Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, 2nd August 2020

Matthew 14:13-21 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=463368596

When I saw that the Gospel reading for today was the story of the feeding of the 5000, my first reaction was to be very pleased. Everybody knows that story, and there are lots of things that you can say, that it illustrates, about Jesus and his teaching. It’s in all the gospels, but in St Matthew’s version, which Gail has just read for us, we have the least detailed version. For example it does not talk, as some of the other gospels do, about Jesus getting the people to sit down in groups of 50. 100 groups of 50 people – that really brings home the scale of the feeding problem.

There are lots of things that you can talk about. Bishop Jo, in her sermon for today, which you can see on YouTube, (see https://youtu.be/EqGmtC-Rlio) concentrates on Jesus’ order to the people to sit down. She spends quite a lot of time on the theology of sitting down, and also how to tell people how to sit down. Apparently when she and her husband Sam Wells were working in the United States, at Duke University in North Carolina, he got taken to task for saying to people, ‘Please sit down’, which apparently is not sufficiently polite. In the southern States the correct thing to say is, ‘You may sit down’. Sitting down and taking it easy for a moment has its benefits.

And then again, you can make a lot out of Jesus looking up to heaven, blessing and breaking the loaves of bread, (and, presumably, doing something similar with the fish), and then distributing them; it certainly could remind you of Holy Communion, and perhaps is supposed to be a sign that Jesus was pointing forward, towards that sacrament.

We use the expression ‘to break bread together’ as a shorthand for having a meal, and I have heard preachers deliver long and abstruse analyses of the menu on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that day; that Jesus was handing out fish and chips, or rather, not literally fish and chips, but the Palestinian equivalent.

It’s interesting that there has been some fuss on social media recently because Mr Rees-Mogg, the MP, has a sister, who rejoices in the name of Annunziata, who has been giving advice to poor people about the virtues of making their own chips as opposed to buying them ready-made. It doesn’t touch on the question whether poor people, or indeed any people, should be eating chips, especially these days, in the light of the Prime Minister‘s campaign for the people to lose weight.

As some of you know, two weeks ago I ceased to be the general manager of Cobham Area Foodbank, after seven years, right back to the foundation of the Foodbank. I still have a tendency to see things relevant to food banks in all sorts of different contexts.

So obviously, Jesus feeding the 5000, in fact feeding them with something that Burger King used to refer to as a Fish King, a piece of fish in a burger bun, (or anyway wrapped in bread) – which was much loved by my children when they were little – that reminds me of all those times when I had to answer questions about what food people should donate to the food bank.

A Fish King from Burger King

What do poor people eat? Well, I would explain that the Foodbank gives out a nutritionally balanced parcel intended to sustain a family until the next time that the Foodbank opens. In our case this was one week. It is not the case that we just provide pasta and beans and other cheap things, because, as I tried to explain, the Foodbank clients, poor people who can’t afford to buy food, are human beings.

They are not a special breed of people who only live on pasta and beans. They are human beings just like you and me. So the real answer to the question, ‘What shall I give to the Foodbank?’ is not what’s cheap, but rather, “What would you like to eat?” And what would you think would be good to eat and nutritious? You don’t live on baked beans all the time – or at least I really hope that you don’t – and it’s the same with food bank clients. They need a variety of things. They need protein, even if it comes in tins.

Well I could have gone into great detail about that, and compared Annunziata Rees-Mogg’s recommended diet for poor people with what a food bank actually provides, noting on the way that Jesus followed the same principles as our Foodbank. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ – because, He provided some fish as well.

But the thing is that I bet that none of you actually think of this story as being just about all those rather abstruse points. Indeed I get a bit fed up when I hear sermons which don’t deal with the obvious things which I think leap out of stories in the Bible.

The obvious thing, that you would notice when you read it for the first time, is that Jesus somehow managed to feed 5000 people – or actually more than 5000 people, because it says that it was 5000 men, plus women and children – with five loaves of bread and two fish. How on earth could He do that?

I can’t honestly remember what my Mum or my Dad said in answer to that question when I first asked it when I was little, but I bet you that it had something to do with miracles. Miraculum, a Latin word – something to admire, something the be astonished at. Are we allowed to talk about miracles, or are we too grown-up? Do you believe in miracles?

When I went to Rome in October for the canonisation of John Henry Newman, I was reminded that Newman was only allowed to become a saint in the Roman Catholic Church when they had discovered and verified two miracles that he had performed, miracles of healing. Many people today do still believe in miracles. They believe in what Saint Athanasius or Saint Thomas Aquinas argued, that miracles are there to demonstrate that Jesus was not just a man like you or me, but he was also God and he had divine powers.

It’s not all straightforward. Think of Jesus being tempted in the desert, to jump down from the pinnacle of the temple for example. Satan wanted him to do all sorts of miraculous things which only someone with divine powers would be able to do. But he didn’t do it. But Jesus does go around healing people. Indeed, in this story it begins by Jesus ‘having compassion’ on the crowd and healing some people who were sick. No details. It’s just very simply said, in one word, ‘he healed’.

People say that scientific knowledge has pushed out the need for us to explain things by talking about God. CS Lewis however wrote a whole book, ‘Miracles’, against what he called the ‘naturalistic’ as opposed to the ‘supernatural’, the more-than-natural. Laws of nature, by themselves, don’t explain everything: that if nature governs everything, there is a contradiction at the heart of it. That is, who created nature? Was that creator subject to the laws of nature?

So over against that is the argument that there is more to it than what we can discover by scientific enquiry. More to it – let’s say, that ‘more’ is God. We can fairly uncontroversially define God as the ultimate creator and sustainer of life, all powerful and all knowing. Present everywhere: omnipresent.

But he could be what Richard Dawkins calls the blind watchmaker, the ultimate creator, who set the mechanism of the world in being, and then let it get on by itself. We as Christians bring up against that things such as the feeding of the 5000. We bring up the fact of Jesus Christ. The fact that Jesus Christ lived and died, in the early years of the first century of the Common Era, is very well attested in conventional history.

We can argue that the story of Jesus would not still be so well-known today and it would not be the case that the Christian religion would be growing so strongly as it is (you have to remember that growth in South America and the Far East is far greater than in the north of Europe) – Christianity would not indeed be the fastest growing religion in the world, if Jesus Christ had been just an ordinary human like you or me.

So the point of this sermon, in case you had not realised, is that the feeding of the 5000 is a miracle, and as a miracle it is a sign of God at work in Jesus.

So in a way I hope that you don’t have a Fish King from Burger King for lunch; but if you do, please do remember that a forerunner of the Fish King was Jesus’ favoured menu.