This is the story: Jesus had been preaching to a large crowd, several thousand people. But they were in a remote place and, after a time, the people had been without food for a long time. They were hungry, so famished in fact that they lacked the strength to return to their own towns and villages. The disciples approached Jesus and asked him whether they should go into the neighboring towns and buy food for the crowd. Jesus told them instead to feed the people themselves. They protested that they had too little food, almost none. Jesus asked them what they in fact did have. Their answer: “Only five barley loaves and two fish.” And this came with a question: What good is that among so many? The equation is hopeless: so little food, so many people.
And so Jesus asked them to bring the loaves and fish to him. He blessed the food and asked the disciples to distribute it among the hungry thousands. We know the rest of the story: They set out the food; everyone ate as much as he or she wanted, and they gathered up twelve baskets of scraps left over afterwards. And the crowd was impressed, so much in fact that the next day they followed Jesus around the lake, hoping for another such feeding. Jesus, for his part, was saddened by their lack of understanding: They hadn’t understood about the loaves.
What do we need to understand about the loaves? We need to understand that we are with the bread of life, everything we need to feed the world we already have. We don’t need to go anywhere to buy anything. We have the resources already; though on the surface those resources will always look over-matched, hopeless, dwarfed, nonsensical, wishful thinking. On the surface, invariably, we will look like David before Goliath, puny and pathetic, not up to the task of defeating a giant or feeding a hungry, greedy world.
The challenge is to roll the dice on the reality of the Gospel. The Gospel works! It is adequate to the task, both of feeding the world and defeating the giant. It only needs to be trusted. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Rolling the Dice on the Gospel” January 2011]
