Jesus in today’s gospel seeks some solitude after hearing the news of the execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas. He withdrew by boat with some of his disciples on the Sea of Galilee to wilderness location. But the crowds followed on the shore line so that when he went ashore there was crowd already of nearly five thousand men, not counting the women and children in attendance. He had heard the story of the horrific meal of King Herod, who at royal banquet granted the wish of Salome for her dancing and prompted by her mother to ask for the head of John the Baptist upon a platter. The image for us is grisly, and it was certain grisly for Jesus. It was banquet of death.
As it got late, the disciples came to Jesus and said, ”The hour is late, send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” I hear the voices of Christians about the poor. “Let’s send them away; let them get their own food. If they don’t have enough monies to buy food, that’s their problem.” Or the disciples were too tired and wanted some away time alone with Jesus. Or they had little faith that they had enough resources to feed the crowd.
But Jesus reacts to the disciples’ phrase “buy food for themselves.” He responds to the disciples: “They need not go; give them something to eat.” Jesus astonishes his disciples because he expects them to provide food for five thousand men plus accompanying women and children. They hardly have enough food for themselves—five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus’ compassion prevails.
And here is a lesson for the disciples and for ourselves. The disciples focus on scarcity in a time of great need while Jesus stresses the expectation of God’s extravagant and gracious abundance. When we open our hearts to compassion to the people we encounter and who are in need, and if we give what we have, God will be multiply the gifts to meet the needs of the crowd.
Jesus looks up in prayer, his heart full of compassion, and he breaks and blesses the loaves and gives them to the disciples for distribution to crowd sitting on the ground. And all the people ate and were filled. Leftover fragments filled twelve baskets. First, this miracle, however achieved by the multiplication of the loaves or Jesus convincing families who brought food with them to share their provisions with those without food, signifies God’s extravagant hospitality. What is made clear by Jesus’ action is that God wants to be a generous host and provide abundant life. Jesus provides a banquet of life while Herod officiates at a feast where John the Baptist’s head is served on a platter. God is the host who cares enough– not to leave go away in hunger.
Jesus takes the loaves, breaks the bread, blesses them, and gives them to the disciples to distribution. Each Sunday we hear from one of our celebrants at the altar the same ritual formula: Jesus took bread, broke bread, blessed it, and gave to his friends, saying “This is my body which is broken for you.” The early Christian worshippers would remember Jesus’ final supper as they heard this story as they gathered at table to remember and relive the story. This has more levels than with first reading.
The connection between hospitality and food crosses many cultures. For the ancient world, welcome at table expresses a companionship. We become bread friends.
The early Christian eucharist meals did not just use bread and wine or grape juice as we do on Sunday. Let me list the items that they consecrated the bread and used oils, honey, fruit, and cheese with the bread. These eating of the eucharist might include spreading honey on the consecrated bread or dipping in olive oil with some balsamic spices. This would horrify many literalist Catholics and Christians who have taken the communion meal into a different social meaning than the early Christians who participated.
They often served fish at the eucharist because they remembered today’s gospel of the fishes and the loaves or remembered that Jesus barbecued fish on the Sea of Galilee after his resurrection while Peter and John were fishing. In my wildest Christian imagination, I often thought of serving sushi or sashimi at worship. But that would not go over with everyone. Some Christians substituted water for wine mixed water for the consecrated drink. Because of their abstinence orientation, the Montanist Christians in the second century substituted a yogurt drink for the wine.
Some of the Christian eucharist meals were pot luck, everyone bringing a dish. And they were called love feasts or agapes. It seems that water was substituted for wine out a sense of abstinence from alcohol, and Paul encouraged some of his followers to use wine rather than water.
These love meals or thanksgivings remembered all those occasions that Jesus invited people indiscriminately to sit down at table. These occasions alarmed religious fundamentalists because Jesus upset their understanding of people classified as worthy and unworthy, holy and unholy. In one of favorite books—Our God has No Favorites, Anne Primavesi and Jennifer Henderson write:
One bastion in particular has to be demolished if we are to be free to witness at our celebrations to the all-inclusive love of God. This is the separation of the ‘worthy’ from the ‘unworthy.’ The mean weapon of attack is the rediscovery of Jesus himself as the prophetic disruption of conventional separateness in his own day and within his faith tradition. There are two main areas in his life where this can be seen. One is his teaching in parables. The other is his scandalous behavior in eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. In both, to use Sally McFague’s words, “he epitomizes the scandal of inclusiveness for his time.”
When in arguments with Pharisees because of his refusal to judge people, Jesus speaks this line: “You judge by human standards, I judge no one.” (John 8:15). He correctly reduces their religious claims of judgment to what they really are—human projections upon God of their own values. Pharisees and sinners inhabit separate worlds, fenced off by religious judgments and practices that exclude. Pharisees cannot ever conceive sitting down and eating with sinners. There is never any sharing together at table in the name of God. It is their religious judgments and classifications that discriminate against people not like themselves. Their complaint against Jesus: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” (Mk. 2:16, Mt. 11:19)
And this is Jesus’ scandal. It is not that Jesus only sits at table with sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, and the outcasts. He sits down on the ground to have a meal with more than 5000 male suspect sinners, not including their wives and unmarried women that they lived with, and the children—even some born outside of marriage and considered mamzers, bastards. The scandal of this meal with so many sinners and suspect peoples hosted in the name of God and indiscriminate invitation to all would be too much to handle for religious fundamentalists of Jesus’ day and our own day.
But let me go back to Jesus’ meals and fellowship. In the feeding of the more than the 5000, Jesus makes clear the distinction of God’s hospitality and religious fundamentalists. God’s hospitality and love are all inclusive, no exceptions. In the Parable of the Great Supper, Jesus illustrates God’s etiquette in inviting the poor, the blind, the lame and since there is still room all those from the highways and byways. God’s house is to be filled…..
Richard Rohr quotes Gandhi,
There are so many hungry people in the world that God could only come into the world in the form of food.” It is marvelous, that God would enter our lives not just in the form of sermons or Bibles, but in food. God comes to feed us more than just teach us. Lovers understand that. Richard Rohr, Eucharist as Touchstone
The scandal of the Christian churches is the limits that they place around God’s table. Some churches use the Lord’s Supper as an instrument of discipline and exclusion. They deprive certain Christians from participation in the table and communion: LGBT folks, divorced and remarried Christians, Christians from other denominations, the riff-raff, young people with tattoos and piercings, people with addictions, and anyone classified as unworthy, and of course non-Christians.
When did the Lord’s Supper become an instrument of deprivation and exclusion? When did Jesus’ vision of God’s radical inclusive love or indiscriminate invitation at table become abandoned? We might trace it to the early divisions between Aramaic followers of Jesus in Jerusalem and the Greek speaking followers. Ever since churches make splits and divisions from one another, refusing to listen to Jesus’ prayer at the Last Supper that they may be one.
Our weekly celebrations symbolize the wild, gratuitous, excessively abundant and shockingly excessive welcome of God. We celebrate our meal as representing all the meals had before his death, his final meal before his death, and all those meals when he resurrected: with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, in the upper room, on the beach of the Sea of Galilee with Jesus barbecuing fish.
Many Christian churches telescope their table celebrations to represent Jesus’ Last Supper, claiming that the twelve apostles were there. This allows them to distort Jesus shocking practice of God’s hospitality and replace the open table with the closed table. Nowhere does it say that there were only twelve apostles at that final meal. It says that Jesus was with his disciples—this means male and female disciples, their children and probably several companion animals as well. His final meal– like all his other meals, was open to all. If the churches take Jesus’ witness to the indiscriminate love of God in his open table practices, then they could not possibly close their tables to the stranger, the sinner, the outcast, and the poor.
The real scandal of the table is the churches’ distorted representations of Jesus as discriminating at God’s table to privilege the elite, only the male gender and ordained, and the powerful. This scandalizing exclusion for the sake of power would scandalize Jesus because these practices were performed in his name and distorted the true nature of Abba God as indiscriminate love for all.
At the table, those with vestments and stoles are just as needy as the poor stranger with dirty clothes and who lives on the streets. The link between hunger, bread and life brings us all together to eat at God’s table.
At our weekly table celebrations, we learn to live our lives as gifts as we accept God’s hospitality in gratitude. To receive communion with God is already to give back not only to God but to others without any strings attached to our giving. We embody God’s hospitality. There is not only an invitation to practice hospitality but a participation in God’s hospitality to the world. What we realize each week is that what God gives to us is excessive, extravagantly more abundant that we need or deserve.
The problem of hunger still affects millions of people globally as well as on the streets of North Hollywood. Jesus the Lord looked upon the crowd of the 5000 plus people in the wilderness and had compassion for the crowd. And the disciples picked up the fragments from the divine picnic in the wilderness and fills twelve baskets, and this indicates the wildly shocking and excessive abundance of God extended to all.
When we celebrate our feast around the table, Christ is present in our hall—instructing us as he instructed the disciples in the wilderness. “Give them something to eat yourselves.” Our table feast will never be fully complete until the Lord comes again once when there are no longer any hungry people in the world.