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Thought for the
Week 3 August 2008 – Eleventh Sunday after
Trinity
I have
in front of me, a checkout ticket from one of the Toulouse Hypermarkets. I only bought four things costing just over
five Euros altogether. Yet this
checkout ticket has printed on it 92 digits, and that’s not counting the
letters. Perhaps that is why they call
this the digital age. Like it or not,
we live surrounded by numbers. In the
ancient world, that was not the case.
I am told that there are tribes in the remoter parts of the world
where their counting system goes: one, two, many. Ah the hours of mental torture that an
accident of birth inflicted on me in maths classes at school! Imagine filling in your tax return under
such a system – bliss! And, best of
all, I would never be late for anything, ever again! The Jews have a decimal system of counting,
but they had no separate characters for numbers; they simply used the first
ten letters of their alphabet to represent the digits, then the next ten to
represent decades, and then the rest of the letters to represent
centuries. Since they only have 23
letters in their alphabet, numbers over four hundred get a bit complicated. They also had no zero, which was invented
much later by the Arabs, so arithmetic was a bit tricky. Also, they used “seventy” to mean a large
number, just as today, we might say “hundreds”. Where we would say, “Oh, there were
hundreds of people there,” they would say, “Oh, there were seventy people
there.” For all
these reasons, whenever you come across numbers in the Bible, they
always mean a great deal more than the
digits on my checkout ticket. If I
said five and two to you, what would come into your mind? Five-a-side football, and two teams
perhaps? Fifty-two weeks in a year
perhaps? Five fingers and two
hands? Bingo numbers? Part of your car registration? Part of your burglar alarm code? There are probably as many possibilities as
there are people hearing or reading this homily. But
picture, if you can, a society where numbers are little used, and where they
are precious and important things, not to be taken lightly. If you said five and two to a Jew at the
time of Jesus, he would instantly think of his Bible. The first five books of the Old Testament,
as we know it, are the Torah, the Law of Moses. And then there were the two other
components of the Jewish Bible, the Prophets and the Writings. Together with the Torah, the Prophets and
the Writings make up the Old Testament.
If, as most scholars believe, Matthew was using the methods of the
Rabbis to teach the Christian Faith, he has here taken a saying of Jesus,
“Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the
Mouth of God”, and explained it in the context of a story from the life of
Jesus. And the
twelve baskets? The twelve tribes of And why
five thousand? Good question. Perhaps it would remind a Jew of the
thousands of people who obey the law of Moses, in the five books of the
Torah. At any rate, here was a miracle
of a wholly greater order of magnitude than Elijah’s – he fed a hundred
people with twenty small barley loaves.
Jesus on the other hand, feeds five thousand men (apart from women and
children), with just five small barley loaves and two little fishes,
described by Mark as a child’s picnic. Of
course the story of the feeding of the five thousand works at many different
levels. Interestingly, there are only
two miracles recorded in all four Gospels, the resurrection, and this one,
the feeding of the Five Thousand. Something
here is really important. At its most basic and obvious, it is always God Who
feeds his children. At the Offertory,
do we not say “All things come from You, O God, and of your own do we give
You”? In a world where everything
comes weighed out, vacuum-packed and with an audit trail from farm to plate,
it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we owe absolutely everything to
God. You might have noticed that in
this story, nobody asks Jesus to feed them.
God’s generosity is not dependent on any actions that we take, or fail
to take; his abundance is completely
unconditional. Then
there is the time-line. God is the
same yesterday, today and for ever.
Elijah, the great prophet, took bread, gave thanks, and broke it, and
used his servant to distribute it. The
people were miraculously fed, and there was lots left over then too. Before that, Moses, just after crossing the
But
Matthew is not just looking back in time, as though to some past golden
era. He may have had Rabbinic training
like Matthew
is much more interested in the future, when the Messiah will reign. Ideas, brilliant though they may be, like
the Holiness Code in Leviticus, are not powerful enough to redeem us. We need a Messiah, not a code of
practice. Many Jews expected the
coming of the Messiah to be accompanied by miraculous feeding, Manna, the
bread of heaven, which their ancestors had eaten in their wanderings in the
wilderness during the Exodus. At the
feeding of the five thousand, as at the Last supper, it is Jesus Who takes
the initiative, in both cases rather to the disciples’ consternation. The disciples are dismayed at the scale of
the problem Jesus sets them – “You feed them”. Here, surely, is a firm boot in the
Church’s backside, when we look at the slender resources we have, and the
all-embracing mission we have been given!
But our heavenly Father knows our needs before we do, and takes care
of them unconditionally. What we
have to do, is, as Jesus says, “Bring them here to me.” (Did He mean the people, or the loaves and
fishes? Both, maybe?) Jesus does exactly the same as at the Last
Supper. He takes the bread, gives
thanks to God, He breaks it, and gives it to the people, just as we do Sunday
by Sunday at the Eucharist, in Remembrance of Him. And
there’s another little clue – Matthew follows mark in recording that the
grass was green. Usually in It is
in the ordinary that we see God’s hand at work. He both feeds us physically, and
spiritually. As part of human nature,
we need food and drink. But, as
thinking, praying, social beings, we need more than that. As Isaiah put it, in our first reading today,
we need the wine and milk without money and without price. In our number-obsessed society, where so
many know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, is it not a
paradox that our deepest needs should be met by God for free? Let us
then take away with us the two commands of Jesus from today’s Gospel, “You
feed them” and “Bring them to me”.
They are really one command, for the two things are the same, but
Jesus’ words are not just addressed to the Apostles, but to all of us. May God bless you as you feed his children
by bringing them to Him. Amen. Father Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy of
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