Jesus was often “too much” for the leaders of the day. It should be no surprise that Jesus identified with others who were “too much” of one thing or another – too poor, too sick, too foreign – to be seen as God’s beloved. Today’s reflection reminds us that the Eucharist offers an abundance precisely because it is grounded in a Divine Love that is wider than one could ever imagine.

‍July 28, 2024: Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

‍2 Kings 4:42-44

Psalm 145:10-11, 15-18

Ephesians 4:1-6

John 6:1-15

The Eucharist and the Gathering of the “Too Much”

A reflection by John Falcone

This week’s Gospel reading – the feeding of the multitude – is the only miracle story told in all four canonical Gospels. Why did the earliest Christians find it so compelling?

Food and hunger were a central focus in the life and ministry of Jesus and of the earliest Christians, and it’s not hard to understand why. In the Roman Empire, farmers, fishers and laborers lived precariously, only one bad season or one disability away from hunger, or homelessness, or the ultimate misery of slavery. Sold into bondage to pay off their debts, they would become human tools for the profit or the sexual pleasure of those more well-to-do. (Is it so different today for many queer, working, or marginalized people?)

The New Testament is full of stories about Jesus and food: the disciples pick and eat grain on the Sabbath; Jesus at dinner with Zaccheus, or with Simon the Pharisee, or with so many others. Enemies called Jesus a glutton and a drunkard. The Kin-dom of Heaven is like a banquet with very strange table-manners, where sinners and swindlers feast next to the just.

In his book The Eucharist: Origins and Contemporary Understandings (2015), Thomas O'Loughlin argues that feeding people was central to Jesus’ ministry. For O’Loughlin, all of Jesus’ meals were “eucharistic” (literally “thanks-giving”) in nature – all of them included Abba-blessing, bread-breaking, and food-sharing with those living on the edge. One of the most striking early Christian meals is recorded in Acts 27. Paul and his jailors are on a storm-tossed ship off the coast of Crete, and it looks like the ship is going down. As desperation sets in, Paul speaks up to his pagan fellow passengers:

‘Now I urge you to take some food. You need it to survive. [I promise you that] not one of you will lose a single hair from his head.’ After he said this, he took some bread and gave thanks to God in front of them all. Then he broke it and began to eat. They were all encouraged and ate some food themselves. … When they had eaten as much as they wanted, they lightened the ship by throwing the [cargo] into the sea (Acts 27:34-38).

Some scholars suggest that this story is evidence of Christian eucharistic practice, but O’Loughlin argues that this meal WAS a eucharist in Paul’s mind, and should be one in our minds as well. Every early Christian meal was an opportunity to underline the values and practices of Christianity – blessing God, sharing food for survival, loving others in the pattern of Jesus.

This week’s main feeding story is from John’s Gospel. It pulls together themes from the other two readings, while adding a special twist at the end.

The story is clearly eucharistic: Jesus takes food, gives thanks to God, and distributes it until all have been fed. Followers of Jesus who were familiar with the Jewish tradition would also know that Abba/YHWH had a history of feeding people in this kind of miraculous way: with manna from heaven, quail from the skies, and water from rocks (Exodus 16-17); with jars of flour and oil that never ran out (1 Kings 17); with twelve barley loaves and some stalks of plump grain to feed 100 people, “and [they] had some left over, according to the word of YHWH” (our first reading, 2 Kings 4:44). Followers of Jesus would also know that one-ness (community, supporting one another) was the kind of life Jesus had called them to live – both during and after their meals (our second reading, Ephesians 4:16).

The twist comes in Jesus’s final instructions: “When the people had eaten their fill, Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Gather up the leftover pieces, so that nothing gets wasted.’ So they picked them up and filled twelve baskets with scraps left over from the five barley loaves.”

Here is another way to translate Jesus’ final instructions: “Gather up what was too much, the broken pieces, so that not one of them may be lost.” Gather up and save what was “too much.” Gather up and save the broken pieces.

Jesus calls us to gather up and save “what was too much.” Members of Dignity are familiar with “too much,” even if we sometimes try to “pass” or to ignore queer realities. … Too gay, too femme, too butch, too trans(gressive), too fabulous, too emo; too labile; too overwhelmed, too broken-down, too Black, too Asian, too ethnic, too hillbilly, too working class, too traditional, too radical, too much from-the-hood – “too something” which makes someone else too uncomfortable. Jesus was well into “too much.” This passage suggests that those who are too much may well be first in the Kin-dom of Heaven.

Jesus calls us to gather up and save the broken pieces, broken relationships, broken dreams, broken people, broken parts of ourselves. Rather than throw away what is broken, Jesus calls us to gather them up: with each other and for each other. It is from our wounded dreams and our wounded fellow-travelers that a new community – a new nation – can be built. These are the twelve baskets that Jesus’ followers assemble: a new Twelve Tribes of Israel, a new people made whole – not by being unbroken, but by being broken together. This is not a papering over of injustice and simply try to “get along.” Christianity is clear about the contours of salvation: “You have cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. You have filled the hungry with good things, and the rich you have sent away emptied. (Luke 1:52-53). Salvation is a country where the high and the wrathful have been emptied of their arrogance, where everyone is loved, housed, and fed. And not a country where tyrants are shot and hung by their bootstraps, for the wheat and the weeds must grow up together (Matthew13:24-30); fascists and small-d democrats must both get to survive.

In this time of trouble for our churches, our nation, and our whole planet, Jesus calls us to be eucharistic: to be generous and not to despair. Let’s practice the vision of Abba and the table-practice of Jesus – sharing our food and our money, paying our fair share in taxes, living more simply and more open-heartedly, so that everyone can simply survive.  Let’s make it a habit to gather up broken pieces, bind up the wounded, up-cycle each other’s dreams, and to reach out prophetically and courageously to those with whom we disagree. Let’s open our hearts to the people who strike us as “too much.” Let’s pray for the courage to live as Jesus lived.

John P. Falcone is a practical theologian religious educator and a practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed (PhD Boston College). He has been a Dignity member for more than 20 years with close links to Dignity NY where he met his husband Matias Wibowo in 2005. He is currently Theologian-in-Residence at St. Matthews Bethnal Green (Church of England) in Londons East End.