NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 18 in Ordinary Time Year A

Greetings, my sisters and brothers, for this the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Before we get to the Gospel, just a little fill-in from what happened after last time. Remember last Sunday, Jesus finished teaching the crowds in parables. And strangely, that's going to be his last public teaching. From here on he will perform signs, as we will see. He'll have teaching with his disciples. He'll have teaching in parables with the authorities in the Temple. He'll engage with various people he comes across. But his major teaching of the people by word is over. Now we move to the phase by sign. And in Matthew's account, a couple of things happen after he's finished this. First, he goes to Nazareth and is rejected there. The account which comes at the very beginning of Luke's account of his ministry happens in the middle of his ministry here — yet another sign of the incomprehension which his teaching provokes. And then there is the account of the death of John the Baptist. We think that this is probably much more significant than we think, because it was clear that Jesus had a very high regard for his cousin John the Baptist and understood him to be a very important part of the ushering in of the kingdom of heaven. So here he gets the news, at the beginning of chapter 14, of the death of John the Baptist — that John the Baptist has been executed vilely. So when we come to the beginning of our Gospel, one of the first things he does: "He withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself" — not even with the disciples. So there's clearly a time of mourning, of rethinking, of wondering what it might mean. "But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns." In other words, the excitement of the sign — of what might be meant by John, what might be meant by Jesus — was enough to keep the crowd in constant activity. And here the crowd isn't a lynch mob; it's just a crowd. It's a gentle reality. They follow him on foot from the towns. So when he comes ashore, "he sees a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick." Well, this is the beginning of the acting out of signs. He'd already performed many other signs, but here there's something deliberate. qualities of the Symmetra. It's as though he'd been waiting for the news of John the Baptist to begin this particular set of Symmetras, and in this first one he's going to reenact Moses feeding the people the manna and quails in the desert. And this is how it happens. "When it was evening, the disciples came and said to him, 'This is a deserted place and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.' Jesus said to them, 'They will not go away; you give them some food.' They replied, 'We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.' He said, 'Bring them here to me.'" This is clearly a reference to the little discussion which Moses has with God before God actually provides abundant food. Basically Moses challenges him to put up or shut up, and he puts up. So here Jesus is putting up. What does he have? He has five loaves, and of course the people of the time would have recognized the significance of that. The five loaves are the Torah, the teaching. And two fish. Why fish, apart from the fact that he lives by the lake? Well, in the case of Moses, the food that was provided apart from manna was quails — at least it's quails in the book of Exodus. The book of Numbers adds something rather surprising: it says that a great wind drove up quails from the sea and brought them to the people in the land. So actually Jewish commentators from before had wondered whether these were in fact quails, since quails don't live in the sea, or whether they were in fact flying fish. So this, to me, is one of the great mysteries of biblical exegesis, which I call the fish-are-quails theory of exegesis. But we'll leave that as it may be. Clearly a mosaic sign is at work here. And so Jesus orders the crowd to sit down on the grass. He has them in a peaceful place, he has them reclining, and then "taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowd." In other words, this is a very peaceful gathering; the crowd here is ordered, it's not tumultuous, it's not under pressure. And all ate and were filled. And again here is the difference with the mosaic story. In the Moses story, the quails come, people can't get enough of them, they fill up all their baskets with excess numbers of quails and eat them for long, and the result is that you get very sick and die. Here a number of people die of excess quail eating. But here there is no excess eating. Everyone is satisfied, and there's a huge amount of fragments left over. The fragments are collected up in twelve baskets, giving a sign obviously of the twelve tribes of Israel that have been fed by the real Moses — the one who has come to put right what Moses was never quite able to get right. We'll see that compared a little bit later. Jesus walks across the sea, either like Moses, or across the Jordan like Joshua. And then we'll get another feeding, but this time with the numbers indicating Gentiles. So what's going on here? Well, the first thing of course is you're faced with people in a place of hunger, people who are hungry for a sign, people who hadn't really understood Jesus's teaching in parables. He enacts a sign. He's not only generous in healing the sick, but he acts the sign of Moses, saying, "Yep, I am the one who is going to bring to fulfilment what Moses was unable to do." Because of that, he does show the abundance — the utter abundance of God, nothing held back. And the passage, the prophetic passage that's being fulfilled, is exactly the one which we have in our first reading. When we actually get the first passage right, here it is: "Everyone — ho, everyone who thirsts — come to the waters. And they that have no money, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price." This is the definition of the word: something for nothing, something out of nothing, pure abundance, something that we rely upon. But there's something that goes along with this in the Isaiah passage. It's not only "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, or labour 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 hear." This is a continuous element of Jesus's teaching. "…not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." So every activity becomes a sign of a much richer listening. Are we going to be able to find ourselves not satisfied with physical feeding alone, but beginning to allow ourselves to be satisfied by the sheer abundance and generosity of God — by, if you like, a changing of our mind that comes through listening, such that we're able to rest peacefully with each other and with God? This, of course, will later become a prophecy of the Eucharist, and that's how it will be understood over time. But for the moment it's this extraordinary sense of there being a richness in the teaching that is even greater than the abundance of the food, and that this is even more than what Moses was able to do. Now, people are concerned about whether miracles really happen, whether fish are really multiplied, whether loaves are really multiplied. To be honest, I have little difficulty believing this, because I understand that the eruption of signs in our midst is always bigger than anything that is simply a fact that can be measured. So I have no idea what actually happened, but that everyone came away satisfied, and that they were fed, and that a huge number of baskets were left over, and people began to understand something about who this was who was initiating the bringing into being of Israel beyond what Moses had promised. And that this was very much within Jewish expectations, with groups of 5,000 listening, and the five loaves, and the 12 baskets left over. And this was understood at the time as being something a bit different from the next feeding, which was with 4,000 and with seven baskets — the baskets of the numbers of the nations. Those were understood, at least at the time of Joshua, to be hostile nations. But here Jesus is actually putting right the relationship between the Jewish people and the nations, showing how both Moses and Joshua are, if you like, being corrected, being fulfilled. And at the bottom of all this there is an abyssal love, a longing for us in our precariousness, in our weakness, a longing for us to receive a fullness — a fullness that is both physical and of understanding, of heart — such that we can learn to rejoice and discover ourselves the loved children of God, who, as Paul says, nothing can separate us from. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.