I hope you all had a nice breakfast this morning because I don’t want you salivating during my reflection. Because I am going to talk about eating. Eating is something we do naturally even without being taught! When I wake up in the morning, the prospect of a beautiful piece of toast is wonderful, something to look forward to.
Charles Dickens writes about eating in a much more extravagant vein. I think we all have heard or read his long story A Christmas Carol and how Ebenezer Scrooge is changed by the visits of three Christmas Spirits that review his own past, present, and future. Here’s how Mr. Dickens describes the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Present in Scrooge’s miserly house:
[S]uch a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrifaction of a hearth had never known . . . for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry . . . great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense . . . cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.
Later on in the same section of the story, Dickens turns to the family of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s oppressed and underpaid clerk. He describes the Cratchit family’s much more modest table, but one saturated with the love of those seated round it:
There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family: indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last!
Now consider this — our Bible begins with eating. In Genesis, God gives to us through Adam every plant yielding seeds and every tree with fruit with a seed specifically for food. And he gives every green plant for food to all the beasts with the breath of life. (Genesis 1:29-30) Later on, we learn that God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also. (Genesis 2:9)
To me it seems that food and eating were therefore creations and that God endowed us or paired us with eating. I suppose it didn’t have to be that way, but God created Eating.
And the Bible also ends with eating. On almost the last page, the fulfillment, the beautification, sanctification, and salvation of creation is described in the New Jerusalem, the new Heaven, the new Earth. And there is our old friend The Tree of Life. Now, this tree bears twelve harvests of different fruits, one harvest per month. And how does this fruit fit in? It is what was given to us when eating was created, as Genesis narrates. (Revelation 21;22:2)
It seems that Jesus ate a lot too. He ate with with tax collectors and sinners. And it was a big deal. (Matthew 9:10-11) In one of my favorite passages, he calls to Zacchaeus up in the sycamore tree to come down so he can stay at his house. (Luke 19:1-10) After the Resurrection, when he appeared to the apostles on the beach while they were fishing, he cooked a meal of fish for them on a fire of coals. And this was after he advised them to dip their net on the other side of the boat, and then it came up bursting. (John 21)
So, with all this food and eating background around us, let’s look at one of the great eating stories of all time — the miracle of eating that is in today’s Gospel passage of the feeding of the five thousand. Or maybe we should call it the miracle of “five thousand people eating together.” Actually — this is a footnote — it’s more than five thousand: Matthew makes it clear that he counted only the men and not the women and children. (Matthew 14:21) So maybe the number was more like seven thousand or even more. Go figure.
This miracle, this story, was so important and meaningful to the Evangelists that it has two versions in Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 14:13 and 15:32) and two versions in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 6:30 and 8:1). It appears in Luke. (Luke 9:10) And it even amazingly appears in John’s Gospel which doesn’t quite follow the pattern or style of the other Gospels. (John 6:1) Altogether, the mass feeding of either the five thousand or the four thousand appears six times in the four Gospels.
In this miracle, Jesus takes a little of what we have and creates more and more and more and more out of nothing. Creation from nothing is what God did in Genesis. Jesus’ miracle of creating out of nothing does takes place after the great Creation of Genesis, but it points to the same end — that is, to eating. Jesus’ miracle is looking ahead to the new creation and the new Jerusalem and the tree of life there. It is a way-station or, better, a sign that we are on the way to a new Eden. God’s kindness and the opportunity for all of us to get to the new Eden are signaled in this miracle and in the immense love that the Trinity lives out in Jesus’ passion.
In other words, the miracle is about salvation. It is not a miracle to teach us what to do to follow the Gospel. It is a miracle about the realization of what something is. That is, it is a revelation. It points us to what salvation actually is, not how we get there. It points to the final ends of our faith. What are those ends? Well, we can’t entirely describe them. But we can say that, in our terms, it is like eating together in harmony, like the abundance and cheer to which the Dickens’ Spirit of Christmas Present points, like the love of the Cratchit family Christmas table, like the feeding of the five thousand or, really, the many thousand. The promise or image of salvation is what happened to these people. Imagine their surprise, their delight, and their pleasure. Imagine the laughter. Imagine the noise!
Every time we sit down to eat, we sit down with Our Lord. We can be alone or in noisy, even raucous, company. It is the creation of eating that knots us together. And eating prefigures salvation. No wonder Tiny Tim said, “God Bless Us Everyone.” So, no matter how good your breakfast was today, we should each be sure to go to coffee hour today!
Amen and Thank you.
