The Feeding of the Multitude: beyond our human inadequacy to our human priesthood

Just as in the Baptism of Jesus we learned that to be human means that we are beloved, the feeding of the multitude offers to us the truth that to be human, we are priest.  

Imagine yourself Jesus, this carpenter’s son from a hick town near Jerusalem looking at the crowd who, despite your efforts to get away from them, has followed you.  There are maybe 15 THOUSAND of them, men and women, some of them with kids.  Imagine that it all started with caring about one person, touching them gently, looking into their eyes and touching them with the love and sympathy that welled up inside you, flowed out from you as naturally as the tears from the normally quiescent wells just behind your eyes. 

I can touch this ONE, you’d thought.  And when that one worn man seemed to unwither at your touch, like a brown plant grown somehow green again, you’d though it pretty neat, to have happened to have touched him just as he’d somehow come out of whatever had been wrong.  It couldn’t have been you….

And now here you are, after that one becoming two, and those four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two…fifteen thousand.  You find your eyes looking at the ground, trying to find there some escape from what is facing you.  But their eyes call to yours, and soon you are looking into theirs.  They are, it strikes you, all different, and yet so like the eyes of that first withered man.  But now the wells behind your eyes seem to have been drained, and you are too tired to stop your brain from considering the time of day and the distance from the nearest town, and you hear your own voice say to your companions, “How can we feed them?”  Before they even hear your spoken words, you hear their unspoken echo. “How can I possibly feed all these people?  Oh, my GOD!”

If you’re with me, if you’ve been able to imagine with me coming to this point of logical, valid sense of our inadequacy, we can look together at what choice is held out to us.  We can choose the paralysis of inadequacy or we can take the next step toward our own humanity.  We can decide to accept the priestly function to which we are all called as humans. 

I believe that just as in the Baptism of Jesus we learned that to be human means that we are beloved, this feeding of the multitude offers to us the truth that to be human, we are priest. 

We return to the story, facing our own inadequacy.  We are in the moment of mental math aware that we are not equal to the task.  It is too great for us, beyond our logical capability.  And so we ride on the cloud of the story, watching what happens next.  Jesus looks up to heaven.  Just as his gaze was called from the ground of his self-doubt to the eyes of the people in the crowd by compassion, his eyes were called from them to the heavens by his need for help, and his faith that help was there. 

He could have been drawn back to the ground of logical self-doubt, accepting his limitations.  Some of his apostles invite him to do this, to accept the feeding as unrealistic, unreasonable, unexpected.  But he allowed his gaze to be lifted up, and his aspiration with it.

And guided by that vision, he did the priestly thing.  The blessed the paltry, inadequate all that he had, and without being distracted by the inadequacy of its appearance, began doing what needed to be done.  He began feeding all those people.

To be human is to accept our belovedness, and not merely as a platitude, but as a practice.  The practice of belovedness calls us to accept ourselves as priest, not because we are given by the world or our church some garment or title, but because we are given by our creator spirit the truth of this gift, of being able at all times of our life to look up, beyond the call of compassion to the call of faith, and in that call of faithful compassion to bless the measly, inadequate all that we are given, and by blessing, breaking, and sharing it, to find that it is indeed more than enough.