"Take, Bless, Break, Give."

Matthew 14:13-21

August 6, 2017

I.

Just before the story we are going to look at, we hear about King Herod’s ghastly, murderous, lecherous, debauched banquet.  You know, the one where he gathers all the wealthy and powerful people in the kingdom for a sumptuous party and feast, has his step-daughter do a sexy dance, after which he is so aroused and impressed that he blurts out how he will reward her with anything she wishes.  So she demands the severed head of her mother’s nemesis, John the Baptizer, imprisoned in a dungeon below, on a platter.  And Herod has to do it just to save face with all these important people.  That banquet.

That’s what Jesus heard about, which causes him to go off in a boat by himself to this and pray.  John the Baptizer is his cousin (according to Luke) and probably his teacher and mentor.  John is the one who recognizes, validates, and facilitates Jesus’ calling at his baptism.  With John gone, perhaps Jesus feels that the torch is passed to him now.  Which means he has the responsibility to continue this ministry on his own… and also that now he gets to be Herod’s target as rabble-rousing trouble-maker.

Jesus proceeds to present a very different kind of banquet among the common people on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee.  What we see represented in these 2 meals is a contrast between 2 diametrically opposed economies.  One was based on wealth, power, violence, licentiousness, gluttony, lust, greed, fear, and hatred.  The other is about sharing, simplicity, community, generosity, and love.  One was an assembly of the elite; people who had earned invitations to the king’s glamorous table, who had grasped their high positions by the standard means of cut-throat deals, by having success in military, political, or business matters, and whose bellies were full of the fruit of the hard labor of poor and working people.  The other gathers poor and working people themselves, over 5000 of them, who manage to produce between them for dinner 5 discs of pita bread and 2 dried fish.

My favorite part of the parable is when the disciples come up with a conventional market-based solution and recommend that Jesus send the people to the local villages to buy food from vendors.  Perhaps the shop-owners had heard there all these people out on the hillside who needed dinner and were already baking bread and raising prices in anticipation.  Supply and demand, you know. 

But Jesus rejects that approach.  Market-based solutions get us Herod’s banquet: a sumptuous feast for a few, and everyone else left with almost nothing, and no other obvious option than to buy from the same system that created the imbalance in the first place.  The whole economy was explicitly designed to funnel wealth from the people actually doing the work to people they have already made rich.  

Jesus wants no part of it.  It’s an anticipation of his throwing the merchants out of the Temple, in chapter 21, when he gets to Jerusalem.  He says to the disciples, “Forget the markets.  You give them something to eat.  Figure it out.  What do you think we’ve been doing for 13 chapters?  Is my mission just a hobby, a verbal exercise, an arcane philosophical conversation, but when people need something real you send them to the store to buy it with Caesar’s money?  Seriously?”

II.

This story is one of the few that appears in all four gospels.  In two gospels it actually happens twice.  In John it is a major turning point where Jesus explains the centrality of the eucharist, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  This story of feeding hungry people with almost nothing is the single most characteristic story about Jesus and his ministry.  It is the one act of Jesus that the disciples and the early church find it necessary to remember and repeat at least every week when they gather for worship: in his name and following his example we still take, bless, break, and give bread to each other.  It is the act in which we most clearly recognize him with, within, and among us.  It is the essence of Christian worship and discipleship.  It is constitutive of his gathered community.

In none of the stories, including this version, do we find out what actually happens.  We don’t know exactly what Jesus does or how he does it.  It’s like there’s this huge gap between verse 19 and verse 20.  It feels like a page is missing or something.  No matter how closely you follow it, you get to the point where, okay, he gives the pieces of bread and fish to this crowd of thousands… and the next thing we hear is, “all ate and were filled.”  There are 12 baskets of leftovers, for heaven’s sake!  How does this happen?  

It’s hard even to visualize.  Movie-makers have used different strategies for depicting this, usually involving deep baskets so you can’t see the loaves actually multiplying, but people who reach in keep finding food.  There was a secular-rationalist theory that what really happened was that the people actually had more food with them and they were inspired to share with each other.  Or there was the more common supernaturalist affirmation that the bread was materialized from thin air, reminiscent of similar miracles done by some ancient prophets.

These interpretations are fine, as far as they go, I suppose… or not.  Both are distractions that miss the point.  The text pointedly and stubbornly refuses to explain it, which means that so should we.  Often, whenever there is some key point missing in the gospel narrative, it is you, the listener, who has to provide the answer.  You are the crucible where the transformation happens. Jesus is not to be explained, but followed.  

And we follow Jesus by rejecting ideologies of scarcity, giving thanks for what we do have, then breaking it to share with others.  We begin, not with the convenient and debilitating lie that there just isn’t enough to go around, and that the best we can do is institutionalize greed and hope for the best, a practice that inevitably leaves some with too much and most with too little.  No.  We begin with the good news that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” that God created this planet as a place of miraculous abundance, with more than enough for everyone to take, bless, break, and share together.

The real mystery here is not what Jesus does.  He’s participating in God’s truth.  The real mystery is why we continually choose the model of Herod’s gaudy, bloody banquet as the essence of economic efficiency, and dismiss Jesus’ hillside communal meal as a naive, unrealistic fantasy.

III.

The methodology Jesus uses here with the bread is simple: take, bless, break, and give.  Jesus uses the same words at the Last Supper in chapter 26, as he does in all the other gospels.  Paul uses the same words in 1 Corinthians 11, explaining the Sacrament.  We use the same words every time we celebrate Holy Communion.  It’s one of the few requirements in the Presbyterian Directory for Worship.  Take, bless, break, and give is Jesus,’ and therefore our, MO.  

When he says “take,” he does not mean grab, steal, or extract.  It is more like receiving something freely given.  There is a difference in attitude between selfishly taking and consuming, as if the world were a private entitlement for us to do with as we please, and humbly receiving something with thanksgiving.  Bread itself already involves the taking of land, grain, labor, water, leaven, and fuel.  Bread is not natural, it is manufactured. We take it from the earth by a labor-intensive, communal process.  When we receive bread we are also receiving the work of many, many people organized in a system of production.  

The taking is defined by the gratitude implied in blessing.  The Lord gives thanks to God, not just for these 5 loaves, but for all that went into these five loaves.  Gratitude changes everything by turning the focus away from yourself and towards the others who provide for us.  Jesus takes the bread in humility, awe, and wonder, not just because bread is itself a miracle of human ingenuity and organization, but because some in that crowd contribute what little they have to the common good.

In Herod’s banquet, the attendees would have given thanks out of a kind of forced regime of obligation and indebtedness that bound people to each other under Roman rule.  They would have given thanks to Herod, who paid for the feast, and to Caesar, whom Herod paid to be king.  But they would not have thanked God, and they certainly would not have thanked the countless workers, peasants, and servants from whose land and through whose labor the food actually came.  That would be ridiculous.

Jesus does not idolize or worship the bread of course.  In fact, he proceeds to break it.  This breaking is not destroying or wasting, but a refusal to own, keep, hoard, store, save, maintain, or preserve it.  He does not take it all for himself, with no thought for anyone else.  Jesus breaks the bread for the sake of sharing and distribution.  Bread only does good when it is spread around.

Finally, Jesus gives the pieces of the bread and the fish to the people, empowering them to take, bless, break, and give to others.  Giving completes and renews the circle of generosity and blessing.  So in contrast to the artificial, centralized, pyramidal system of distribution from the top down that prevailed at Herod’s banquet, Jesus’ banquet is flat, networked, spread out, egalitarian, and free.  Everyone is giving thanks for and to each other and God.

IV.

This is what Jesus’ economy looks like.  This is his understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven.  It starts with gratitude and ends with generosity.  It is a communal process of mutual nourishing.  It receives, blesses, breaks, and gives away to all.

This cannot be done from an egocentric, selfish, acquisitional perspective.  It cannot be about stealing and hoarding and protecting to keep goods for you and yours alone, disregarding the truth that we are given everything by God’s grace in creation, and maintaining instead the self-serving lie that we are each “self-made” by our own “hard work,” and that people who have less are inherently undeserving and lazy, which was the attitude of our ancestors who came to this land, and continues to characterize our economy based on the kind of lewd greed and sour competition we see in Herod’s feast.

The Lord gives us the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as the model and pattern of his economy.  What begins with the bread and the cup in this room, is extended into the world as we who are fed here all continually receive, give thanks for, break, and share what God gives to us.  Whether it be wisdom and insight, acceptance and forgiveness, joy and peace, or the daily bread mentioned in his most characteristic prayer.  It is all about the self-giving love exemplified by the Lord Jesus to feed the world.

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