What does MacDonald's Hamburgers Have to Do with the Feeding of the 5000?

Lectionary Link

7 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 13, July 31, 2011 

Genesis 32:22-31 Psalm 17: 1-7, 16

Romans 9:1-5 Matthew 14:13-21

  From today’s appointed Gospel: And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.   (And one wonders what the total would have been with women and children, because they count too, and if there were teenage boys there, there would have to be a major food miracle).  Now where in our history and culture have we found posted the number of people who have been fed?

  Do you remember when those golden arches signs grew out of the sides of that hamburger chain in the 1950’s?  McDonald’s Hamburger.  And they had a sign that changed each week.  Over a million hamburgers sold.  I googled the most recent count and some speculate that it must be over 247 billion hamburgers sold.  That’s a lot of beef; though I often wondered about the beef content of those 15 cent wafers.  (I remember when they were 15 cents a piece).

  What if the Christian Church had a sign at each church posting the number of communions served since the Last Supper?  No sign would be big enough for the number of zeroes required.  And MacDonald’s total of 247 billion would not even be a speck of dust in the total number of communion bread served.

  Today’s Gospel looks like a miracle story in the life of Jesus, but more likely it is an early church recounting a teaching in the ancient tradition of the bread of heaven.  If this story were just a miracle story about Jesus feeding the masses, we’d have a moral dilemma on our hands.  Why isn’t Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes to feed all of the people in the world, right now? And why did he selectively decide to do it for one group of people in an event and why does he not choose to do it for all hungry people in the past 2000 years?  One really needs to be careful about how one literalizes the Bible, because then we only encourage the skeptics to demand that we be consistent in how we present God and Jesus Christ.

  The writers of the Gospel who gave liturgical writing or scripts that could be performed within their community worship gatherings, inherited the bread of heaven tradition from the Hebrew Scripture.  And so they told the story of the Eucharist and the story of Jesus using a development upon this motif of the bread of heaven tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures.

  When I hand you the little wafer of bread at Communion, all of you know the routine, otherwise if you were a young child when I hand you the wafer and say, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven” you might say, “What’s this?”  And how is this the body of Christ?

  That’s exactly what the Hebrew people said when the bread of heaven tradition started.  You remember that one of the greatest heroes of the Hebrew faith was Moses.  And he led the people Israel out of slavery in Egypt.  But it took them 40 years of wandering in the wilderness before they got into the Promised Land.  And Moses as the leader, as a good leader, was supposed to feed this large group of nomadic people in the barren wilderness.  And there were not any MacDonald restaurants in the wilderness.  The environment did not provide subsistence for the people of Israel and with a food shortage, they complained to their leaders.  They even wished for the good old days of slavery in Egypt, At least there they had a supply of leeks and garlic.  And what Gilroyian could blame them? (After all it is the Garlic Festival Weekend).  So Moses prayed to God and God sent from the sky each day, a strange substance on the ground.  And when the people saw, they asked, “What’s this?”  Or if they are like children who are asked to try some new food, they probably said, “ooh, What’s this?”  So “what’s this” became the name of this bread from heaven, Manna means, “What’s this?”  This was God’s intervention in providing heavenly bread for the life of the people of Israel.

  When the Gospel writers preached about Jesus and the Jesus Movement that became the church and were explaining the significance of the practice of the ritual of Holy Eucharist, they used the bread of heaven tradition in their teaching.

  Jesus was the new Moses.  And he like Moses led a large group of people out of slavery to Roman traditions and hypocrisy in the Judaic tradition.  And Jesus provided a new source of sustenance for this new community of people in the wilderness trying to get started and attaining their Promised Land to be the New Israel.

  The Passover Meal, a meal done within one’s natural family, was expanded to be a meal for all within the community of Christ.  And what was one of the early Christian titles for Jesus Christ?  Jesus was called the bread of heaven.  Just as Manna was special bread from heaven for the ancient people of Israel, so too Jesus was the bread of heaven to the new Israel, this new community who came into being because of Jesus Christ.  And when Jesus took bread and sealed his identity with it by saying, “This is my body which is given for you.  Take and eat in remembrance of me” he was expressing a continuity with the bread from heaven tradition.  Ever since, Christ has been identified with the Eucharistic bread, made that way by repeating the words of Jesus.  And we with our thoroughly skeptical sides receive the odd bread in our hands each week, with the even stranger words, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”  And our skeptic side cannot help but say, “Man na?  What’s this?  Body of Christ?  Bread of Heaven?” 

  And yet this “Man na?” has been gathering the church for two thousand years.  The Eucharistic gathering is the most literal, and the most incarnate expression of the continuing life of Jesus Christ in the world today.

  The story of the multitude of the loaves and fish is a crucial story in the bread of heaven tradition that came to be the Eucharistic practice of the church.  And just as those early Gospel writers proudly posted the number of people who were fed by the presence of Christ, the church, even more than MacDonald’s,  has lost track of the number of people who have been fed and sustained by the presence of Risen Christ, in the bread and wine, and in countless other ways in this world.

  The 247 billion burgers sold at MacDonald is laughable when compared with the living bread of heaven, the risen Christ, who is known to us not only in the breaking of bread, but in countless mega-billions of way.  Let us thank God today that we are part of this wonderful bread of heaven tradition.  Amen.