17th Sunday in Ordinary Time: The Nature of the Miracle
Giovanni Lanfranco, “Miracle of the Bread and Fish” (1620-23)
If you can start the day without caffeine
If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles
If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it
If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment
If you can conquer tension without medical help
If you can relax without alcohol
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs
Then You Are Probably
The Family Dog
Problem is that people are often not like dogs – I will expand a bit later on what can be done about this
But thinking about the nature of the miracle (in all 4 gospels) – people did not u/s it but something happened and people knew that somehow God was present in this even if they did not understand – same as us! I know that there are any number of conversations or even debates to be had about what exactly happened with that crowd and that little boy’s lunch two thousand years ago. Did Jesus really break the laws of science as we know them, and multiply those loaves and fish? Or was the actual miracle the opening of hearts and the channeling of generosity, such that five thousand people decided, as a result of their encounter with Jesus, to share their precious food with each other?
We can’t know. For my part, I’m fine with believing that Jesus did something supernatural that human beings can’t explain. If the God who created the cosmos caused the content of one child’s lunchbox to become a feast for thousands, I can live with that.
In John’s gospel there follows the story of Jesus walking on the water, calming the terrified disciples and telling them not to be afraid – which was the greater terror the storm or Jesus walking 3 or 4 miles to them over the water and calming them? All these stories were “signs” of who Jesus was – people did not understand them. But rather they point to something. Something that Jesus goes on to elaborate in the remainder of the gospels. And this something was about the world and the nature of the world back 2000 years ago – a world not so very different from the world we live in now; but the world we live in now is also significantly different from the world back then.
I was struck by this in an email I received a day or two ago from the editor of the Guardian Australia a free online newspaper linked historically and internationally to the Guardian newspaper chain throughout the world. It is known as a left-liberal publication
Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen.
Its formation was linked to the Peterloo Massacre which took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. The “massacre” attests to the profound fears of the privileged classes of the imminence of violent Jacobin revolution in England in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. The revolt was against social injustice, working conditions and general impoverishment in industrialising Britain.
The email in about 800 words succinctly described the grim situation 200 years later of the world we live in. None of it I found surprising in the sense that I had heard it all before in bits and pieces, but it was written so starkly and in one piece that it raised for me questions I had been struggling with for some considerable time. The 800 words referred to the virus pandemic of course, more sinisterly the looming, even greater threat it would seem, of climate change and environmental degradation, and the apparent inability of democratic institutions to deal with these crises, compounded by people’s loss of trust in them. These questions are of course linked for me, and I guess for all of us as people of faith, to questions of where is God in all of this? how am I to respond? How can my faith as I understand it now, bring me hope? There are many others we could list too I expect- some universal generic questions, some particular to our own situation. That’s enough for now you may be pleased to hear me say and also that I am not going to try to answer them – there are many theologians throughout the world working away at this I expect. What follows is just a few reflections.
About the Guardian piece – it was a fundraiser, an appeal for people to give in response to the free articles that they can access – fair enough and I was moved by the context
The Guardian’s Australian Editor wrote: “As the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, wrote in an essay to mark the Guardian’s 200th anniversary in May: “Our mission is based on a moral conviction: that people long to understand the world they are in, and to create a better one. To use our clarity and imagination to build hope.” Putting any cynicism aside (there is too much of that in the world!) this is a noble aim and one that at the very least is a fellow-traveller with Christianity.
And so it is that Christianity needs to be the focus of my perspective and probably of yours too. And I think this perspective sharpens the focus of how we are to understand this, hopefully but not simplistically.
It has been remarked of the story of Jesus that the gospels are descriptions of what happened and the epistles tell us the meaning of what happened. So the miracle of the loaves and fish is a “sign” and indication that the people realised that God was at work among them, even if they did not “get” much else, even if they were only interested in filling their hungry stomachs. Jesus was often reluctant it seems to "perform" miracles and this is shown again here when at 6:27 Jesus says “do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to eternal life which the Son of Man will give you” and a splendid example of the meaning of this is found in the epistle reading this morning from Ephesians “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” Some very dog-like qualities there I think! but certainly an elaboration of part of the meaning of discipleship.
And the thing is that we do not have these qualities necessarily naturally but when we give ourselves to Jesus, we with the Holy Spirit can be transformed – we can become new creations. And then when this happens the question of who gets the bread and whether there is enough is totally reformed for hearts become generous, swords are beaten into ploughshares and lions lie down with lambs. This is the great gift Christ brings to the world, the message that is entrusted to the Church, the transformation of our own lives that brings hope to us and to others.
And this is our hope, and the hope for the world, just as it always has been, and the darkness has not put out the light. As St Augustine put it so beautifully, timelessly, in the 4th Century “The whole purpose of this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen”