Jesus’ way of dining offers us a different approach to thinking about food.

Mark 6:30-44

There’s a lot of talk about food these days, especially about what’s good for you and what isn’t. I found it interesting that the government has decided to change the food pyramid to something simpler (simpler than a pyramid?) and more recognizable by Americans—a dinner plate. Then there are the diet fads. A couple of years back it seemed like everyone was involved in the Atkins Diet craze…restaurants touting their “Atkins-friendly” menus. I could hardly sit down to lunch with someone talking about what “phase” of the diet they’re in as they order a burger with no bun and extra bacon.

One day eggs are good for you, the next they’re bad. Should I eat bread or not? Is dairy ok or what? I keep hoping that someday they’ll tell us that bacon is the healthiest thing we could possibly eat!

Our eating habits have become complicated…one of the negative byproducts of an affluent society. We haven’t learned how to eat effectively and healthily. As the saying goes, “You are what you eat.” A friend of mine once said, “If that’s true then I’m fast, cheap, and easy!”

The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if eating is a pleasurable experience, it probably means you’re doing it wrong. It’s like the doctor who gave this guidance to one of his patients: “If it tastes good, spit it out.”

Maybe that’s one of the reasons that it can be tough to read the Bible, especially on Sunday morning, and especially during the late service when you’re approaching lunch time. The New Testament, after all, is filled with meals. Jesus, in particular, seems to always be around food. Think about all the eating that goes on – ceremonial meals, potluck suppers, wedding receptions, grand banquets, intimate dining, parties, and, like today’s story, even large outdoor picnics. While we’re phasing through diets, Jesus seems to be carbo-loading as he goes from place to place.

But there’s a reason for this (with Jesus, there’s a reason for everything!). In first century Jewish culture, eating a meal was really more of an event than simply horking down fast food. Meals were about hospitality, about sharing, about bonding. If you ate with someone it meant that you were friends for life. Jesus goes around eating with lots of people, from the religious elite to the outcasts of society – for Jesus, eating with people was a sign of things to come and was very much tied into his mission of proclaiming God’s Kingdom. One of the images of that Kingdom is a banquet – a grand feast where everyone is invited. Jesus was acting out the idea that the Kingdom is a party thrown by a God who sits down with everyone and feeds them only the best. It wasn’t so much what he ate, but who he ate it with that counted. Through his own pattern of eating, Jesus offers us some food for thought about our own approach to meals.

The greatest picnic of all time

So in today’s snapshot from Mark we read the story of the greatest picnic of all time. The popularity of Jesus had grown to rock star-like proportions. People were following him everywhere, listening, hoping, wanting to be healed. So many people were coming and going that Jesus and his disciples didn’t even have time to eat. Even when they tried to break away for awhile by commandeering a boat the crowd catches up to them, racing around to the other side of the lake by foot – so desperately hungry for the words and touch of Jesus.

Jesus saw their need. They were “sheep without a shepherd” – sheep who needed care and feeding. Here again is a biblical codeword – Whenever we see the word “sheep” in the scriptures it’s usually a euphemism for Israel or the people of God. Sheep need to be fed – physically and spiritually.

But here’s the logistical problem. Now it’s late in the day, everyone’s stomach is growling, and the nearest McDonald’s is about 20 centuries away. In the disciples mind it was time to wrap it up and send the people away so that the team can finally relax. After all, their own stomachs were growling, too. The crowd can scrounge up dinner in the nearby towns. It’s a reasonable request.

Jesus’ response? “You give them something to eat.”

The disciples immediately begin to think practically as they do the math and realize that they don’t have the resources to do the job. You can almost see Judas, who was, ironically, the keeper of the money, banging the estimate out on the calculator with Matthew looking over his shoulder (let’s see, 1 loaf of bread for every 2 people, each loaf costs 1 lepton if we buy in bulk, 5,000 divided by 2  equals 2500 loaves at 1 lepton each…2500 leptons comes to about 200 denarius…one denarius being a day’s wage…holy bankruptcy, Jesus!) “That’s about 8 months of a man’s wages! Are we to go out and spend that kind of cash for one meal?”

They’ve added it up and come up way short. The numbers don’t jive. But Jesus seeks to teach them a different kind of math based on multiplication.

“How many loaves do you have?” he asks them.  “Go and see.”

In some of the other gospel accounts, the disciples scrounge up five loaves and 2 fish from a boy who happens to be there. In Mark, the context suggests that the five loaves and two fish came from the disciple’s own picnic basket – their own as yet uneaten lunch. See, Lord? It’s not enough to feed all of us after a whole day out here, let alone 5000+ people.

But Jesus is determined to throw a party.

What Jesus is getting ready to do there on the hillside is really put together the quintessential kingdom meal. All four Gospels record it, which makes it a key moment in the life and ministry of Jesus. In fact, when you look at it closely, you begin to notice that what Jesus does here as the host of the meal is establishing a pattern for all the meals to come—the kingdom meals that will be eaten in the Upper Room and all the meals eaten by Jesus’ followers until the day they feast with him in the kingdom (as we say in our communion liturgy).

The American relationship with food is all about consumption and overindulgence. Jesus’ relationship with food was all about taking, breaking, and sharing. It’s a pattern that invites us to think about food not as our crutch, our medication, or our enemy but rather to think of the way we do food and meals as potential patterns for Christian living. Look at what Jesus does with the food he’s been given:

Taking

First, he took the bread and the fish. Where the disciples are looking at scarcity, Jesus looks at the pitiful lunch that was all the disciples could scrounge up, received it, and determined that it was enough—an abundance when put in the right context. It’s not much, but it’s enough.

 saw an interesting article a couple of years ago that looked at paintings of the Last Supper over the last thousand years and what the researchers discovered was that the portions of the food depicted on the table have become bigger with every generation. Apparently, artists over the last thousand years have been painting food the way it has appeared on their plates, with increasing volume, as prosperity (and obesity) have become more prevalent in the age of medicine and money. Looking at some of these paintings you’d think that Jesus and his disciples had made a serious Costco run before sitting down to dinner.

I think that trend reflects a larger reality: that our problems with food stem largely from a failure to believe that what we have is enough. Our stores are bigger, our portions are bigger, our bellies are bigger. There’s always more to be had. We’re never satisfied. That’s true of our dinner plates, our wallets, and our homes. Our culture tells us that we ought to be focusing on more. Jesus says that a little is enough.

What would it mean to live with Jesus’ view of how much is necessary? What would it mean for us to simply look in our pantries, at the menu, at our daily meals and simply say, “What I have is enough. What I am eating is enough.” That’s a kingdom way of living and being, recognizing that when we are faithful to God, God does indeed give us our daily bread, just like he gave manna to the Israelites in the wilderness. We don’t need to hoard it, gorge on it, hork it down as fast as we can. In the kingdom, there is always enough for me, for you, and for everyone.

Blessing

That leads to the second pattern Jesus demonstrates here: he blessed the meal. The standard Israelite blessing for the meal is, “Blessed art thou, O Lord, king of the universe, who makest bread come from the earth.” Blessing the meal recognizes that without God we wouldn’t have anything at all. Indeed, it all has come from him and belongs to him.

When I was in Kenya and had that great feast of freshly butchered goat in a Maasai village, one of the things that struck me about that experience is that we often forget from where it is that our food comes. For those Maasai villages, butchering a goat was clearly a sacrifice after years of tending to its growth. We go to the store and we see shelves lined with stuff—some of which we need, most of which we don’t. The stuff magically appears overnight and we buy it without a second thought. We don’t often consider the vulnerability of those who produce that food—the farmers who depend on rain, the rancher who must feed his livestock, the driver who brings it to market. Every person in that chain is dependent on the provision of God. God is ultimately the one whose blessing makes everything we eat possible.

At our house we have a tradition of reading a different blessing before each meal from a book called Blessed Be Our Table which I brought back from a trip to Iona, Scotland a few years ago. This book doesn’t really have the standard prayers that we tend to offer at the table: “God is great, God is good,” or “Good bread, good meat, good God, let’s eat.” Instead, I find these prayers to be a real way of thinking about food as a blessing. Here’s one of the prayers:

Loving Creator God, we thank you for this beautiful earth from which our food comes. We thank you for the long chain of people who grow, harvest, and transport it, who sell, buy, and prepare it, and for those who now serve, share, and eat it. Bless the world and all its people, ourselves and this food, to bring life and harmony within your whole creation.

When we bless our food, we should then go on to eat it in ways that reflect the grace and love and character of God—we eat it with thanks, with humility, with a mind toward those who may not have their daily bread today. In the kingdom we will see clearly that God has been the one providing for us all along through helping us to provide for one another. Eating our food with a blessing reminds us that we are stewards of God’s abundance.

Giving

That brings us to the third thing Jesus does with the meal: he “gave [the food] to his disciples to set before the people.” In other words, Jesus shared the meal, gave it away, lavished it on the poor people sitting there on the grass. He gave it away until everyone had enough—enough that there were twelve baskets of leftovers.

Some commentators, trying to downplay the miracle, suggest that what really happened was that the crowd saw Jesus sharing the disciples’ lunch and they decided to share, too. I seriously doubt that would have been the point the Gospel writers were trying to make, but there is a connection. Jesus demonstrates the power of God’s sharing of grace, abundance and provision for his people—a definite sign of the kingdom. Jesus, the king, feeds his subjects and cares for them. But the implication for the disciples was clear: those who had received enough were now expected to go and do likewise.

In the training manual for Ritz Carlton Hotel employees, there’s a maxim that says, “If you see a problem, you own it.” To say, “It’s not my problem” or “It’s not my job” is not acceptable. If you see a problem, you own it – you take responsibility. Jesus doesn’t do the reasonable thing there on the hillside, the rational thing—sending the people away to fend for themselves—but turns the problem into an opportunity – a teachable moment. “You give them something to eat,” he tells his disciples. That isn’t just a commandment for the perplexed disciples standing there with nothing but a sack lunch to share—it’s the command to all of us. Jesus has fed us out of his abundance, now we are to go and share it with those who need it so that they, too, might have enough.

In the last month, our church has donated 1500+ pounds of food to Tri-Lakes Cares. Awesome! But our community food bank there is always running on the edge of its ability to feed our neediest neighbors. What if we committed in the coming year to donate at least 5,000 pounds of food as a symbol of what Jesus does here on the hillside? What if we committed to buying a few less groceries for ourselves, especially the stuff that isn’t particularly healthy for us, and instead spent the extra on staples of food for those who are hungry? That’s one way to follow Jesus’ example.

There are others, too. If meals were a communal event in Jesus’ day, they should be so in ours as well. In our fragmented, individualistic culture, the way of the kingdom invites us to invite others to join us for meals. You know, when we eat at table with others we tend to eat more slowly, we engage in conversation, we take the time to digest…it’s an event, not just eating. Making time to eat with our families, to eat with our neighbors, to even eat with a stranger now and then, is a way of sharing a kingdom reality around the table.

Taking, blessing, giving—that’s the pattern of kingdom eating. It’s the pattern we use every Sunday as we gather at the Lord’s table—a table where all are invited and all are fed by the grace and love of God. It’s a diet that all of us can embrace, one that will make us healthier in body, mind, and spirit.

That’s some food for thought!