The necessity that changes a course

In the Benedictine spirituality reading this week, Joan Chittister quotes an old Sanskrit saying: “necessity changes a course but never a goal.”  In Matthew’s miraculous account of the loaves and the fishes we can see this old adage in play. Necessity changed the course, but did not alter the goal. The story of the feeding of the 5000 was so important to the early church that is was reproduced in all four gospels. Jesus and the disciples have just learned that John the Baptist has been beheaded. And Jesus for his part, is at the height of popularity - the crowds can't get enough of him, but all he wants is to find somewhere to be alone.  Some days are like that.  Some days everybody wants a piece of us and there doesn't seem to be a single moment of the day to just sit down.  And there's nothing to do but take a deep breath and get to the next thing on the list, or go to the next committee meeting, or teach the next class, or fix the next meal or drive to the next appointment. Some days there's hardly a moment to catch a bite to eat. That's the kind of day Jesus was having.  His teaching was winding down and it was getting dark and the crowd was hungry but there was no food. Equally exhausted and short tempered the disciples wanted to just send the people away, especially since there was barely enough food for them. But Jesus is mindful of the expectation of hospitality and the centrality of a shared meal that was foundational to Judaism, then and now.

Mindful that Jesus himself was not a charismatic leader of Christianity but in fact a devout and practicing Jew, a rabbi and preacher of the Torah, it might be useful to look at the way in which Judaism understands the sacredness of the meal. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about meals as an expression of piety, saying, “Piety is an important word in Judaism, because all of life is a reflection of God, the infinite source of holiness.  The entire world, all the good things in life, belong to God, so when you enjoy something, you think of God and enjoy it in his presence. … When you wake up, you are aware God created the world.  When you see rays of sunshine streaming through your window, you recognize the presence of God. When you stand up and your feet touch the ground, you know the earth belongs to God.  When you wash your face, you know that the water is God.  [You cook, set the table, and eat in the presence of God.] Piety is the recognition that everything is linked to the presence of God in every moment.  The Passover Seder, for example, is a ritual meal to celebrate freedom of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and their journey home.  During the meal, certain vegetables and herbs, salt and other condiments help us touch what happened in the past – what was our suffering and what was our hope.” 

This is the perspective we must understand as we come to study this event.  For Jesus this was a matter of piety; to deny the meal would have undermined the teaching. Necessity was pressing them to change course, but they were ill-prepared.  They had been looking for a moment of quiet in the countryside, but the crowds had followed them.  Nonetheless, Jesus confidently blessed the meager five loaves of bread and two fish and gave it to his disciples. They in turn broke the food into pieces and put it into baskets, lots of baskets in fact. So much so that after all have had their fill there are 12 baskets left over.  Let us understand that Jesus did not add anything to the food that was not already there.  The food was good and sufficient in its own right.  Wholesome, simply, basic food is in itself a sufficient expression of God’s generous nature. Jesus simply lifted it up to God so that that attribute, God’s generous nature, might be made manifest.  And it was. God then multiplied the pieces with a greater abundance that was even required.  Necessity required a change of course, but the goal was not altered.  The goal was always the revelation of God.

There is another way to look at this story.  I remind you once again that the gospels are, if nothing else, political documents.  The Roman coin had on one side the picture of Nero and on the other, Cere, the goddess of agriculture. The coin also had a phrase translated to: "The annual harvest of the emperor." So by extension, it is the king who provides the basic necessity of food for all of inhabitants of the Roman kingdom. Jesus’ act is not just a simple act of kindness, random grace, but a bold political statement about the reign of God in direct contradiction to the Roman establishment delivered in the authentic cloth of piety. It is God who feds the people in their hour of need; providing what is needed both physically as well as spiritually. We must also consider that the gathered crowd may have understood the significant of the feeding more than we give them credit if word of John’s death had arrived to them. John was a well-known figure, regularly drawing large crowds of his own, and word of his death would have spread quickly throughout the Judean countryside.  They too would have been deeply grieved and worried about the abruptly shifting and dangerous winds threatening Jesus’ safety and those associated with him.  If it could happen to John it could happen to Jesus just as easily.  The sudden provision of an unexpected and abundant meal reassured Jesus’ followers that God would provide for their needs, even in the face of John’s death and Jesus’ own threats from the Roman and Jewish establishment.

In addition to the use of this story to reveal God’s generous nature as well as to contrast the worldly kingdom of Rome against the spiritual realm of God kingdom, there is yet another way to understand this event.   Because it’s such a large crowd, it’s easy to miss the human factor.  We do this as a matter of course in our world today. In a crowd individual identity is lost.  But we might ask, who are these people who are in this crowd?  Well, they were mothers and fathers, who undoubtedly had their children with them, and probably quite a number of them, together with aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and all the cousins.  This was a crowd of whole, large families in addition to widows and outcasts, and a goodly number of sick, carried for miles by relatives in hopes of a miraculous cure. And each one of them had a story, a life, a history, a present and a future, hopes and dreams and all the things they planned for and all the things they wanted to forget.

In one of my lectures this week from my health coaching coursework was on the mind-body connection; the way in which all the events of our lives are expressed in some physical manifestation by our bodies.  In fact most all of the healing arts throughout the centuries all around the world have this precept and foundational for healing. It is only Western medicine that focuses completely on the body’s ailments to the almost total exclusion of the person themselves.  All ancient modalities of healing still widely practiced around the world consider this quite inadequate – like trying to feed 5000 with five loaves of bread and two fish.  Our bodies do not forget the events of lives.  And we all have a story.  Like every person in that crowd on the shores of Galilee, 5000 different stories.  There is one type of doctor practicing widely in the US that does not exclude the person from their illness and those are naturopaths.  When you see a naturopathic doctor, after the symptoms have been described, the first question is, What’s your story?  What has happened to you? And there’s quite a lot of talking and quite a lot of listening, deep listening – to all that is being said, and all that is being left unsaid. In my personal experience, there’s a reverence to this exchange that is also quite sacred.  The world we live in is all about being fixed as quickly as possible, as if we were machines.  But we are not machines; we are, each one of us, holy expressions of God’s greatest hopes for us. And we all have a story. And we each have our own pain and have made sacrifices, and incurred great losses. Sometimes necessity required not a single change of course, but a whole new map. Along the way we get wounded and scarred and our emotional and spiritual lives become neglected if not altogether abandoned.  The healing that most of us require cannot be found in a bottle and is not available at any shelf at any pharmacy.  The healing we require takes far more effort than most of us are willing to give.  Deep and complete healing requires not a simple change of course but a new goal altogether; a new paradigm for understanding that we beautiful, complicated expressions of everything that has ever happened to us.  God knows this because it is God who made us this way.  To fight against this is to fight against God.  I like the way this truth was expressed in a song called, Mystify. For all you hard rock fans, the band is Saving Abel. The lyrics go like this:

Consuming moments just like these,
I'm being broken down on my knees.
It's getting clear, what do I see?
I feel your love reaching out for me.
Oh, mirror, it's so clear,
That I'll run and disappear.
Why am I running from the past,
With all the memories that couldn't last?
So when you peek into my soul,
Why do I run, when you make me whole?
Mirror, mirror on the wall:
Who's the biggest fool of all?
With no light, no sight, no eyes I see,
I can't help, I feel you reaching out for me.
You know you mystify me.
You bring a light to the life, I'm breathing.
You bring a light to the life, I'm living.

We all think we’re so individual, but that not how the world sees us. To the government, we just the people who make up the crowd, the voters, the constituents, the lobbyists, the special interest groups. To the corporate world, we’re a crowd of consumers; we buy the products and services and do our part to keep the economy ticking along. There’s nothing individual about it.  There’s a certain irony here if you think about it in terms of the image of rugged American individualism.  But to God and in God’s kingdom crowds are not crowds, but people in close proximity to one another, each retaining their own uniqueness; each loved and treasured not for what we have or have to offer, but simply for who we are. We are the necessity that changes a course.  Our hunger is the priority; our pain, our suffering that matters to God.

So what is your story?  What has happened to you? For what do your hunger?  

Tell your story. Claim your story. Then ask for what you need and it will be given to you.