Metamorphosis

The feeding of the five thousand. Today’s gospel story is one of those stories from the gospels that everyone knows, at least in its broad outline. It is the only miracle of Jesus’ that appears in all four gospels. That fact, in and of itself, is interesting and gives us a clue how important this story was to the earliest generations of Christians. The miraculous feeding of the five thousand. Miraculous. It is a miracle story. And the miracle, of course, is not that five thousand people were fed. At this very moment the U.S. military is feeding several hundred thousand people a day. We might think of that as a miracle, I suppose… in one sense. The miracle in the gospel story is that Jesus fed five thousand people with just five loaves and two fish. Five loaves and two fish. If we define a real miracle as something that couldn’t have happened without God’s help, it certainly is a miracle to feed over five thousand people with just five barley loaves and two fish.

As familiar as this story is, however, something new struck me about it this week. Yes, it certainly is a wondrous thing that so little food could feed so many. But why did Jesus even need five loaves? Why not start from scratch? Why not create a rich and fulfilling feast just through the power of Jesus’ word or touch? Why do all four gospel writers emphasize that the multitude were fed with five loaves and two fish? Why don’t we have a story of Jesus offering the people food created out of thin air? Wouldn’t that have been an even greater miracle? If Jesus had fed the multitude from nothing?

Tuesday of this past week was the day on which we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation. The annunciation falls on March 25, nine months to the day before Christmas Day, and it commemorates the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary. Gabriel announces to Mary that she has been chosen to be the bearer of God’s Son… the annunciation. But perhaps we should also call this holy day the Feast of the Acceptance, for we also celebrate the fact that Mary said yes to Gabriel’s announcement. "Let it be to me according to your word," she said.

What if she had not said yes? Would Gabriel have traveled throughout Judea looking for another maid who would be willing to be the mother of Jesus? Or might God have decided that, after all, God actually didn’t need a human womb in order to bring the Son of God into the world? Jesus could have just appeared. Drawing upon the images of the Hebrew Scriptures, I can imagine several possible scenarios. I can imagine Mount Tabor, for example, near Nazareth, shrouded in clouds and then with great claps of thunder and lightening and the trembling of the earth, Jesus could have just appeared on the mountaintop direct from heaven. Or in my imagination I can envision a young baby being found somewhere along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, no mother anywhere nearby, his origin a mystery. And only as he grew older amid his foster family would the mystery of who Jesus was become known.

But it didn’t happen either of these ways. Jesus didn’t just appear; he didn’t just drop in on the world; he truly and fully joined our world. Jesus’ conception may have been mysterious, but the next nine months were as fully human as it’s possible to be. For Jesus and for Mary. In a commentary on the Feast of the Annunciation, someone has said, "God made us without us, and redeemed us without us, but cannot save us without us" [Lesser Feasts and Fasts]. It’s a rather muddled quote, but what it means is that Mary was a necessary part of God’s plan of salvation. God needs us to save us. If we were to think of God’s hope for human salvation as a painting, the material of God’s palette had to be the lives and the flesh and the hopes and the bread of real human beings. The process of human salvation necessarily involves the stuff of human life.

In this process of saving the world, God is not interested, say, in replacing defective human beings with new perfect ones made from scratch. God is interested in transforming the sinful human beings who are already here into holy citizens of God’s kingdom. God’s desire for human salvation starts with compassion for us. God doesn’t seek to make a new world out of nothing. God doesn’t seek to make better human beings out of nothing. God seeks to make better human beings out of sinful human beings. God seeks to make better human beings out of us. Salvation is a process. A process of transformation that begins with us.

Or a metaphor from geology occurs to me. The process of metamorphosis. Metamorphic rocks were my specialty some years ago. Metamorphic rocks are rocks that begin their rocky lives in some different form. Maybe they begin as sandstones or limestones or granites. But through the process of metamorphosis they are transformed, recrystallized, reshaped into something new. Ordinary limestone becomes extraordinary marble. Metamorphosis is the process by which coal becomes a diamond. Metamorphism is also, incidentally, the process by which most of the rocks of the Sinai desert were created. And surely, the Sinai desert was a place of metamorphosis for God’s people. God took a rag-tag, whiney group of wanderers and metamorphosed them into the people of God. That was a miracle!

Throughout Scripture, God’s miracles are acts of metamorphosis. Acts of metamorphosis, not magic. Never does Jesus pull a rabbit out of a hat, or pull a coin from behind the ear of a child. Jesus is not a performer who does magic tricks to impress us. Jesus is the fully human Son of God whose miracles are acts of metamorphosis that affect and transform us. Again and again in the miracle stories of the gospel, Jesus starts with the humble, tangible stuff of human life and then transforms it, metamorphoses it into something holy. We are not just observers of God’s miracles; we are the subjects of God’s metamorphosis. That’s very good news.

Yet there is another message here for us as well. We may take great hope in the fact that our transformation is God’s purpose in the picture of salvation. Yet, we also need to be reminded, over and over again, that our salvation, our transformation will not take place unless we participate, unless we offer ourselves to God.

It is hard to imagine any more generous act of self-offering than a woman’s offer to bear a child. That was Mary’s offering to God. The story of the annunciation has no meaning at all until Mary says yes; let it be with me according to your word. Mary simply, fully offers all that she is to God. God could not have saved the world without her offering.

And in today’s gospel we have the young boy who offers the five loaves and the two fish. The boy appears as a specific individual only in John’s telling of the story. He is a powerful example to us. It is the boy’s offering of the food that he has that enables Jesus to feed the multitude. Without the boy’s offering, this particular piece of God’s work of salvation couldn’t have taken place.

A child’s offering. A child with five loaves and two fish, who offered five loaves and two fish to God. Only a child, we might say, would give up all that he had just because Jesus needed it. I can imagine how a typical adult might have acted in this situation. Over five thousand hungry people and one grown-up woman or man among them carrying a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish… How much can I get for this bread, he might think. The law of supply and demand would make those loaves extremely valuable. Or, a woman might wonder to herself as the disciples asked for the food… if I give up everything that I have, what will I eat tomorrow? A typical adult might decide he could spare one loaf without missing it too much, as long as Jesus agreed to feed the folk from his hometown first. Only a child would offer everything without a second thought. Jesus could not have fed the five thousand (including the boy) without that offering.

Jesus came in to our world--became a part of our world--to save us. We are the human flesh and blood that God desires to wondrously transform and make new. But God cannot save us without us. God’s work of salvation depends upon the offerings of human beings. God cannot save the world unless we offer to God… all that we have… and all that we are.

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