Jesus Feeds the Multitude

Homily for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B Cycle)

The first reading for today’s liturgy is the last of four stories about the prophet Elisha, the successor of Elijah. Years ago, this little story from the Elisha cycle was not widely known, but it has become quite important in recent New Testament scholarship because it provides the literary prototype of the miraculous feedings in the Gospels. The pattern of the feeding narratives is largely the same following five steps: (1) food is brought to the man of God; (2) the amount of the food is specified; (3) it is objected that the quantity is inadequate; (4) behaving as master of the situation, the man of God ignores the objection and commands that the food be distributed; (5) the crowd not only have enough to eat but there is some left over.

Today this story is used to complement a story from St. John’s Gospel. Every three years, the Church uses five Sundays in late summer to consider chapter six of St. John’s Gospel which contains the Discourse on the Bread of Life and begins with the feeding of the multitude story. (This year August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin) falls on a Sunday which means that we will miss the fourth of these five installments.)

Elisha’s servant and the apostles Philip and Andrew fill the role of objecting to the idea of distributing what little they have among so many. “What good is so little among so many?” They fear that if they share what they have that no one will have enough. Yet both Elisha and Jesus persist in their insistence that there will be enough if they share what little they have with the others. I think it would be fair to say that these objections are familiar to most of us, even among consecrated religious. As an older friar once joked with me as the two of us made our way to the dining room, “We need to get there before the greedy ones do.” I even remember a meal in our own dining room here at St. Francis Woods when we were asked not to take two portions from the buffet line until we were sure that everyone got at least one. While most people concentrate on the miracle wrought by Jesus, it seems their concern was much more mundane.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Gospel story is the boy who had enough prudence to pack some food before he went into the wilderness to hear Jesus speak. Apparently this little boy was not worried about whether he would get any of the lunch he had packed and had alerted Philip and Andrew to the fact that he had some food. The same can be said of the man from Baal-shalishah in the Elisha story. Bishop Desmond Tutu, in an address to a Student Christian Movement gathering in North Carolina, pointed out that “the divine miracle requires the thoroughly inadequate human contribution,” adding a pithy saying from St. Augustine: ‘We without God cannot; God without us will not.’” The boy did not have much, but what he had, he brought to Jesus. What Jesus did with it was so amazing that it is remembered after two millennia.

Of course, we cannot overlook that the actions of Jesus in this instance are similar to what he does at the Last Supper. He takes the bread, gives thanks, and distributes the loaves. All four Gospels report this sequential action, but only John uses the verb eucharisteo, the Greek verb for “give thanks.” John’s Gospel does not include the institution narrative that is used by the synoptic Gospels in reporting the actions of the Last Supper before Jesus’ death, but in the discourse that follows this episode, Jesus himself identifies this feeding miracle in sacramental terms. It is this discourse which will occupy our attention for the next few Sundays.

As we gather today, we would do well to reflect on the providence of God, the many gifts with which we have been blessed. While we tend to think of our possessions only in terms of what we have earned by our personal industry, it must be remembered that all we have is really a gift from God, a gift that is the product of an accident of birth and country of origin. As St. Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Ephesians, in baptism we became a member of one body and one spirit, with one Lord, one faith, and one God and Father of us all. He calls us to live a life worthy of the calling we have received from Jesus, a life in solidarity with all of our brothers and sisters, with particular concern for those who have far less than we do.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator