Today’s gospel is the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand, one of the few Jesus stories that makes it into all four gospels. Here’s the section in my new book A Year of Faith and Philosophy that addresses this miracle.
The Ordinary Time 10 Year A and B gospel is one of Jesus’ most famous miracles: the feeding of the five thousand. This miracle is reported in all four of the canonical gospels which, for once, pretty much agree on the details. As is the case with all miracles, we are presented with a straightforward story of something happening that simply could not have happened. Simone Weil once wrote that “the stories of miracles complicate everything.” She’s right. Ever since my youth I have asked “What are we supposed to do with such stories, especially since we don’t see people raised from the dead or storms dispersed by a voice command today? Did these things really happen? If so, why don’t they happen now?”
I once heard a Benedictine priest give a homily on the feeding of the five thousand. He struggled mightily with the very notion that so many people could be fed with five loaves and two fishes from a kid’s picnic basket. After setting things up eloquently and paying proper attention to Jesus’ compassion for the crowd of hungry people, he hit a wall with the miracle itself. “We modern persons have a difficult time with the stories of Jesus’ miracles,” he said, “since what they describe violates the laws of nature.” Accordingly, the homilist did what most of us do when faced with such an apparent violation—he provided alternative interpretations of the story in which such a violation did not occur.
It is possible, for instance, unless Jesus was dealing with a crowd of fools that day, that the little boy was not the only person among the thousands in attendance smart enough to have brought along something to eat. The “miracle” is not that a tiny amount of food was increased to feed thousands, but rather that the boy’s innocent generosity sparked similar generosity in others. Those who had intended to hoard their carefully packed lunches for themselves were suddenly motivated, either through inspiration or shame, to share with others around them.
And then perhaps a further “miracle” occurred, in that many realized that they didn’t really need all the food they had brought—five loaves and two fishes are more than one person can eat, right? So as a spirit of generosity spreads through the crowd, gluttony takes a big hit. If each person eats only what they need and shares the remainder, everyone has enough. An impromptu community is built on the spot, everyone learns to share with others as well as to stop eating too much, and no laws of nature are violated.
Why was the homilist, and why are we, always inclined to explain a miracle away, to bring it within the confines of what we believe we know and can explain? This is partly a failure of humility, an insistence that we are the center of the universe and that, as Protagoras infamously claimed, we humans are “the measure of all things.” But we aren’t. We are subject to the laws of nature, but they are neither defined by nor limited to our experience and understanding. Hamlet tells his friend Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”
Still, our dogged attempts to explain (or explain away) everything smells more like fear than lack of humility. What better way to carve a home out of a reality far beyond our control than to define it in terms of what we can control? And while humility is the antidote for hubris, the cure for fear is wonder. Fear turns us inward; wonder turns us outward, toward the infinitely fascinating reality in which we find ourselves. And ultimately, wonder turns us toward God, who crosses the vast distance between divine and human by infusing everything, including us, with transcendence. This is the miracle of incarnation, that God inhabits everything, that we are living sacraments, testimonies to divine love.
Thomas Jefferson once published an edition of the gospels with all the miracles taken out, resulting in a very brief book. A daily existence from which miracles have been removed is similarly impoverished. A good friend of mine who passed away a few years ago defined a miracle as “something that everyone says will never, ever, ever happen and it happens anyways.” And that covers just about everything, from individual acts of generosity, through impromptu human solidarity, to feeding thousands with a kid’s lunch. Remember that, according to Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The earth is charged with the grandeur of God.” We need only learn to see it with the eyes of wonder and humility.
For reflection: Marilynne Robinson writes that “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.” If we are surrounded by miracles, how can we practice seeing them?
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