6 August – Of parables and miracles
Pentecost 10
6/8/2023
Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145
Matthew 14:13-21
In a sentence:
In the hands of this God, the one pearl, invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish is enough
Parables versus miracles
Over the last couple of weeks, we have heard – although not looked very closely at – some of the parables of Jesus. Today, by contrast, we hear a miracle story.
We respond differently to the various reports of what Jesus said and did. Mostly, we are happy with the parables, if sometimes a little mystified. Many of us, however, suffer from a nervous twitch when it comes to the miracle stories. We feel an urgent need to get around the miracle, an urgency we don’t feel when it comes to the parables.
The parables and miracles might be contrasted as thoughtful, scratch-your-head texts (“Hmmmm…”) and spectacle texts (“WOW!!) – even if we might be sceptical about the miracle report. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven added to the dough” – “Hmmm… That’s something to think about”; “Jesus broke bread and fed over 5000 people – “Wow! Did you see that?”
Of course, we might wonder about the miracle, but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that we don’t say “Wow!” when we hear that the kingdom is like leaven added to the dough, and we don’t really scratch our heads wondering what it could mean that a hungry mass is satisfied with one bag of groceries.
We touch here upon what someone raised last week in our brief conversation about the readings: why does Jesus justify his use of ambiguous parables with a troubling quote from Isaiah, along these lines?
‘To you [disciples] it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to [the crowd] it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13.11ff)
Jesus means here that these parables are not easy. What they relate to is about as easy as it is to perform a miracle. The Kingdom of Heaven in the parables is a very strange thing. A little later in last week’s collection of parables, Jesus asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” (13.51) They answer, “Yes”. For Matthew, it is important that this is a “YES!!” but it was more likely an uncertain “Ummmm…yeahhhhh…could you say all that again?”
On the one hand, the shock to the senses of the miracles illustrates what the parables are about: they have to do with the miraculous. On the other hand, the miracles are mute and meaningless without the parables. A curious thing about today’s account of the feeding of the 5000 is that it doesn’t actually tell us what we are to do with it, which is also the case with just about every other miracle story in the Scriptures. There is no “Believe this” – that I did it. There is no “Do this” – as I have done. There is no “watch for this again” – so you’ll know when I’m around. There is just the story, and the narrative moves on, kind of like how the parables are told, leaving us to scratch our heads.
Here you are, Jesus
With all this in mind, let’s consider today’s particular story. In the middle of the account is an exchange between Jesus and his disciples about who will feed the masses. “You give them something to eat”, Jesus tells them.
The standard reading is that here the disciples are being tested, and fail. And they do fail. But what is the test? Again, the common reading is that they didn’t have “enough faith” – they couldn’t summon the magic – to do what Jesus then had to do in their stead.
But if the feeding has something to do with the Kingdom of Heaven, “not enough faith” doesn’t ring true with the Scriptural understanding of who does what in that Godly kingdom. For a contrast with these disciples here, we might jump gospels and watch what happens in Cana when the wine runs out (John 2.1-12). There Jesus’ mother Mary, the quintessential disciple, nudges Jesus and whispers, “They’re out of wine,” and then tells the servants, “Do whatever he says”. Problem solved.
This suggests that if the disciples fail a test before the hungry masses, it is not that they didn’t have enough “faith” to feed them. The failure is that they didn’t see that the test was whether they would defer to him and respond immediately, “Here you are, Jesus: we can toss in a few loaves and a couple of fish.”
The work of the miracle is to communicate that the world the parables describe can only be realised by God. The Kingdom is God’s work. Put differently, the parables tell of the miraculous nature of God’s reign.
What does this mean for anything?
It means that all of our great efforts at working miracles – our planning, our negotiations, our careful liturgy and our new organ, our food programs, education programs and asylum work – these things are but a few loaves and a couple of fish to be presented with the words, “Here you are, Jesus”.
The miracle – the unbelievable thing – is that this is enough. In the hands of this God, the one pearl, the invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish… is enough. And faith, when it comes – the faith that so little is yet enough – this faith is what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come, on earth as in heaven.
“The” parable, and miracle
So little is enough with God because at the heart of our confession is a single, baffling parable: “A person of faith freely walked a path to condemnation on a cross”. “Hmmm…”, we might say, “Not sure I get that”. That one parable is met with a single, spectacular miracle – “The crucified man was raised to life”. “Wow!!”, we might respond, “Although not sure I can believe that”.
But it also applies the other way around: the raising of the condemned man is the parable, and the steady path to the cross is the miracle. We don’t get the parables without the miracles. The easy-to-comprehend cross is only ours with the impossible resurrection. The glorious resurrection is meaningless without the gritty reality of Jesus’ life and death. What we find easy in the parables and hard in the miracles lean in toward each other, fill each other up, and there the Kingdom of Heaven is revealed.
When the kingdom of this God draws near, everything becomes a parable, and everything a miracle – even us with our hesitations, our lack of faith or vision, our fears and our graspings after empty hopes. And the same for our more “positive” experiences – our dreams and visions and joys; the Kingdom of Heaven “makes strange” everything, for the good.
Our life together as Mark the Evangelist in this place, and the quiet hopes and anxieties of our hearts, are the stuff of parable and miracle, where God’s will is done, on earth as in heaven. We will be God’s parable and miracle.
Let this be the light in which we do our next thing.