17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

There is no free lunch. Or so we have been taught to believe in the capitalistic societies that we live in. Even if it’s someone’s else’s charity we are benefitting from, the lunch that we get free has to come from somewhere, value is not just created out of thin air – someone’s gotta pay for it – there is no free lunch. But then along comes a charismatic prophet, powerful in word and deed. The people have seen the signs that he has done and they follow him off into a deserted place, just like they did Moses before him. And here in the desert, Jesus does exactly what we know should not be possible, he provides a free lunch. For a bunch of 1st century Palestinian peasants who have had to eke a living out of an unforgiving land, where life was a permanent running battle with hunger, a free lunch comes as a gift from heaven. As Christians, we have a name for a free lunch, we call it grace. Grace has been at work since the dawn of human history, as God has been sharing God’s life with us. Perhaps the most powerful Old Testament motif of grace is the story of how the Lord led the people of Israel out of slavery and into the promised land.

In this gospel, set at the time of the Passover, Jesus is presented as the new Moses, giving the people a powerful sign of God’s continued saving power and grace in their lives. The typology of Jesus as the new Moses is first introduced by having Jesus climb up a hill. In the gospel of Matthew – the author uses this typology to have Jesus as the new Moses giving his sermon on the mount. Here, Jesus mimics Moses by giving his followers a new law, one that surpasses the expectations of the ten commandements. Matthew is not interested in a law that will be spoken – Matthew has been around long enough to see how law can be perverted. He wants the new law to be a sign, a symbol – a messianic meal and a symbol of Jesus’ self-giving. The giving of himself as Eucharistic bread to all is going to be the new law – not a law written in words but in deeds. This typology is reinforced Jesus’ question to Philip: “how are we to buy bread, so that people may eat,” a question that echoes Moses question to YHWH in the desert “Where am I to get the meat to give all these people?”

Philip takes this question from Jesus at face value and launches into speculations about how not even 200 denarii would be able to buy enough food to feed all the people. Just like Moses did in the desert, Philip sees the masses of hungry people before him as a problem to be solved. He crunches the numbers and realizes that this problem isn’t going to get solved. I’m sure that we have all been there in our lives. We are confronted by an insurmountable problem and no matter how we crunch the numbers, we come up short. As Jesus looks over this crowd, he sees not a problem, but rather an opportunity. He wants to use their hunger to set them on a journey, similar to the one that saw the Israelites pass out of slavery and into the promised land. Jesus wants to blow them away with God’s grace, and show them that if they entrust themselves to him, they need not crack their heads like Philip, wondering how they are going to ascend the mountain of problems that lie before them. All they need do is offer up to him the little they have, and Jesus will give the increase.

It is worth noting that this is only gospel miracle story to occur in all four gospels. Mark and Matthew increase its prominence in their gospels by narrating it twice in two different contexts. For this story to have appeared 6 times in the gospels is a testament to the profound resonance it had with them as a communities, defining something fundamental about what it means to be a Christian. The Eucharistic language of blessing and distributing the bread present in this story reflects the deep conviction of the early Christian community that it was at the table of the Lord that they primarily experienced the overflow of God’s grace.

It is clear that this story expresses the belief of the Christian community that the messianic age had arrived. But it wasn’t just Jesus’ inner group of disciples that later became the Christian community who saw in this event the arrival of the messianic times. In an apocraphal work that dates somewhere around the 1st century AD, the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, we find a prophecy that must have framed the latent expectancy of the crowd who ate their fill on the hillside that day: “And it shall come to pass at that selfsame time that the treasury of manna shall again descend from on high and they will eat of it in those years, because these are they who have come to the consummation of time” (2 Bar 29: 8). Everyone on that hillside who got a free lunch would have seen in Jesus the incarnation of their long-awaited messiah. This is why we are told that after they had eaten their fill, they wanted to make Jesus their King. They all thought that the Kingdom had arrived and wanted to install their King there and then. But, just as we are told in John 2: 24, Jesus does not entrust himself to them, for he knew what was in their hearts.

This sign places us bang in the middle of a tension that continues to animate our world even to this day. The people were not wrong to discern the inauguration of the messianic times, but they were premature in their desire to see this Kingdom consummated. For those who have eyes to see, God’s grace abounds in our world pointing towards the fullness that God invites us to. At every Eucharist we get a foretaste of what our world will be like when every creature has welcomed God’s fullness in their lives. But for the moment, this is not the case and there are still myriads of people who haven’t tasted this fullness, who are still weighed down by oppression, addiction and the burden of their own cynicism, fears and pride. There are still so many people who are crunching the numbers and seeing that they come up short, and either losing themselves in despair or in the illusion of their own power to balance these complex economic and ecological equations. They have not learnt like that little boy to offer up the little they have and let God give the increase. The miracle of the loaves teaches us that in the messianic time that we are living in, we do not have to go it alone. There is such thing as a free lunch, and its main purpose is to give us the hope to work towards a world where everyone might have one.

Questions for reflection

1. Do you let yourself become paralysed when confronted with a problem, or are you able to trust that God can work with the little you have?
2. When was the last time you got a “free lunch” – did it galvanize you to make sure others got one too?
3. Are you able to live in the narrow space of the tension between God’s Kingdom having arrived but not yet been consummated?