Five Loaves and Two Fish, and Twelve Baskets of Left-overs
Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full (Matthew 14:19b-20). Scarcity. How many of you have experienced scarcity in the past four months? Did you try to buy TP, or Kleenex, or wipes, at Costco or Target or Walmart, but find empty shelves? Could you only buy one or two items of meat, because the grocery was limiting purchases? What about flour and yeast? Lucky for us, these problems were not due to major, long-term issues, but just the short-term combination of panic-buying and minor supply-chain disruptions. Today’s Gospel reading gives us a story of abundance—the miraculous feeding of 5,000 people (many more than that, actually, as Matthew tells us only the men were included in that count). As we’ve been reading through Matthew this summer we’v