Easter Homily, April 12, 2020

There’s honey in the rock for all God’s children.

Feed every child of God.

What a perfect song for us to sing after the story that we heard about Jesus and the disciples feeding the 5000, sometimes known as the story of the loaves and fishes. It did not seem to the disciples like it would be possible, any more possible than finding honey in a rock, but somehow there was enough to feed them all.

The first song we sang together, Lean on Me, may seem like an odd choice for Easter Sunday. But really, when you think about it, it too, fits the occasion rather well. After all, the Biblical story of that first Easter morning is the story of a community devastated, scattered, grieving and afraid. Everything they’d counted on was gone; every dream lost. They didn’t know what was coming next. Nothing made any sense to them anymore.

Their teacher had been arrested and killed. Now his tomb was empty, his body mysteriously gone. The women who’d discovered the empty cave had fled from it, saying nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. All the disciples had left that morning was each other. And yet, they had each fled to their own homes, according to one account, and they were hidden away from one another behind closed doors, for fear that the authorities would come after them next.

You might say they were practicing “social distancing” of a different sort. The crowds were dangerous. They were afraid for their lives. And they were trying desperately to live another day. The disciples certainly knew pain and sorrow that morning, and they certainly needed each other to lean on. Which they did again, later, after the immediate threat had passed, and they could gather together in person once more.

Now, did that first Easter morning really happen the way we are told it did? Are any of the gospel accounts factual? Those are interesting questions, but not the right ones to ask.

Each of the four gospel stories was written over time by a community trying to make sense of Jesus’ life and death. What matters most is not whether the stories are factual, but what meaning they might contain for us today. And to figure that out you have to know a little bit about Jesus and the time during which he lived.

You have to know that he and his followers lived under what Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan call a “Domination system,” which means there were three things in place:

• Political oppression (meaning the many were ruled by a few powerful and wealthy elite)
• Economic exploitation (meaning resources of all kinds were distributed unequally and unfairly)
• Religious legitimation of that oppression and exploitation (meaning some powerful religious leaders backed the state)

Now, what you have to know about Jesus was that his passion, the thing he cared about more than anything, was what he called “The Kingdom of God.” And that to him the Kingdom of God basically meant the equitable distribution of resources…resources such as bread.

Jesus talked a lot about bread and you have to understand that it wasn’t just symbolic. According to Borg and Crossan: “For Jesus’ peasant audience, bread, enough food for the day, was one of the two central survival issues of their lives (the other was debt).” Bread and its fair distribution represented justice.

In the story of the feeding of the 5000, the disciples (who throughout the gospel accounts are presented as rather clueless) say to Jesus, “Send the people away to get their own food.” But Jesus says to them, “No. YOU feed them, not by performing magic or miracles, but through the simple act of careful redistribution.” That was his passion.

And, for that redistribution to happen in any sustained ongoing way, he knew that the Domination System, which maintained injustice, needed to be confronted. And so he took his teachings on the road and led his disciples to Jerusalem, towards the confrontation that would ultimately lead to his arrest.

Jesus also knew that he would not complete the work that was his passion. And if his disciples were going to continue to confront that unjust system after he was gone, they would need to lean on one another. Or as Jesus said, in the gospel of John, they must love one another has he had loved them, even though they were at times frustratingly imperfect, even though they sometimes misunderstood, even though they might one day betray both him and his ideals.

That is what the story tells us. And so that is the Easter message this morning, my friends. Keep loving one another. Keep challenging unjust authorities and systems. Keep working to redistribute bread and other resources fairly. And in that way, Jesus’ teaching and passion and spirit will live on…in us, through us, and among us.

So may it be.

©2020 Rev. Wendy L. Bell