John 6:1-21, from Proper 12 (17).
Read in its entirety, the story of the “Feeding of the Five Thousand” could be more aptly named the story of the “Ditching of the Five Thousand.”
The story begins with a wondrous occurrence. Jesus replicated one of the prophet Elisha’s most famous miracles (See 2 Kings 4:42-44, one of this week’s other readings) and even kicked it up a notch, feeding more people than Elisha had, and with less food to begin with than what had been available to Elisha. Jesus even matched the leftovers exactly to the needs of his disciples. Twelve baskets for 12 men. Bravo, Jesus! Way to put it straight through the uprights!
But the wonder would quickly fade. The multitude that went to sleep feeling full and loved that night would wake up hungry and abandoned the next morning. And it would happen not because they had strayed off somewhere, like carelessly errant sheep. It would happen because Jesus had intentionally given them the slip.
As night approached, Jesus directed his disciples to sail away without him (I’m borrowing, here, from Mark’s version) in full view of the crowd, leaving Jesus with no obvious means of getting back across the lake. Jesus then withdrew alone to the mountains and, after dark and apparently unobserved, set out across the water on foot, leaving the crowd unaware of his departure. When the people awoke the next day, there was no bread, no fish and, bewilderingly, no Jesus.
Reverence might keep you and me from asking why, fellow Christian, but critics of faith in God certainly don’t avoid the question.
“I’d say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?” British actor and author Stephen Fry famously replied when asked what he would say to God if God, contrary to Fry’s expectations, turned out to be real. “How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?”
And while you might be unwilling to ask such a question as boldly as Fry, have you not asked it secretly, at least a time or two? Haven’t there been times when God has shown up in a big way for you during one crisis, only to be inexplicably absent during the next one? And even if you’re having a perfectly fine life, with plenty of everything you need and even a little of what you want without needing, you’re surely aware that many, many others aren’t so fortunate as you. Why would a good, all-powerful God feed, clothe, shelter and protect some people some of the time, but never all people all of the time?
It’s too soon in the story to answer the second half of that question, and I can’t promise you’ll find the answer that is coming all that satisfactory. Fry has heard the answer, surely, and it seems not to have impressed him in the slightest.
But Mark has already given us the answer to the first half of the question. “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd,” Mark wrote, “he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” It seems that, at least some of the time, God meets our needs because he simply can’t help himself. He loves us, and when we suffer, he suffers, too. Any half-decent parent knows the agony of seeing his or her child in want or pain, even when both are inescapably necessary. God knows that agony for every human being who ever was, is, or will be.
Grieving the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis initially described his attempts to find comfort in God as having a door slammed in his face, “and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” But in time, his sense of the experience changed.
“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer,” Lewis wrote later. “But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’”
In the morning, the crowd will awaken hungry on a remote shore with no Jesus in sight. A morning is coming when you will, too, assuming it hasn’t arrived already. But God will see you there. And having felt, through Jesus, what you will be feeling, he will understand, and he will look upon you with compassion. For now, that’s the best I can offer you. More is coming, but be warned. It may not feel like enough.
