All of us who grew up in the church grew up with the story of the loaves and fishes. It’s the only event prior to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem that all four gospels tell, so we got the story no matter what gospel we were reading. Maybe as children we cut out fishes from construction paper, some of us with our child ego fantasizing about being the little boy – that would have done a lot for status with your peers, wouldn’t it?  Sometimes we acted the whole thing out, with the congregation playing the part of the crowd; and we occasionally saw in it, even as children, the symbolism of the Last Supper… and the Eucharist that has commemorated that final meal throughout Christian history.  In childhood innocence we said “wow.”  As teenage doubters we asked, “how did he do that?”  As adults in the 21st century, I don’t know what we do – miracles make a lot of us uncomfortable. And yet the images remain of springtime by the sea of Galilee, of a child coming forward with five loaves and two fishes, and of thousands seated on the ground while Jesus and his disciples put together lunch.

I’m going to leave you with the miraculous in the story of the loaves and fishes to sort out for yourselves.  What I want to do instead this morning is to talk about two other features of the story and what they might mean for us.  The first I owe to William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the war (for people my age, still the war).  In his Readings in St. John’s Gospel – if you don’t know it, look at sometime; it remains a classic, one of the more thoughtful in devotional literature – Archbishop Temple noticed in John’s version of the feeding of the thousands that Jesus turned first to his disciples to see how they were at problem-solving.  Philip opted out altogether: Not even two hundred denari, he said, would buy enough bread for folks just to get a little to eat.  Andrew did try to be helpful: He had surveyed what was available, and reported on five barley loaves and two pickled fish.  True, he immediately discounted their worth: What good will that do? he asked.  And that was that.  The disciples didn’t make it any further. 

What William Temple saw in this passage was this: That Jesus and his disciples were confronting a mass of human need.  And, in Temple’s words, “the need of the world is not too great for our resources if it is the Lord who directs the use of those resources.”   Now that’s a nice thought, isn’t it? – and one that has been translated into all sorts of trite sayings that work as a salve to the Christian conscience.  But Lenten readings – what we have heard every Sunday during Lent – are reminders of the depth of that message.  It is not a simplistic little thought. Listen to Temple’s sentence again:  “The need of the world is not too great for our resources if it is the Lord who directs the use of those resources.”   The Archbishop is pointing us toward that crucial Lenten conviction that we need to rediscover who is in charge, and by doing so rediscover as well our gifts for ministry on God’s agenda.

Consider the elements of this story again. The need for food for thousands was apparent to everyone.  The resources, the small quantity of food, were there all along.  The ability to see the possibilities, and to accept God’s power to transform – that’s what the disciples lacked.  The miraculous element of the story is not the point.  The search for God’s direction for us, rather than our own direction for ourselves, and then acting upon what we discover – that is the point. One of the reasons that I believe so deeply that all of us are called to ministry is rooted in stories like this – ones that acknowledge how overwhelming human need is, how minuscule the resources to meet human need are, yet how sufficient – now there’s a word that, in our prayer book, takes on far more important meaning than we usually give it; look for it in the liturgy – how sufficient people and their resources really are when acting in accord with God’s will.

How we know what that will is... well, that takes me to my second point.  There’s something rather odd, I think, about Jesus’ reaction to the crowd.  There they were, proclaiming that “this is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world,” and Jesus wasn’t inclined to capitalize on it.  You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this is something he’d have liked to hear?  People were finally getting it.  If, as he suspected, some wanted to make him their king, he still might redirect their energies in ways more in keeping with his understanding of his presence among them.  For the moment, though, at least he could see that the people were beginning to understand.  But instead of taking advantage of their insight, what did he do?  He had the crowd with him…, yet the story simply ends with his withdrawing alone to the mountain.

Jesus essentially decided that he could not use the crowd’s enthusiasm as it was. That’s ironic to me.  He was able to take one set of inadequate resources – the five loaves and two fishes – and turn them into what he needed, but a handful of sentences later he could not take another set of inadequate resources – the crowd and its misplaced  enthusiasm – and turn them into what he needed. 

One response for us is to say there are mixed messages here. And, maybe there are.  I don’t believe Jesus’ teachings were ever meant to be neat and tidy.  But maybe instead he is finding another way to communicate that it is God’s agenda, not ours, that we are to serve. Until the crowd was prepared to set aside its wish for Jesus to be king “here and now,” their enthusiasm not only wasn’t worth very much, it was downright detrimental to Jesus’ ministry. … I like Jesus’ solution: Withdrawal.  Ultimately God has time on God’s side.  God can wait.  And at some point God’s call is heard by a remnant if not by a crowd – and someone puts away her or his agenda and tries to follow God’s.

How we know what that agenda is... well, that’s the problem.  Which takes me to my final point, and that is that that will always be the problem.  We are called to the never-ending task of trying to figure out what is God’s will and God’s agenda for us at this time and in this place and with these realities – for each of us, at any age, of any sex, of any race, from any culture.  My own suspicion is that when we confidently declare God’s will for us, God is most likely to withdraw to the mountain alone.  When we search, when we doubt, when we look at our own version of five loaves and a couple of pickled fish and wonder what help that can be for anything – my suspicion is that that is when God looks upon us and says Yes.

Lent is now, soon, coming to its end.  What we have done or not done during these weeks may vary greatly.  There is no single way to do Lent.  And yet there is a common element, and a common call.  Wherever we are – as individuals and as communities of faith scattered throughout God’s creation – the common element is critical self-examination of ourselves as children of God; the common call is an openness to the discovery that such an examination brings.  And that openness is ultimately an openness to understanding God’s agenda.  Both the Old and New Testaments, including the book of Chronicles that we heard today, failed in that openness rather miserably. The disciples, in the loaves and fishes episode, weren’t an awful lot better. And the crowd – well, they seemed to skip that discipline of critical examination as they rushed to their own conclusions.  In the Bible we get a lot of messages of how not to do things.  But in the church year we also get an annual reminder to look again at ourselves and our witness, and ask ourselves what if anything we are proclaiming, what we have to say to our world, and what any of what we do and say has to do with God at work in God’s creation.

Penitence – the great theme of the season of Lent – is not a denial of our gifts as people of faith.  It is simply a time to stand before God and open ourselves to God’s direction, and that allows our gifts to seek new and often more profound expression.  When we open ourselves to God’s direction, we and the loaves and fishes that you and I possess take on new possibilities… and I believe that when Jesus sees us more open to God’s will, God’s direction, God’s agenda – ready at last, as that grand old hymn proclaims, to accept that Christ’s love “demands my soul, my life, my all” – well, Jesus isn’t going to withdraw alone into the mountain this time. 

Amen.