Whom do we feed?
In the Second Book of Kings, the prophet
Elisha is faced with a crisis: famine
has afflicted the land and the people of Israel are starving. So when a
man comes from Baal-shalishah bearing twenty
barley loaves, Elisha doesn’t keep them for himself, though it is his right
as temple prophet to do so. Instead, he
instructs his servant to give the
loaves to the people to eat. Now, generally speaking, twenty loaves might
barely stretch far enough to feed a
hundred people, and yet when they
have eaten, there is some left over, an observation that points to God’s
abundant providence in their lives. The
story confirms the dictum of Psalm 145: The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers
all our needs. But the psalmist realizes
that God feeds God’s people with more than tangible food: God also gifts them with justice, holiness
and truth.
When, in John’s Gospel, Jesus feeds over five thousand people with five barley loaves and two fishes, he
too is feeding them with tangible food, to be sure, and in generous abundance,
abundance far exceeding that witnessed in Elisha’s time. But Jesus is about so much more than the
tangible; he is, as the gospel will reveal over time, the Bread of Life, food
for body and for spirit. The crowds in
this story are not ready to understand this truth yet, although they recognize
Jesus as the Prophet who is to come into
the world. They do recognize the
abundance of food Jesus provides; they are not as quick to recognize the
abundance of grace he embodies, or the sacrifice he will undertake for their
sake.
After Jesus’ death on the cross, Paul reminds
the Ephesians that they too, as the Body of Christ, must carry on in generous
abundance, bearing with one another
through love, coming together in community to meet each other’s needs. If the
hand of the Lord does indeed feed us,
we, like the Ephesians, must in turn feed the world as Jesus fed it, not in
tangible ways only, but in the Lord’s way, feeding hearts, feeding souls, with all humility and gentleness and patience, sharing the love that is our hope.
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