August 3-- Feeding the Crowds (Instead of Turning and Running)

Passages: Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7, 15; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21

Life in the Boston area, I have discovered, always involves crowds—you just never seem to be able to escape them. My husband and I drove all the way to Salem a few nights ago for a quiet, relaxing seaside dinner. We made it through road closures, traffic snarls, and blocks of parking spot-less curbs, only to finally dine in a restaurant so loud that we could hardly hear one another speak. When I recently went to experience the meditative, peaceful environs that inspired Walden, I was shocked to find Walden Pond swarmed by hundreds of people crammed onto its tiny beaches, their voices drifting up in a dull roar that echoed through Thoreau’s hallowed woods. In Massachusetts, especially during the summer tourist season, it seems that the only path to true solitude leads to somewhere in upstate Maine.

So we folks from Massachusetts can feel some of Jesus’ pain when, in today’s gospel lectionary passage, he gets in his boat and sails off for some R&R, only to find that he just can’t escape those pesky crowds. Jesus has good reason to seek solitude—he has just heard the news of John the Baptist’s death, and John’s killer thinks that Jesus is a resurrected John (14:1-2). It is smart for Jesus to lie low for a few days.

But someone in Jesus’ camp isn’t good about keeping his itinerary secret. For just like Walden Pond’s beaches on a sunny Saturday afternoon, upon coming ashore Jesus sees the beach jammed with people from the nearby towns. If Jesus had been like you or me, he probably would have cruised a little further up the coast for a more secluded beach. This being Jesus, though, “he had compassion for them and cured their sick” (v. 14).

Yet Jesus has something more in mind for this crowd than simply a few healings. To understand what’s going on, it helps to take a step back and think about the role this story plays in Matthew’s larger narrative. Many scholars have pointed out that for Matthew, Jesus is a latter-day Moses, the new lawgiver (Moses is threatened at birth but miraculously escapes; Matthew’s Jesus is threatened at birth but miraculously escapes. Moses gives the children of Israel the Law on Mount Sinai; Matthew’s Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7). So when Jesus feeds the crowds twice in Matthew’s gospel—here in 14:13-21 and again in 15:29-39—there are echoes of Moses providing manna and quail to the Israelites on God’s behalf in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11. Jesus is to these people as Moses was to their ancestors, God’s miraculous messenger sent to lead them to the Promised Land.

But is Jesus really Moses here? Or is Jesus actually playing out the divine role in this little Exodus/Numbers parody? For when the disciples come to Jesus and ask him to send the crowds away, he doesn’t respond by telling everyone how God has promised to feed them, as Moses did. Instead, he tells the disciples, “You give them something to eat” (v. 16). When they offer all that they have, Jesus himself does the miraculous, transformative work that before had been reserved only for God. Here Matthew clearly states that Jesus is not simply a new Moses, but greater than Moses. Jesus not only speaks for God, but is the Son of God.

What about those disciples, then? The disciples, like Moses, are God’s servants to the people. They participate in the miracle, not only bringing the five loaves and two fish, but also distributing the meal to the crowds. The whole passage has a ritualistic, liturgical undertone to it—with all this blessing and breaking, giving and receiving, it sounds a lot like our own Eucharist services today. Jesus is inaugurating a new community to follow his teachings, a community where God amplifies our limited human tools to effectively serve the world. Jesus’ disciples find that with his help, they can in fact meet the needs of the crowds. They may not be new lawgivers, as Moses was, but they find that what they have to give is enough to do the job.

In these dog days of summer, when the needs of those around us threaten to swallow us like voices swallowed up in a crowded restaurant, remember Jesus feeding the five thousand. It isn’t just about the abundant feast that Jesus has put before us to nourish and sustain us on our personal journeys. For we are not only the crowds, but we are the disciples—called to offer grace and mercy to others as Christ has offered us grace and mercy. Our tools can seem woefully inadequate to the task. But through Christ’s transformative power, our lack becomes God’s abundance in us. Through Christ’s grace, we find sustenance for ourselves and strength to serve the world.

July 27-- God For Us

Passages: Genesis 29:15-28, Psalm 105:1-11, 45b, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:31-33, 42-52

Hello, those of you eagerly awaiting another segment of the Massachusetts Bible Society lectionary blog! As a newcomer to this blog, but not to MBS, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself before getting to the actual text for this week’s lectionary. I’m Kelsey Rice Bogdan, third year student at Harvard Divinity School and 2006-2007 MBS seminarian. I had the pleasure of working with MBS the year before Joe came on board, in the Society’s pre-blogging days. I was an avid blogger before the student life ate up all my time, though, so I’m excited to be back in the blogosphere. I also look forward to setting aside some time each week with you all to pause and reflect on a little snapshot of Scripture from the Revised Common Lectionary. I hope it will be a time for all of us to consider, be challenged, and grow together.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ... Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” --Romans 8:31, 35-39

Have you ever wondered why John Calvin, the great Protestant Reformer of the 16^th century, ever made such a big deal about the idea that God chose some people for salvation and others for destruction? After all, it isn’t such a warm, fuzzy doctrine, and a good chunk of Christians (even Presbyterians like me, who claim their religious heritage from Calvin’s teachings) don’t really buy into it today. But Calvin was very emphatic on the point, and today’s lectionary passage is a perfect example of why.

In Romans 8:26-39, being God’s “predestined” (v. 29) suggests that God is with you, God will take care of you, nothing can come between you and God. In Calvin’s day, it was a comforting thought to reflect that, though the French authorities might threaten to kill you for your faith, God would vindicate you in the end because you were a beloved, chosen child. In Paul’s own first century context, it must have been likewise reassuring to think that despite all the vulnerabilities that come from being poor (as the majority of those living under the Roman Empire were at the time) and a follower of a strange new Jewish sect, God was on your side. It is no coincidence that, whether they agree with Calvin’s take on who or what is “predestined” in this passage, Christians through time and space have clung to it to claim God’s stake in their cause.

And therein lies the danger, the key element that can make Paul’s words both a clarion call for justice and the all-too-easy weapon of the oppressor: God is for us. Too many times we gloss over this phrase in verse 31 and just assume that if God is “for us,” that means someone—the devil, that particularly nasty co-worker, corporate America, Iran—is against us. We then go on to scan the rest of the passage with a smile on our face, knowing that we can be assured that God will make us “more than conquerors” over all those people we’ve brought into our reading of the text.

When I look again at Romans 8:31 and 35-39, though, an important character is missing from our little scenario: all the people who are against us, all the people we are supposedly going to conquer. The Holy One who created all of us, who embraces all of us as a mother embraces the sometimes squirmy child, is ultimately for all of us. Jesus, who reached out to Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus, Matthew the tax collector and Martha the busy housewife, doesn’t have to pick and choose who to love. When we think of God as a God of abundance, rather than through our own frame of scarce, coveted resources, who indeed is excluded from God’s overflowing love to stand against us?

Perhaps this is why, through Christ, we can be more than conquerors. Through Christ, the text suggests, we can transcend the lens of limit and lack through which we see others. We can go beyond winners and losers, beyond the notion that my gain is your loss. That’s not to deny the brokenness that exists in the world—in verses 35 and 36, Paul acknowledges the realities of persecution, hunger, and war, some of which humans and human systems cause. But none of those things can alter the fact that the God who appeared among us did so because that God is for each and every one of us.

In the gospel Paul presents here, no one—no individual, group, or society—can lay claim to God’s special favor over another. For just as Jesus embraces all of creation in this troubled world, we are called to embrace all those who we might view as standing against us. What would it mean to look at the enemy, even one that perpetuates injustices we rightfully oppose, as someone whom God is ultimately for? Maybe that means revising our belief that an enemy is someone to be vanquished, conquered, bent to our will. Maybe that means seeing our opponents as God sees them—broken, flawed creatures like us, desperately in need of transformative love.