May I speak to you in the name of the one, holy, and living God. Amen.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew records the miracle of the loaves and fish. From a mere five loaves of bread and two measly fish, a crowd of more than 5,000 people were fed. Not only were they fed; they were stuffed, and still there were twelve baskets of leftovers![1]
Whenever the number twelve pops up in Matthew’s Gospel, we should pay attention: twelve tribes of Israel; a twelve year-old girl is raised from the dead and a woman who was hemorrhaging for twelve years is healed; Jesus commissions twelve disciples; and, now, we have twelve baskets of leftovers. The number twelve is a symbol of wholeness or completeness; nothing and no one is left out. There is enough healing, enough power, enough food, for everybody!
The focus of this story is often on the miraculous feeding. But notice that healing is intertwined with feeding in this story. Jesus sees the great crowd and has compassion for them and cures their sick. Only later in the day, when his disciples call attention to the fact that it is getting late and the people are hungry, does the issue of feeding arise. The people are sick, but not just physically sick. They are hungry, but not just physically hungry. They are sick with grief. They are hungry for justice. The greatest miracle, it seems to me, is not that the people are cured and fed, but that they rediscover hope in the midst of despair.
We know that the crowd was sick with grief and hungry for justice, because they, and Jesus, had just heard that John the Baptist was executed by King Herod. In one of the more gruesome tales in the New Testament, we are told that Herod wanted to murder John for some time, because John was critical of his rule. Herod had John arrested and thrown in prison, but resisted executing him because he feared the reaction of the people; who, apparently, loved John more than Herod. But in a strange turn of events, while celebrating at his own birthday party, Herod decides to have John’s head presented on a platter to please his daughter and party guests. This was the level of decadence and corruption at which Herod’s regime operated.[2]
You can imagine the mix of anger and grief that the people were feeling. Jesus shared these feelings. When he hears the news about John’s murder, he goes off in a boat to a deserted place by himself. We are not told why he did this or what he did there, but we can imagine. Herod has heard reports about Jesus, and fears Jesus is another John the Baptist drawing crowds critical of his regime. Maybe Jesus thought he needed to lie low, go underground for a little while. Maybe he just need some alone time to pull himself together. I believe he needed to steal away to pray, to reconnect with the source of hope that overcomes despair, so that he could help the crowd process their grief and rage.
Jesus has reached a crucial point in his public ministry. He is successfully spreading his message of God’s kingdom, no doubt implying some contrasts with Herod’s kingdom, and drawing crowds. But opposition against Jesus is beginning to harden. The authorities spread stories about Jesus being a magician in league with evil.[3] Even the people in his hometown reject him.[4] Now John is dead, and Jesus is on Herod’s radar. Incited by Herod’s cruelty, the crowd following Jesus is on edge. What will happen next? How will Jesus respond.
The crowd is sick with grief and hungry for justice. I am sick with grief and hungry for justice. Aren’t you? Can you identify with the weight of sadness carried by the crowd around Jesus in the face of a regime too big to overthrow and too cruel to endure? We are nearly five months into this pandemic and more than 150,000 Americans are dead. In the past 14 months, Americans have filed 47 million unemployment claims. Actual unemployment may be as high as 23%, and the employment to population ration in the U.S. is 53%: just 53% of the working age population have a job, the lowest ratio since demobilization at the end of WWII.[5]
The COVID-19 pandemic coincides with a renewed outbreak of racism and state sponsored violence against those who dare to criticize the corruption, injustice, and plain incompetence of our government. We are at a “Herod serving John’s head on a platter” level of grotesquerie, overreach, and indifference to the suffering of the people our government is supposed to protect and serve. Crowds are gathering, people are afraid and angry. And beneath it all runs a deep river of sadness, fed by the many tributaries of personal and collective grief flowing into it. So much grief, and so much to grieve, in our families and schools and hospitals and churches. What will happen next? How will we respond?
I invite you to pause for a moment, and breathe, and acknowledge your tributary of grief feeding into our collective sense of loss. Maybe your tributary is just a trickle, seemingly small, but this isn’t about comparison or judgment. It is about acknowledging what is real. It is far easier to react with fear or anger or numbness; being willing to sit with our grief is much, much harder.
What are you grieving? I miss having some place to go to escape the relentless Richmond District fog. I miss the simple consolation of browsing the bookshelves of the Richmond Library or Green Apple Books; the quiet of sacred spaces devoted to literature and learning and the pleasure of discovering a good read. I grieve for my son, trying to launch what should be an exciting career as a performing artist at a time when there are no more audiences. I grieve for him, too, because of the challenges he faces as a black man in America navigating the reality of racism. I can’t protect him from the disappointments of life. Perhaps that is a grief that all parents feel when their child is 22, but COVID-19 exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness.
And, because I love you, I empathize with the grief that many of you are experiencing: the still fresh wound of the loss of a loved one. The loss of jobs and economic opportunity. Our shared sense of grief at the loss of civility and reason in our public discourse and of trust in our public institutions. All this is very real, and very much present in our hearts and minds.
Jesus’ first response to grief is to acknowledge it. He goes to a deserted place to rest in God’s love before the crowd comes to find him. The suffering and need and trouble of the world will always be there. The crowd will always find us. But we need to take the time to attend to our grief and place it before God. It is only in the presence of God’s healing love that the river of grief can become a river of life; no longer a flood that drowns us, but an ever-flowing stream that satiates our thirst for life.
Grounded in this love, Jesus is able to move among the people with compassion. His response to them is not one of pity, like that of a well-fed man seeing a starving child as from a distance. Jesus shares their gut-wrenching sense of grief.[6] He is able to come close to them in their suffering because he is in touch with his own. I imagine Jesus moving among the people, with a touch here, a gentle word there, inviting them to share their grief with each other so that it may become something that can be borne rather than buried. It is not hard to imagine for anyone who has ever witnessed the surprising joy and laughter at a wake.
Jesus invites us to do the same today. Grief, once shared, is transmuted by some mysterious spiritual alchemy into the bread and fish that nourish us. Jesus tells his disciples, and us, that we actually have the power we need to strengthen and support each other in the healing of grief and the struggle for justice. We have the resources, the bread and fish, that we need if we are willing to share them. COVID1-19 has revealed once again how profoundly we are bound together by our shared vulnerability, our shared grief, and our shared power. When we accept this deep and beautiful connection, we discover a communion in love that provides more than enough healing, enough power, and enough food for everybody. Most importantly, we discover a sense of hope, the possibility of a future that is not simply a repetition of suffering but an opening of new life.
Our resilience as the people of God is grounded in our
capacity to find hope together. Optimism is rational and evidence-based,
whereas hope is an act of courage and imagination that looks beyond what the
existing circumstances tell us we can expect.
When we look at the extent of suffering in the world, optimism is never
really an option. If optimism were all
that is available to us, despair would triumph.
“But hope is
something else, you see,” Dr. Cornel West reminds us, “because hope is not
spectatorial. It’s participatory. You’re already in the mess. You’re in the
funk. What are you going to do? Hope is a verb as much as a virtue. Hope is as
much a consequence of your action as it is a source of your action . . . So
that hope is something that you find in your immersion.”[7]
Our immersion
in the river of grief can become a baptism into the river of life. What will happen next? How will we respond? Hope rides on how we, together, chose to
respond.
Jesus walked
into a despairing crowd that could have easily become an angry mob, and invited
them to become a community, a communion, in love. That is the Church’s mission. That is our mission. We are the bearers of hope in the world, not
because we are in denial about the temptation to despair, but because we see
through it and beyond it to the life in community that never gives up and never
ends because God’s love never ends.
[1] Matthew 14:13-21.
[2] Matthew 14:1-12/
[3] Matthew 9:34.
[4] Matthew 13:54-58.
[5] Allana Akhtar, “Just over half of Americans have a job right now,” Business Insider (June 29, 2020) accessed at https://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-americans-have-a-job-coronavirus-2020-6.
[6] D. Mark Davis, “A Gut-Wrenching Gathering,” Left Behind and Loving It (July 30, 2017) accessed at https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-gut-wrenching-gathering.html.
[7] Sigal Samuel, “Why Cornel West is hopeful (but not optimistic),” VOX (July 29, 2020) accessed at https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/29/21340730/cornel-west-coronavirus-racism-way-through-podcast
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