Isaiah 55:1-5
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
Romans 9:1-5
I am speaking the truth in Christ - I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit - I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
Matthew 14
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew in a boat, alone, to a lonely place. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. And going, he saw the great multitude, he felt compassion on them and cured their sick. Now, when night came, the disciples came to him and said, “this is a lonely place, and the hour has gone; dismiss the crowds, so that going into the villages they can buy food for themselves.” But Jesus said, “It is not necessary for them to leave; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We only have here five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he commanded the crowds to sit down in the pasture, and taking up the five loaves and two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke and gave the bread to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate their fill. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And the men who ate were five thousand, besides women and children.
Sermon:
When a story seems too familiar, I try to find in it the thing that bothers me. So this morning, the thing that bothers me is the disciples. Jesus has gone away by himself, the crowds and the disciples follow him, he cures them of their diseases, the sun starts going down, and the disciples sort of get... what, annoyed? I don’t know what tone of voice they use with Jesus when they say what they say, but I would be annoyed at this point. Jesus has cured the sick who were brought to him while he was grieving the death of John the Baptist, and the disciples, maybe with good intention, to protect the time of their Rabbi, remind Jesus that it’s getting late and it is now time to send the crowds away so they can get food for themselves. It’s a bit of an “am I my brothers’ keeper?” moment. These crowds came to get something from Jesus, they got it, now let’s send them away and finally get that peace and quiet.
But Jesus isn’t finished with them. It’s not just about the curing of disease.
There’s this thing, in lots of cultures, ancient and modern, near and far away, this thing about breaking bread with other people. It builds community. It gives people time to be with one another, to be aware of one another, to consider that they all have the same basic need for survival. It was part of what got Jesus in so much trouble, this eating with the quote-unquote “wrong” people. Pharisees, tax collectors, women, Gentiles... Jesus broke bread with a lot of folks, righteous and unrighteous, self-righteous and hopeless. He shared the same source of sustenance with us, no matter our background. Which was about as close as people could get to one another.
It was this exact closeness that Paul laments in his letter to the Romans, in today’s portion of that letter especially. Jesus shared a common history, common ancestry, common tradition and scripture and worship, with the people of Israel who were killing each other over their reading of just who he was. They were disowning each other on account of him, which is not something terribly surprising to us, given human history, but painful, nonetheless. And Paul grieved for this break in the family, this splintering of his own people whom he loved so dearly, from whom came the Messiah himself in the first place!
But in today’s Gospel we see not just a filling of bellies, not just an abundance of food for the hungry thousands, but a foretaste of the feast to come.
Jesus could have cured the sick who came to him as though they were on assembly line. Could have gone bing, bang, boom, and then sent them all away. But there was more to their brokenness, more to their illness, and to ours, than just physical or mental ailment. Jesus cured their sickness, in the Greek it’s a word pronounced ‘therepeu-o,’ where we get the word therapy. But the real salvation, the more complete restoration, came in their eating together.
There is an ancient prayerbook, the earliest record of Christian liturgy, that comes from the late first century, maybe the early second, that’s somewhere around one or two generations after Jesus first walked on earth. It includes a general shape of how worship takes place, what happens in what order, including a prayer at the Eucharist which is still used in many, many churches today: “As grains of wheat once scattered on a hill were gathered into one to become our bread, so may all your people from all the ends of earth be gathered into one in you.”
See, when those crowds came to Jesus with their sick, like lost sheep without a shepherd, Jesus had compassion on them. They were not problems to be solved. They were not issues to be dealt with. They themselves were not illnesses to be taken care of. They were his own people. His own flock. His own gathered body, there in that wilderness with him. They had followed him for healing and he gave them both that and community, both wholeness as individuals and wholeness as a community. Not only wholeness, but overflowing abundance of good, for sharing with those who had not been there gathered with them. Twelve baskets full of leftover bread. Twelve baskets for the twelve broken and scattered tribes of Israel who were to be restored in him.
Paul, writing to the Romans, had not seen that restoration in its fullness, and he grieved deeply over it. No one has yet seen it come to fruition. Certainly it seems these days that if there are even fragments of Israel left over after the violence in the Holy Land they won’t be easily bandaged and healed.
And it’s not a world easily bandaged and healed. Not easily put back together again. Not simply restored and done. The twelve disciples were part of Jesus’ work of feeding those thousands of hungry people, just as we are part of that work today in our own ways. But the real restoration, where Jesus thanks God and breaks himself open for the life of the world, is painful and difficult and deadly, and carried on the back of him who had such compassion on the crowds. The real feast is yet to come, when Jesus will gather together all of the people from all of the ends of the earth, into his own body, which has carried all of our pain. The Gospel lesson this morning is a hint of who this Jesus is, a taste of what sort of God has called and gathered us here.
Blessed and broken, the Body of Christ is given to us, is living among us, is abounding in steadfast for us. And all who thirst are welcome.
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