The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin’s Church
August 3, 2008
Proper 13 A
“You give them something to eat.”
That’s what he says to me. “You give them something to eat.” And then he turns away from us and gave all his attention to the little girl with the festering arm they’d brought to him.
Great. You give them something to eat – out here in this wilderness – nothing around us but rocks and grass and sheep, and I know he won’t let us butcher one of those for an evening meal – and even a sheep wouldn’t be enough to feed this crowd.
I hate it when he says things like that. “You give them something to eat.”
Well, excuse me, Jesus – but in case you haven’t noticed, YOU’RE the one that does the miracles. I mean, it’s not us all these crowds keep coming to see. These folks aren’t bringing their sick babies, or poor crazy uncle Eli to see us. They bring them to you, and you heal them – you make them well. And then some more come – and you make them well – and then they go back to their villages and bring a couple dozen more poor sick folks to see you – and all of a sudden there are thousands here, out here in the middle of nowhere.
And all you wanted was a place to be by yourself for awhile. The news about John hit you hard – he was your cousin, and some of the people who’d followed him turned to you when John said, you were the one we’d been waiting for. John did a lot of work getting people ready for you – but John never knew when to stop.
Still, we never thought Herod would kill him. Herod was giving John a little palace hospitality down in the dungeons – just giving John a chance to think about what a mistake it was to go around preaching that Herod and his new wife, who used to be his sister-in-law, were living in sin. Herod doesn’t like that kind of thing. But we all thought Herod would let John chill for a month or two and then let him out – like he always does.
We heard it was a bad business – there was a banquet, and Herod’s step-daughter, who I guess was also his niece, danced – and I don’t think she did one of those little girl dances, and Herod got so hot and bothered he said, in front of all his guests, that he’d give her whatever she wanted. And she said, “Bring me the head of John the Baptist.”
That’s a terrible thing to hear about your cousin – and when Jesus got the news, he just turned away and started walking up into the hills.
He does that a lot. And it always means he wants to go somewhere quiet, somewhere he can be alone to pray. And it’s getting harder and harder for him, because they follow him everywhere. He’ll go higher and farther up into the hills, and there they are – climbing up behind him, dragging their sick on litters, carrying feverish babies in their arms, leading the simple-minded by the hand – everyone following him, higher and higher up – until finally he realizes it’s no use, and he turns around and – how does he do it? – he smiles at them and reaches down to pick up that first runny-nosed, stinking child.
So here we are – way up on this hillside, not a village in sight, with what must be thousands of people. Oh – and it’s late – the shadows are getting long and the day’s heat is starting to cool. It’ll be dark and freezing out here before these people could be fed – if we had anything to feed them.
You give them something to eat.
Well – he can’t mean that! Yes – we packed a little bit of food for the day – but it’s barely enough for the twelve of us. I think there’s only five of those flat loaves the women bake on stones in the village, and two scrawny dried fish. And we walked MILES today. There were only be a few mouthfuls between us all…so what could five loaves and two fish do in this enormous crowd?
You give them something to eat. He doesn’t turn back around to us, and I know he means it. So – we look at each other, and my brother Andrew shrugs – it won’t hurt us to go hungry one night, and maybe – if we offer up what we have, a few other people will share – who knows?
The little girl’s arm seems whole and sound again – her mother, not much more than a child herself, throws herself at Jesus’ feet, kissing them and weeping, she’s so grateful. That little girl must be all she has. There are no men with them – is she a widow? So young. And so poor- the two of them are just in rags really. If they stay here at the edge of the crowd near us, I’ll make sure they get at least some of the bread – before everyone starts pushing forward, snatching it of our hands.
“This is what we’ve got,” I say to Jesus – showing him the bread and the fish wrapped in a cloth.
He gives me one of those looks but this time I don’t have to look away. “Really. It’s all we’ve got.”
And then he smiles. How does he do that? “It’s enough,” he laughs, “Get them to sit down.”
So he sends us back out into the crowd. You can feel how worried they are – it comes out of them in waves – and at first they won’t sit down. A few of them near the front have seen that little bit of food, and they’d beat their own grandmother into the ground to get something to eat.
We fan out into the crowd. I’m a pretty big guy, and usually, people do what I ask them to. I don’t know to get the crowd to pay attention the way Jesus does – he never raises his voice, he never threatens or makes a fuss – all he has to do is get quiet – and then everyone around him gets quiet, too. He can command without ever saying a word, or lifting a hand. It’s the strangest thing.
So – I sort of have to shove a few people down – just a little hand on their shoulder. And I can feel how thin they are – and when you get this close, you can see that they’re tired, and they’re sick, and some of them don’t even lift their heads up any more. They just sit on the grass, waiting for something to happen – they don’t know how to do anything else but wait.
I keep moving deeper into the crowd – and I just can’t stay angry the way I was. There are so many! Jesus will never be able to help so many – and who else will ever care about them? Rome doesn’t care – our own high priests don’t care. This crowd would just be nameless rabble to Rome and Jerusalem. But I see their faces – I see their bodies – bent and broken from hard work and not enough to eat - I see how sad and defeated and exhausted they are.
Something stirs in the crowd, and I turn around to look back up the hill at Jesus. He’s standing with the sun behind him, so I can’t really see very clearly, but I do see him take up one of the loaves of bread, and he lifts up his hand – it looks like a blessing – and then he breaks the bread, and he turns to give it to the woman sitting next to him.
A man tries to push past me, to get up the hill to the food, and I – help him reconsider the idea. When I get a chance to look back up at Jesus, I can’t see him anymore, but I do see ripples of movement through the crowd – they aren’t snatching – they’re passing, they’re handing food to their neighbors and then turning back for more.
And more keeps coming. Plenty more. I mean plenty.
And the bread isn’t flat – the stuff we pack to travel with. These loaves are full, and soft and light and they seem still warm from the oven. And the fish are fresh – smelling of the charcoal fire and herbs stuffed under the skin. It’s moist and delicious and there’s so much.
Now the crowd is laughing, and talking to each other and a few children are running around and the babies are nestling into their mother’s arms, with full, round bellies. I realize there’s so much food, that it’s going to be wasted – no one can eat as much as has been provided. So – I start to gather it up. Half eaten loaves, a fish here and there – and I can see some of the others doing the same thing. We have baskets full of extra food – and as the sun begins to set, we haul them all back up to the top of the hill.
Jesus is alone at last. He’s sitting with his back against one of the rocks, his arms around his knees, and his head sunk down on his crossed arms. I don’t know if he’s resting or praying, but I leave him alone.
It’s a shame to let all the food go to waste. The young widow with the little girl is still sitting on the ground – the child is in her lap, her thumb in her mouth, not quite ready to go to sleep, but close. I reach into one of the baskets and pull out two almost whole loaves of that beautiful bread, and a fish that still smells as fresh as if it just came off the fire. I find the cloth I’d wrapped around the loaves and fishes I brought out this morning, and now I wrap it around this food that has come from I don’t know where.
I hand the bundle to the little girl and she cradles it against herself as if it were the most precious thing in the world – and to them, I guess it is. And then I lay my hand, for just a minute, on the top of the mother’s head. I don’t know why – I know I’m not Jesus – I know there’s nothing special in my touch – but I want her to know that whatever Jesus can give me, then I want her to have, too. I want them all to have it. Whatever it is.
Then the moment’s gone and both mother and child settle down to sleep and I head back to where our group has kindled a little fire and is spreading out cloaks. Jesus is still sitting in the same place, but now his head has turned toward the fire and as I come up and join the group – he smiles at me.
You give them something to eat.
|
