Today, just before Luke's account of the Confession of St. Peter that Jesus is the Messiah, we read of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness. There's a special feast day commemorating the Confession of St. Peter. And in Luke's version, the Transfiguration follows - and it has its own feast day. (Actually the Transfiguration is also the traditional gospel lesson for the last Sunday in Epiphany that many of us heard read aloud a couple of weeks ago.) With the Confession and the Transfiguration Jesus is completely revealed to the disciples and to the readers of the Gospel as the long awaited Messiah.
But Luke chooses to precede this total revelation with the feeding of the multitude. There's no special feast day on our calendar commemorating this event. But, if you read much literature from the time that Luke was writing, you would recognize that the style of the writers was to put the most important story first, and then follow it with additional stories that explain the importance of the first one. It seems clear that something like that is going on here. One could argue that the feeding of the multitude - neglected as it is in the church calendar - is the greatest event in this series of events. Why?
In a book called "The Jewish Roots of the Eucharist" Old Testament scholar Brant Pitre looks carefully at the role of bread and blood in the Old Testament in hopes of unlocking additional meaning in the Eucharist for the communities of the New Testament. As Pitre investigated the writing of the rabbis to discover what they were expecting in the long awaited Messiah, he learned that one of the primary signs of the Messiah's arrival was to be the return of the manna.
You remember the manna? It was the miraculous bread that sustained the people of Israel as they followed Moses at the time of their forty years of wandering in the wilderness. It was given by God at the beginning of the forty years and ended as the people of Israel followed Joshua into the Promised Land. The sign that Messiah had come was to be the feeding of the people with the miraculous bread of the angels.
The feeding of the multitude in the wilderness is the first great sign in Luke that fulfills this specific expectation. While it seems to us to be a foreshadowing of the weekly Eucharistic feast, it was to the Jews of Jesus' day one of the primary signs that he was the Messiah. And now the two following stories of the Confession of St. Peter, and the revelation of the Transfiguration make much more sense. They are the exclamation points that underscore and emphasize what happens when Jesus feeds the multitudes with so much that there *12* baskets left over.
In essence then, the largest part of this chapter in Luke's Gospel is a clarion clear call that the Messiah has come. The prophecies are being fulfilled. The faithful remnant recognize and confess that this happening.
And the chapter ends with Jesus setting his face to go to Jerusalem. Just as the prophecies predict.
So what does it mean to you that Jesus is who Luke's Gospel says he is? What does it mean to you to participate in Peter's words that Jesus is Messiah of God? Has it made a difference in the way you live your life, in the choices you make about what you do or how you spend your money?
That's always been a key thing for me to look at in my own life - particularly when I go on retreat. I have confessed Jesus as Lord time and time again with my lips. How have I confessed him with my life?
To me this chapter supplies us with a few of God's calls to us. I think the Transfiguration story speaks the loudest to me in this chapter. I hear it as a call to action. There is a voice, Gods voice, in the clouds almost demanding, as I hear it, to listen to Jesus and to what he is saying. This in response to Peter's offer to to craft dwelling places on the mountaintop for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. It seems to me that this was such a miraculous and Holy experience for the three that they had lost sight of the fact that Jesus worked in the world away from the mountaintop. That was where Jesus healed, preached and cured and that was where Jesus sent out the twelve to do the same. I might add that I should also take note that my own mountaintop experiences in church and elsewhere are to remind me that I have work to do in the world also. Bishop I love your statement "confessing with our lives" Because it hits home what the real deal is here. The mountaintop(church) supplies us with the spiritual feeding we need for the rest of the week, but much of the work is out in the world. Even now at this very moment our confirmands and adult leaders, including our rector are down in the Dominican Republic Feeding and healing our brothers and sisters by improving their living conditions as well as we can. My own oldest two children went and their lives were changed. So bravo Jesus! We love you and you do have many many disciples out in the world doing your work! Help me to focus on and prayerfully remember to do my part..
ReplyDeleteI have always loved the story of the Transfiguration. The story of the loaves and fishes was just that, to me...a story. Now, it means so much more. Thank you Bishop for your insight and explanation and thoughts on this.
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