"They gave what they could: 5 small loaves, 2 small fish"
Knox, 8 October, 2011 © Scott McAndless
1 Kings 17:7-16, John 6:1-13, Psalm 107:1-16, Philippians 4:4-7
It is Thanksgiving. And all over Canada today and maybe tomorrow people are going to gather – aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers. But this year, I wonder, will things be a little different?
They’ll gather in the living room before the dinner – the same living room where last year they ate canapés with smoked salmon and caviar. This year, they’ll munch on Ritz crackers smothered with Cheez Whiz. And instead of sipping on French champagne they’ll have some bubbly grape juice instead. But the most significant difference is that this year, instead of chatting about tomorrow’s football game and the Stanley Cup prospects for the Leafs, they’ll spend most of their time talking about how Uncle Fred lost his job, how Cousin Ted’s factory is about to be shut down and how far underwater Brother Adam is on his mortgage.
But eventually the dinner bell will ring and they’ll move into the dining room and sit down to table. You’ve heard of grade A turkeys, I suppose. And those top quality ones that are even better – the ones that practically baste themselves. You’ve probably heard of utility grade turkeys too. They can be kind of tough. But this year they’ll wish they could have got a utility bird but they couldn’t – and they’re also making do with the vegetables they got from the reduced-to-clear shelves.
It’s not that it will be a bad meal. It will be quite edible and Grandma will have indeed outdone herself to present what she had to work with as well as possible. It is just that, compared to other years, I wonder, will this thanksgiving really measure up. And even if, because of extraordinary effort and going over the budget, the food does measure up, will the people really be in a thankful mood? Or will they just look down at the underladen table and look around at the relatives who are unemployed and underemployed and on the very edge of losing their jobs and say, “What, we’re supposed to be thankful for this?”
And that’s just Canadian Thanksgiving. Canada has not fared nearly as badly in this recession (or, I’ve heard someone call it, this Lesser Depression), as some places have. I’m sure that next month Thanksgiving is going to seem very dismal for many Americans. Now, I realize, of course, that not everyone is doing badly and maybe some of you are in a position where you are enjoying a great deal of abundance and prosperity. But it really seems that, this year, that is not going to be the experience of the majority.
And how do you do that? Thanksgiving is supposed to be a feast of plenty. It is no accident that our ancestors – who were almost all farmers – scheduled this feast at the very time of the year when the crops had come in, the barns were full and they actually pretty much had to eat a lot of food because they couldn’t possibly preserve it all. But today we live in a society where the cycles of feast and famine don’t follow the seasons as much as they follow the ups and downs of the stock market and interest rates. So how do you celebrate a feast of plenty when plenty isn’t exactly on the menu?
But fortunately this is not a new problem. Throughout the history of our faith there have been many people who have lived through times of scarcity and even of great want and yet they still learned thankfulness. And when they did, amazing things resulted.
Take the Apostle Paul for example. When he took up his pen to write a letter to the church that he had founded in Philippi, the letter that he wrote was simply overflowing with joy and thanksgiving. “Rejoice in the Lord always.” he commanded them. And he even repeated it for emphasis: “I will say it again: Rejoice!” But what he had to say about thanksgiving went much further than that. He wrote, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”
Now often people who tell other people not to worry and to rejoice and not be anxious about anything are those people who don’t seem to have a lot to worry about themselves. Parents tell their kids not to worry about school when they don’t have to deal with Jimmy in the next desk who steals pencils and Sally who makes fun of their hair. Financial planners tell you not to worry when it’s not their money on the line. But where does Paul’s command to rejoice and be thankful come from? The Letter to the Philippians was written from a prison cell. And I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t a nice tidy cell with an actual bed and flush toilet either. Most people would have named the situation that Paul was in when he wrote that letter the low point of their life, but Paul found it to be a great lesson on joy and thankfulness.
Thankfulness is a powerful thing. This is something that I see demonstrated in our Gospel reading this morning. The story of how Jesus fed five thousand men (and possibly many more women and children) with just a little bit of bread and a few fishes is one that is told in all four of the Biblical gospels. The first three times it is told – in Matthew, Mark and Luke – the story is practically identical.
The various gospel writers offer no significant variations on the story. The disciples remark on the fact that there is a large number of people and that there is no food for them all. Jesus tells them to feed them and they complain that it would cost too much. Then Jesus asks them what they have and they scrape together five loaves and two fishes from somewhere (it doesn’t say where they get them). Jesus takes the food, gives thanks and breaks it and has the disciples give it to the people (who find that there is more than enough).
But there is a fourth version to be found in the Gospel of John. It is clearly meant to be an account of the very same events but John tells the story a bit differently. It is not that John’s account contradicts the others. It is just that he brings out very different aspects of the story. And whenever a gospel writer does that I always pay close attention because I find that they are usually trying to bring out a very important point.
These are some of the key differences in John’s version. According to John it is Jesus’ idea to feed the people and rather than talking about unnamed disciples he says what specific disciples said on the occasion. More important, John tells us where the loaves and fishes came from. Apparently they weren’t just lying around somewhere as the other gospels may suggest. They came from a very specific place: they were brought by a boy who offered them up. They were a donation. John also, however, puts the emphasis on the smallness of the offering, specifying that there are five small loaves and two small fish. This explains, of course, why Andrew dismisses the offering saying, “how far will they go among so many?”
But here’s the difference that really stands out for me in John’s gospel. The other gospels say that Jesus took the bread, gave thanks and broke it before giving it to the disciples to distribute. This is not surprising because this is the pattern we see most of the time when Jesus shares a meal with anybody. Jesus always takes the bread, gives thanks and breaks it. These were the recognized tasks that had to be carried out at any meal in that culture. Traditionally the father or the host would take the bread and give thanks and then the servants (or if there were no servants the women) would break the bread and pass it out. People probably particularly remembered how Jesus did it because he actually broke the social rules of his culture by taking on all the roles at a meal himself (even when he was a guest and shouldn’t have taken any role).
But when John reports what Jesus did on that occasion, we note that he highlights one of Jesus’ actions in particular. He says that Jesus gave thanks but he doesn’t even mention anything about breaking the bread. This is not, I believe, because John doesn’t think that Jesus broke the bread. It is because he wants to put special emphasis on the thanksgiving. The thanksgiving is kind of strange, after all, when John has just made a point of saying how small the offering of food is. I think that what John is trying to say by doing this is that it was precisely Jesus’ attitude of thanksgiving that was able to transform a pitiful offering into a feast for five thousand.
You see, we often think of thanksgiving merely as an obligation. If someone does something nice or generous to you, you are supposed to respond by saying thank you. It is just the polite and cultured thing to do. To not say thank you is to be rude and probably more than a little bit self-centered. And we simply extend that thinking when it comes to God. We say thank you to God because it is only the polite thing to do.
But if that were all that thanksgiving was, it would not be a big deal. It would hardly be a reason to hold a fall festival, for example. We don’t have a festival dedicated to saying “please” or “excuse me,” do we? So why do we need a festival for “thank you”?
The reason is this: thanksgiving is more than just an obligation. It is an attitude – an attitude that you can have in the face of any circumstance. You can be thankful in the face of plenty of course. That’s maybe not so hard. (Though, I’ll tell you, there are some people in our society who do have plenty – indeed much more than they could ever need – and they haven’t learned to be thankful. In fact they can be so grasping and greedy with what they have that you sometimes wonder whether the plenty that they have is just making them miserable.) But you don’t have to have plenty to be thankful. It is an attitude that you can have even when you only have a little.
And here is the Biblical principle: the less that you have and yet you still adopt an attitude of thanksgiving, the more amazing the result can be. I’m not saying that it is going to turn out exactly like it turned out for Jesus and the disciples on that mountainside. I’m not saying that, an attitude of thankfulness will always mean that that we will experience such abundance that there will be twelve baskets of leftovers to put into the tuperware containers in the fridge. But I am saying that an attitude of thanksgiving can transform any situation in unexpected and powerful ways.
An attitude of thanksgiving is transformative because it changes your attitude towards what you do have. You recognize that, whatever you do have, it is a gift. Yes, you may have worked for it, or saved for it or planned for it, but it is a gift nonetheless because there are plenty who do work or save or plan and end up with less. An attitude of thanksgiving teaches you to receive whatever you have with grace and it teaches you to give with generosity because you know that, ultimately whatever you have, it is not your own. An attitude of thanksgiving is what our world needs a lot more of on this Thanksgiving Day.
Perhaps you can see that – can understand how such an attitude can change your perspective on things. But can it really do what it suggests in the story in the Gospel of John? Can it really cause miracles? Can it create abundance in the midst of scarcity? I believe that it can – at least when abundance is what is needed most. But we won’t experience those kinds of miracles until we learn to be thankful in the small things – even in the things that just don’t seem like enough.