with seven baskets full of the leftover pieces. If twelve is a critically important number in Judaism, seven was an equally important number in Greek thought; in the dominant Gentile thought of that world. And you wonder, then, is this story meant as a precursor to what would follow, as the Jesus movement is shown to be for all: for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. I believe that is part of what is at work here.

But even more critically is this: just as the multitudes were miraculously fed on bread and fish, so are we fed with bread and wine. Week by week, Jesus is made known to us in the breaking of bread, just as he was to the earliest disciples, the two people on the road to Emmaus, to Paul and Barnabas and Silas and Timothy, and to all through these two thousand years who have opened their hands, their hearts, their souls to the presence of God with us in the eucharist. Christ is present to us here, now and ever.