READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 2:7-17
Romans 6:19-23
- St. Mark 8:1-9
Grace, mercy, and peace will be with you all from God the
Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and
love. (2 Jn 1)
Who speaks to you saying,
“I have compassion
on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to
eat.”
There is a time and a place in the interpretation of holy Scripture for the use of allegory, whereby we take something that is said or written and turn something physical into something purely spiritual.
For example, our OT mentions the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To use allegory on these trees, we would doubt the historical fact of them being actual trees and instead say that they were representative of the growth of life and the situations we face as individuals.
The Tree of Life would be all the positive decisions and events that take place and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would be the negative and difficult times. So we should want to eat from Life so that we have a positive disposition and can positively influence others, instead of the other tree. But when life makes us “eat: from the other tree”, we must strive to make the best of it.
Because God doesn’t want us “eating” bad things, does He? He may have planted that tree, but it was just to show that He understands that life can be tough. He can’t help it that He created such a thing, but He can care for us no matter what.
Blah blah blah. And you eat it right up because of course Eden was so long ago, who knows if it actually happened. And what do trees have to do with God loving me and having the best life God wants for me? Allegory.
And St. Paul does not help out, in the Epistle reading. He heads straight to allegory, talking about “fruit” and “sin” and “gifts” from God. What else could those be but spiritual things we can’t see, because we can’t see them? Especially that word “slave”. Ugh. That better be an allegory or I’m never believing in the God of the Bible again. Yeesh.
Do we even have to talk about the Gospel reading today?
Yes. We have to and we will. But first, back to Eden. While there is a time and a place for allegory, God gives no room for that kind of thinking at first. For God is using Moses and not a spirit to speak of and write these things down about 4,000 years after they happened. And while this should be some sort of spiritual trip that God gives to Moses, He instead gives Moses words we can understand.
He says things like “man” and “dust” and “ground”. He uses the words “breath” and “planted” and “garden”. He mentions rivers and gives their names as if we would recognize them. He talks about gardening and fruit and eating. If God wanted Eden to be an allegory, He should not have planted it on earth and put a man in it to work it.
In the beginning, Jesus does not create a spiritual world, but a physical one. The danger of a purely spiritual, purely allegorical world is this: you have your “tree of life”, grand. But what happens when your “tree of life” isn’t all its supposed to be? What happens when someone else’s “tree of life” is better than yours, or worse yet, their tree of the knowledge of good and evil is better? In other words, how can you know who has the truth?
With that way of thinking, you can’t. It’s impossible. There is no standard to judge the truth if everyone’s truth is equally valid and, well, true. And this brings up another problem: it is impossible that everyone’s truth is true, if only for the simple example I brought up earlier of pitting each other’s experiences against each other.
Especially when it comes to God and theology, because today we hear of Jesus feeding people. Did they just receive platitudes or positive thoughts? Was the bread a “hearty handshake” and the fish a “participation trophy”? An “I ate with Jesus today” button? As soon as you say you believe that Jesus actually fed 4000 men with real bread and real fish carried by real people and gathered in real baskets, you step foot into the realm of the sacramental.
When God comes in the flesh and declares, “I have compassion on the crowd”, He does not say it because He only wants their souls to be fulfilled and their lives to have purpose. “Compassion” means that Jesus’s belly is being scrunched up and poured out for them. These people are hungry and He wants to feed them, as in “put food into their bellies”.
Herein lies the full force of God’s religion: that He does not forsake His earthly creation, but remakes it according to His will and makes it do His will. It would have been easier, maybe, to create Adam to subsist on nothing but the energy of the universe, but God made it so that a fruit from the Tree of Life would maintain Adam’s life and power at maximum every time he ate. (AE 1:92)
It would have been easier, possibly, to simply send the crowds of 4000 away with a word of power to fill them up. It would have been easier, allegedly, to snap His fingers in order to save all of mankind from sin, death, and the devil.
Instead we have trees, and fruit, and gardens. Instead we have bread, and fish, and a man. Instead we have and are given Christmass and Easter.
Mentioning the rivers of Eden, its gemstones and precious metal content, and their precise locations would all be worthless, unless something important was happening there. Something more important than the events in heaven or any other spiritual plane.
Because of our natural limitations, as St. Paul says in his Epistle heard today, Jesus uses human terms. Not just human terms, but human vocal chords, a human tongue, and a human brain. Instead of snapping His fingers to make everything go away, He comes down to dwell in the midst of the sin and death that His people are suffering.
This God of compassion, Who chooses love over lordship, mercy over sacrifice, and life over death takes the hard road to prove it to us. He doesn’t just want our abject submission, He wants our love and devotion freely given. He doesn’t want a world of robotic “Yes Men”, He wants children, heirs to His kingdom.
So He plants the Tree of the knowledge of Good and evil, not because He wants us to fail, but because He wants to succeed for us. He wants to be faithful, even unto death on a cross. He wants to show that He is dependable, in spite of our failure. He wants to be chosen instead of the sin that oppresses us so.
So much does Jesus desire this world of love, that He creates it. He creates it by making two trees: one tree where we hear God’s truth and confess, and the other tree that was supposed to give Life, and will give life come hell or high water. For the Son of God ascends that tree, descends into hell, and rises again three days later.
The one thing that the feeding of the 4 teaches us is that, what was barred in Genesis, has been reopened in Christ and the price of admission to that table is “one God on a tree”. In Christ, God fed Adam Life by fruit and in Christ God feeds Adam eternal life by the Body and Blood of Christ, the “fruit” of the tree of the cross.
If this is allegory, then we are still in our sin and lost forever. But it is not. When God speaks of anything, His words are both allegory and concrete. When He speaks of trees, and fruit, and bread He is deeply caring for spiritual and physical needs. It is not and/or, but both.
So when you find yourself in the Divine Service, being directed to sit down, and the pastor then takes bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and gives it to others to set before you…you may think that your concrete world has just gone abstract. The truth is that your world is bigger than that and it is in the sacramental that all comes together to do Christ’s bidding, which is the forgiveness of sins
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