If you attended the ‘National Emergency Briefing’ film that was shown here on Friday evening, you will have heard, among many other worrying statistics, a warning about the risks that climate change poses to food security not only globally but also here in the UK, where we are – compared to many parts of the world – blessed with a temperate climate and fertile land. We learned that three of the five worst cereal harvests ever recorded in England have been recorded in the last decade, following periods of extreme weather. And this matters because it drives the price of food up, leads to shortages, and drives those who are already struggling ever closer to poverty, to reliance on food banks, and to hunger.
And this matters, too, because to live with food insecurity is to live a life that is insecure, unstable, disadvantaged across the board. Food is, we can all agree, not a luxury but a necessity. The American politician and diplomat, Adlai Stevenson, in a speech he gave in Minnesota in 1952, went so far as to claim that ‘a hungry man is not a free man’. If you are struggling to feed yourself or your family, that struggle will be a factor in every choice you make, every aspect of your life.
And this is something that the crowds following Jesus must have known well. Not all of them will have been poverty-stricken, of course, but many of them will have been people living simple lives, dependent on what the environment could provide: fishermen, farmers, shepherds. Think of the parables that Jesus told, some of which we have heard over the last few weeks. These are intended to be stories that his listeners could relate to, stories that would make sense of their lives in relation to God and God’s provision for them. They are stories about seed that either grows and produces a rich harvest, or fails to thrive, eaten by birds, blighted by poor soil, choked by weeds. They are stories about day labourers, waiting in the marketplace for work which may or may not materialise; about corrupt stewards; about a man waking his neighbour up in the middle of the night to beg for bread; about a party to which – against all social norms and expectations – the poor, the disabled, the homeless and dispossessed are invited. If Jesus is drawing on the lives and situations of his listeners, we can only assume that his listeners were not, on the whole, people for whom life was easy.
And is not this also the implication of the story that we have in our Gospel reading today?
Jesus, at the beginning of this reading, just wants to be left alone. But wherever he goes crowds follow him. And their needs trump his own. He cannot ignore them. Driven by compassion, he heals the sick people who are brought to him. But then, as night draws in, he realises that the crowds need something even more fundamental than healing; they need food.
The disciples’ proposed solution to this problem is one that signally lacks the compassion that had driven Jesus to engage with the crowds in the first place: send them away to fend for themselves. It is not so much a solution as a diversionary technique, a way of making the crowd’s hunger someone else’s problem, of removing it to a place where they – the disciples – did not need to see it. But turning a blind eye was never Jesus’s way. ‘You give them something to eat’, he says… and now the crowd’s problem is the disciples’ problem too.
And it would be easy to say, ‘Ah, but Jesus knew all along that he could and would feed the crowds; that he held the miraculous solution in his hands’. But read the passage carefully. Jesus challenges his disciples to find food for the crowds… and they do find it. Five loaves and two fish. Certainly not enough to feed five thousand men, and probably at least as many women and children again. But not nothing. Jesus does not, in this story, miraculously produce food from thin air. He takes what the disciples bring to him, and from their offering he feeds the whole crowd.
This is a story about generosity. It is, for sure, a story about the generosity of God. God provides not just enough to feed the crowds, but more – much more – than they need; not a few meagre scraps to stave off their immediate hunger pangs, but enough so that all could eat their fill and twelve baskets of leftovers could be gathered up afterwards. But in this story, God’s generosity begins with the generosity of those who provided the bread and fish in the first place. And, although we are not told what happens to the baskets of leftovers, I wonder whether they too might have been used generously, taken out by those who had given so reticently at first and used to feed others in their turn.
Of course, like so many of the stories about Jesus which have come down to us, this is a story that works on more than one level, pointing both backwards and forwards.
The deserted place where the five thousand are fed cannot but recall the wilderness in which the people of Israel had wandered following their escape from slavery in Egypt. They too had been hungry – so hungry that they had even begun to lament their enslavement, when they had at least been fed, when they had had cucumbers and melons! They know the truth of the saying that a hungry man is not a free man. But in that desert too God provides, raining down manna from heaven, the food of their freedom.
The crowd fed by Jesus would have known this story well… well enough, perhaps, to notice the subtle, but significant, difference between God’s feeding of their ancestors and Jesus’s provision for them. For the manna that God provided to the Israelites in the wilderness was only ever just enough to satisfy the people’s needs. Indeed, those who tried to gather more than they needed found the excess gone bad and full of worms. Whereas today’s Gospel reveals how, in Jesus, God is doing a new thing, a bigger thing, providing not just enough for a select group of ‘chosen’ people, but in abundance for all people everywhere. Yes, even for us… For if the feeding of the five thousand recalls the Exodus, Jesus’s actions here also point us forward… forward to the end of the story of Jesus’s earthly ministry, but also even further forward, right up to our own time.
Notice what Jesus does in our Gospel reading when his disciples bring him bread and fish. First he prays, looking up to heaven, giving thanks to his heavenly Father for what he is about to do, for what he is about to provide. Then he blesses the loaves. Next he breaks them. And finally he shares the bread with his disciples and the rest of the crowd. This is exactly what he will do on the night before he dies, at the Last Supper, when he will break bread and share it with his disciples, inviting them to take and eat it in remembrance of him.
And shortly, I – and please don’t underestimate the immensity of the privilege that it is for me to do this – will take bread. The bread will be ordinary bread, provided by you, Jesus’s disciples here and now. There is a reason why the bread and wine that we use for communion is brought up, during our offertory hymn, by members of the congregation. You are playing the part of the disciples in this story; we all give what we can, our loaves and fish, and we trust God to do extraordinary things with them.
I will take bread. Then I will pray. Having given thanks to God and recalled the Last Supper, I will bless the bread, asking the Holy Spirit to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary: the body and blood of Jesus himself. Then I will break the bread. And finally we will share it. And, as we share it, this bread will set us free. It will set us free from the sins that make us blind to the needs of those around us, free from the selfishness which, even when we do notice the needs of others, nudges us to prioritise our own hunger over theirs, free from the sense of powerlessness that we can feel in the face of gloomy statistics about the state of the world. The bread that we receive will set us free to share what we have, knowing that what we have received is not ours alone, but is given for us and for many.
The bread that we share today is taken – indirectly – from those twelve baskets of leftovers. The bread that we share today is a sign of God’s abundant generosity that is for all people, everywhere. At the end of our service today, as we do every time we meet, we will hear the words ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’. When you hear those words today, I would like you to imagine Jesus passing you a basket of bread. What will you do with it? Who will you share it with? How will you use it to make a difference in the world in Jesus’ name?