Jesus is Enough

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"There is no need for them to go away; you give them something to eat."

-- Matthew 14:16

Our readings of Matthew’s gospel now bring us from the things Jesus said to the things Jesus did. Chapter 13 is a chapter of parables, chapter 14 a chapter of miracles. It is worth reflecting on this difference between things said and things done, between words and deeds, before we interpret the miracle of the feeding  of the multitude itself. Of course at one level everything is words because we are reading accounts of the deeds not experiencing them directly, nevertheless there is a clear difference between a story like the “Parable of the Sower” and the account of Jesus’ feeding of five thousand men, and untold women and children. The former is intended to be a fictional story that teaches us while the latter is meant to be a factual report that informs us. The former tells us what we should do, the latter what Jesus did; the former tells us what we should believe, and the latter tells us why we should believe it; the former tells us what he wants, and the latter who he is.

Many of us balk at the claim that a miracle story is a true report and prefer to treat it in the same way as we treat a parable, as a fictional story designed to teach. This tendency is particularly pronounced among liberal Protestants like us for whom the great claim of the gospel of John that “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory (John 1:14) should read, “The Word became words and was discussed among us ad infinitum without ever commanding a consensus.” Our practice of faith therefore is a matter of opinions and insights, preachments and poems that educate, inform, even move us, but do not necessarily change us, a matter of words not events, stories not miracles.

We should not make this distinction between words and deeds too sharp, however, because in a special sense words can be deeds, and I do think that Jesus meant his parables and other sayings to be at least opportunities for change when we really listen to them. They are like commands. For instance, when we say, “Stop that!” to a child, or the sign says, “Stop,” words are commanding deeds, and in the latter case at least, mostly succeeding. “Stop” is a word that causes braking and looking and waiting. Even though it is not the activity itself, the word “Stop” is an integral part of the activity, and in that sense, not merely a fiction that teaches, or an account that informs, but a command that causes action. The Bible is full of such commands – “Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself,” for instance – and full of accounts of what happened when people did not obey them, – much like what happens when one fails to stop at a stop sign, a wreck. Nevertheless, even if it cannot be too sharply marked there is a difference between words and deeds, and the miracle stories make that point. They assure us that God in Christ will not only tell us wonderful things but also do wonderful things for us.

I remember going on a backpacking trip to the High Sierras with a group of Stanford students. We arrived at the trailhead when it was already dark, set up the tents and then turned our minds to cooking dinner. We had a great pile of chicken bits to cook but no one knew what to do with them. So we held a seminar and discussed what was the best way to cook the chicken pieces, and then having come to a conclusion we all got up and walked away. We reached an understanding of what needed to be done, but nobody was able or willing to do it. I recall cooking my own bit of chicken by holding it over the flames on the pitiful end of a stick, and eating it virtually raw. Discussion but no action, a plan but no follow-through; that is a caricature of course but every caricature has a foot or two in reality. The miracle stories inform us of what Jesus did once in order to assure us that he can do it again, and that he will not walk away leaving us with theory only. We should expect him to act! The miracles assure us that God is a God who acts as well as a God who commands and gives understanding. 

The miracle of the feeding of the multitude is the event in which Jesus fed thousands of people with five loaves of bread and two fish, leaving 12 baskets of leftovers. The story as we have it has been molded and embellished by the oral tradition that carried it for the thirty or so years before it was written down, and so we can only conjecture what the factual core might be. Here are examples of what I have called molding and embellishing: the description of Jesus’ action, “…he took, he blessed, he broke, and he gave…” (vs. 19) recalls the ritual of the Eucharist;  the saying, ‘They don’t need to go away; you feed them,” (vs.16) recalls the later situation of the church when the apostles have to take up the responsibility of the spiritual feeding of the church; the way the food is passed from Jesus to the disciples to the people suggests the bishop and the priestly intermediaries; and the 12 baskets of leftovers recall the twelve tribes of traditional Israel. So we could reconstruct a full ecclesiastical warrant out of this passage, for the Bishop as celebrant at the Eucharist representing Christ himself when he takes, blesses, breaks, and gives the bread to the priests or presbyters to distribute to the people, and the twelve baskets as a sign that God is saving some of spiritual food of Christ for the twelve tribes of the Jews who will all eventually accept him. So much for the embellishments, which are in the nature of  what we call allegory.

When we try to imagine what the factual core of this miracle story might be we have difficulty. It is relatively easy to accept that Jesus healed people in ways that were so wonderful to the onlookers that they called them miracles. It is easy because we are aware how strange and subjective human suffering and healing are, how much there is that escapes our understanding but not our observation. We have just learned for instance that arthroscopic knee surgery makes no objective difference; those who actually had it and those who only believed they had had it reported identical results. All were helped equally, but only for a time. This is the famous placebo effect, which alerts us to the possibility that non-physical, essentially subjective, factors are integral to health and sickness, and thus points us to the possible power to heal of the pure love that Jesus showed.  Love is after all a subjective emotion. So it is relatively easy to accept the possibility of healing miracles, but very difficult to accept the literal truth of a nature miracle.

In the present case we have such a miracle, worked on nature not humanity, so there can be no question of a subjective dimension in which something like a placebo effect could take place. (Jesus’ walking on the water is the other well-known instance of a nature miracle in the gospels, and in Matthew it follows our present story immediately). It seems rather that the power that in the hands of Jesus heals us human beings is the same power that in his hands augments nature, the power of the perfect, divine love. So Jesus’ healing miracles are not like the placebo effect at all, but the result of the working of the divine creative power, the same love that made the whole world, natural and human. The relation between the natural and the human, the objective and the subjective is much more subtle than we yet understand. All miracles are acts of God who intervenes in His own creation for His own special purposes, and the power of that intervention is something we know as the divine love. Therefore, I am prepared to allow that there is a dimension to the relationship between God and His creation that we do not understand, and that when God and the creation meet in the divine-human hands of Jesus, at the point where the hands touch the bread, a process of creative multiplication might take place. The creator extends the creation for His own special purpose at this special time.

What is that special purpose? It is to teach and to demonstrate something absolutely essential, namely, that the creative power of God works through Jesus Christ to recreate the world, and that the world is much more than human subjectivity. Jesus is the point of contact with the perfect love that once created the world and now recreates it. Through his hands the power of the new creation streams to the bread of the Eucharist, and into our bodies. As the Apostle says, “Whenever anyone comes to be in Christ, there is the New Creation! Old things have passed away; behold, everything has become new (2 Corinthians 5:17)! What shall we say to that?  That it is impossible? But nothing is impossible with God!

Let me end with my text, “They need not go away; you feed them!”  Here Jesus tells us that we can do miracles if we take from his hands and pass the power of divine love on to others. We are intermediaries; we take the creative love of God and give it to those who are out in the desert without food and shelter because they seek Jesus.  We do not need to send them away because Jesus is enough. Here is the point: the miracle attests that Jesus is the bread of life, that his hands are the place where we are recreated.  Our miracle says what  everything in the NT ultimately says, that  “Jesus is the one, Jesus is enough, take, eat what his hands give, and he will make you new!”