28 July 2024 Pentecost 10

2 Samuel 11.1-15   Psalm 14   Ephesians 3:14-21   John 6:1-21

Sometimes all we see is scarcity in our lives.  We see what we don’t have, we judge ‘what can I do, I’m just one person’, we limit our worth and we limit what we do offer because we are not able, or not game, to see what we can offer, only what we can’t.  The boy in this story only had 5 loaves and 2 fish, Phillip has already told Jesus that there is no way they could put together enough money to feed this huge crowd, and then Andrew mentions what the boy has, admitting it will not go close to meeting their needs.  So why mention it.  What prompted Andrew to even tell Jesus about the boy’s offering.  This boy has offered his ‘little’, and Jesus takes this little and it not only meets the needs of the multitude, there are enough ‘left-overs’ to fill 12 baskets.

Jesus shows us that no matter what we have or how ‘unprepared’ we think we are, when we ‘trust’ Jesus with our offerings, it will not only meet the need, but it will be abundant.  Today is ‘Commitment Sunday’ where we are all asked to ‘re-assess’ what we can offer to the parish, financially.  And yes, the current financial climate has not been kind to many of us, and you may be thinking that your ’offering’ is little more than a ‘drop in the ocean’ when we consider what it takes to keep this parish going.  But, drops meet other drops, and soon those few drops can become a stream which meets other streams to become rivers and oceans.

For this crowd, Jesus’ abundance intersects with their culture of scarcity.  For the boy, he ‘offered what he had’, he offered all he had.  And it not only met the needs of the crowd, but it exceeded it beyond expectations.  For the crowd, tired, probably hungry, they were just interested in hearing what Jesus had to teach them, they were just ‘following the miracle worker’.  They may or may not have thought ahead about, ‘did we remember to bring enough food to last the journey’,  ‘what will we do if this goes overtime’, ‘where can we go when it is over’.  They just saw Jesus and hurried to where he was.  Jesus saw their need and asked the disciples for suggestions to solve it.  Most didn’t see the possibilities, Andrew saw in the meagre offering of the boy a ‘little possibility’ but admitted it was not nearly enough.

What do you think the disciples thought when Jesus told them to ‘just get them all to sit down’.  Did they ‘trust’ that somehow Jesus would turn scarcity into abundance?  Do we trust that our scarcity can become abundance when we offer it faithfully and trustingly to meet the needs around us.  This feeding story was important enough for those who continued Jesus’ message that it is told in all four of the gospels and, in fact, we have six ‘feeding’ stories.  Mark, when he tells this story says the crowd ‘ate and were satisfied’, John tells us the bread and fish were distributed ‘as much as they wanted’, and ‘they were satisfied’.  Can we, today, through our offers of commitment, trust that it will be ‘as much as [the parish] wanted, and the needs of the parish will be ‘satisfied’.  If you look at the budget presented at the AGM, you may remember that it runs to a very large deficit.  I am not suggesting that our offerings will ‘fill’ that deficit, but it may help to ‘reduce’ it even just a little.

The people who followed Jesus came from a tradition of scarcity.  They were not the wealthy, they were not the ‘hoi poli’, they were basic, poor farmers who lived a ‘hand to mouth’ existence, and today, Jesus turns their scarcity into abundance.  We don’t know ‘how’ 5 loaves fed such a huge crowd.  It may be that those 5 barley loaves ‘suddenly’ were multiplied into many more, it may be that in offering the crowd these 5 loaves, the crowd ‘supplemented’ the scarcity with the little they had for themselves, and in that sharing a feast was created.  At some level the ‘how’ is not the important ‘take away’ message.  In this story, we see divine multiplication bringing abundance from what appeared to be pitiful scarcity.  5 barley loaves and 2 fish feeding a crowd of 5 thousand men, not to mention the women and children who were also present.  Are we able to imagine, and hold on to, anticipation of God’s blessings?   What would emerge if we believed our generosity, our commitment, could be multiplied to help others, both within the parish and outside it.  If we dedicate our offering to God’s vision, who knows what the results may be.  The power flowing from Jesus will flow through us when we open ourselves to God by faith, even faith as tiny as a mustard seed.