by CCW | 14 July 2013 14:39
Seven loaves of bread and a few small fishes. Compassion is dietary light, it might seem, perhaps a Gwyneth Paltrow special. Yet, the story of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness compels our attention. It is actually part of a kind of New Testament conundrum: there is the story of the feeding of the five thousand and the feeding of the four thousand almost juxtaposed, side by side. There are a host of intriguing differences which suggest some sort of larger design and purpose rather than incompetent mediocrity and forgetfulness, as if confused about a single event and how to tell it.
But without getting into the intricacies of comparing the accounts of Mark and Matthew in relation to Luke and John about these double miracles with differing figures – five thousand, four thousand, seven loafs, five loafs, seven baskets left over, twelve baskets left over, to mention a few – what does this story really signify?
I think it is captured in Mark’s succinct phrase. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. In a way, these remarkable stories are all about the compassion of Christ, the Son of God, in whom we learn the love of God for our wounded and broken humanity, even more, for our humanity in its disarray, our humanity lost and hungry in the wilderness.
The wilderness, after all, is a powerful image. It belongs to the rejection of creation as the good and ordered world of Paradise, the proverbial Garden of Eden where everything is simply there at hand, where a kind of harmony between Creator and Created exists and between God and Adam, our humanity. But only in accord with the principle of that good order – the God who creates for a purpose. The story of the Fall provides the fundamental Jewish, Christian and Islamic sense of wilderness, wilderness as the place of our wild wills in a kind of knowing rejection of God’s Word and will. “Did God say?” The serpent asks beguilingly about what God did say and so begins the slippery slope of equivocation and denial, so begins the experience of the wilderness as the place of exile from the garden of God, from the paradise of truth.
The paradox is even greater though. As the story of the Fall makes ever so clear, the consequences of the Fall are the beginning of our labour and learning, the beginning of redemption, the beginning of a greater joy discovered through the wilderness journeys of our lives. In a way, the Fall is not only downward into the dust and death of human suffering but also upward into the truth and mercy of God. “O felix culpa,” as the ancient theologians put, “O blessed fault.” Why? Because our disobedience, which lands us in the wilderness, provides testament to the power of the goodness and truth of God which is always greater than all and any and every evil. What God provides for us in the wilderness is always more than we can desire or deserve. He provides himself; the lamb for the offering, the bread of life, here signified for us in the body broken and the blood outpoured of the Holy Eucharist.
For these stories of the feeding of the five and the four thousand point us powerfully and symbolically to the nature of our lives in the wilderness and to God’s provision for us in the journey of our lives. We so easily forget that, especially in the market state, as some have described the contemporary economic and political scene, where we assume that the state and, by extension, God, exists (if at all) for our material well-being and economic prosperity. That is the way of despair and death, I am bound to say.
The compassion of Christ in the story of the feedings in the wilderness is really a kind of Babette’s feast, to make reference to a wonderful movie – an extravagant meal in the barrenness of the wilderness. What is that extravagance? Living from every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God, to recall the themes from the Jewish Scriptures which undergird these accounts. Manna from heaven, water from the stricken rock, and that rock was Christ. Learning through suffering, yes, but, even more, learning through the sacrifice of Christ which opens us out to the truth and power of God who alone makes good out of evil, even our evil.
Seven loaves and a few small fishes, and yet it is not just the multitude in the wilderness who are fed but all who yearn and seek after the truth and goodness of God; seven baskets are taken up, provisions for the further journey of our lives. Christ will name himself as the bread of life, a few small fishes will be the tokens of the truth of his resurrection in another story, and, for the early church, the Greek word for fish will become an acrostic signifying the truth of Christ, IXCTHUS – Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour. So much, we might say, from so little, but such is redemption; such is the journey of learning in the wilderness of human experience.
This year marks the 225th anniversary of the founding of King’s Collegiate School, now King’s-Edgehill. For those of you who are celebrating that remarkable milestone, you know something about the lessons learned in the wilderness of boarding schools. There was a time when the boys of KCS and the girls of Edgehill marched down to Christ Church on Sundays and sat on opposite sides of the Church, which didn’t prevent many “fair speechless messages” received from one another’s eyes, whether of love or mischief, I forbear to say. Not facebook but in your face, as it were, a bit like Job and Polly, children of Dobson’s Orphanage in Elizabeth Goudge’s splendid novel, The Dean’s Watch. “They could never speak but they looked at each other each Sunday”. Christ Church is part of the experience of your learning, part of being fed in the wilderness through education; a point further captured in the windows over the altar in the Chapel that emphasizes the Eucharistic theme.
What underlies the Gospel story is the powerful sense of being in the wilderness for a purpose, namely, being with the teacher, in this case, Jesus. It was not by accident that Bishop Charles Inglis, following the counsel of other loyalist divines in New York in 1784, deliberately located the School here in Windsor in 1788. A wilderness, yes, but a different kind of wilderness than the wildness of the naval port of Halifax, bawdy and bold, corrupt and corrupting, decadent and debauched, violent and wild. Some things, perhaps, haven’t changed! Yet, here in Windsor was a wilderness place of learning that would contribute to the building up of responsible leaders for a new culture. The leading idea is captured in the motto of the School, Deo Legi Regi Gregi, an education that contributes to public life and service; for God, for the Law, for the King and for the people. Wonderfully complemented in the Edgehill motto, fideliter, it is about our faithfulness to the principles that dignify and ennoble our humanity through our commitment to service and sacrifice.
The compassion of Christ actually provides so much more for us than what we realize.
One could suggest speculatively various ways of thinking about the symbolic significance of seven: the seven virtues of the soul, referring to the classical or cardinal virtues in conjunction with the theological virtues, or the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit, for instance. But Christ’s point about both feedings, the feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand, is about what he provides in the moment and for all time. It is ultimately about the Word of life from which we learn to live. “The free gift of God,” St. Paul reminds us, “is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
All because of the compassion of Christ. He cares for us and for our good. He provides for our growth and nurture, “nourish[ing] us with all goodness and of [his] great mercy keep[ing] us in the same,” as the Collect puts it. He is “the Lord of all power and might,” and “the author and giver of all good things.” Learn and live from him.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VII, 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/07/14/sermon-for-the-seventh-sunday-after-trinity-2/
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