Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 32:22–31; Psalm 143 (sung); Romans 9:1–5; Matthew 14:13–21
Auditoire de Calvin, August 2 2026
I came across a limerick the other day. It goes like this:
The world had a pleasant beginning,
but Adam spoiled it by sinning.
We hope that the story
will end in God’s glory,
but so far the other side’s winning.[1]
So far the other side’s winning. On first hearing, this may well seem to be true.
Wildfires in France and Spain, in Canada and the US, even in the Scottish Cairngorms, suggest that fossil fuel interests have been all too successful in stopping effective action on climate change.[2] Israelis refusing to withdraw from Gaza and rampaging right across the West Bank – some in knitted kippahs, others in IDF uniforms, others still in both – suggest that feeble protests in word by Western powers, coupled with active support in deed, allow Israel to continue to act with impunity.[3] In Ukraine, Washington and Moscow continue to fight to the last Ukrainian. Meanwhile, forever wars in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo go on and on. Forever wars do that.
It does indeed seem that the other side is winning. But the whole point of the Christian church is to say, and to show, that this isn’t so.
And this, as we shall see, is what our reading from Matthew’s Gospel says too.
*
But first we need a slight detour. Saul of Tarsus, better known to us as Paul, was, like Matthew, a Jewish Christian, a Jewish follower of Jesus. He saw himself as sent especially to the gentiles, to those around him who weren’t Jews. In his letter to the Romans, he argued at length that the coming of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus from death marked the turning point of the ages. The world was radically different. The Spirit of God was poured out on all flesh. The people of God was no longer Jewish only. Gentiles could be included without becoming Jews.
But, as we heard in the opening verses of Romans chapter 9, Paul was cut to the quick by the failure of his Jewish brothers and sisters, his own flesh and blood, to respond to the gospel and become, like him, followers of Jesus.
It was the shape of things to come. A century later, the early church was primarily a gentile church and the division between church and synagogue was close to complete.
This was bad for the Jews. But it was also bad for the church. Paul and Matthew were steeped in the scriptures and traditions of their people. Gentile Christians in later centuries were not. This meant that, all too often, they missed the allusions in the Gospels, and the other books of the News Testament, to the scriptures and traditions of the Jews. They heard these writings with a gentile tin ear.
And so, too often, do we. The Reformers in the 16th century insisted that we attend to the plain meaning of the Bible, but we can’t easily do that if we know little or nothing of its Jewish background.
*
On recent Sundays, we’ve listened to some of the parables, or stories, told by Jesus of Nazareth and collected by Matthew in chapter 13 of his Gospel. This morning we’ve heard a story, from Matthew chapter 14, that is not a parable told by Jesus but is, instead, a story told about Jesus: a story about feeding a lot of people with very little food. What are we to make of this story?
In our four Gospels, there is a running motif: Jesus is compared with figures from what Jews call the Bible and we call the Old Testament and declared to be greater than any of them. He is greater than Abraham or Jacob; greater than Moses or Elijah; greater than David or Solomon. He is greater than Jonah, a character in a story rather than a historical figure. In his own day, he is greater than John the Baptist. Shockingly, he is greater than the Jerusalem temple.[4]
In today’s story, Jesus is greater than Elisha.
Elisha, the successor of Elijah, looms large in Jewish tradition but doesn’t much feature in our Sunday worship. Just four stories from the the book of Kings find a place in our lectionary: blink and you miss him. But one of these three provide the inspiration for the Palestinian Jewish Christians who first told today’s story.
It’s a story in which Elisha feeds the company of prophets in a time of hunger:
“A man came from Baal-shalishah bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha said, ‘Give it to the people and let them eat.’ But his servant said, ‘How can I set this before a hundred people?’ So he repeated, ‘Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord: They shall eat and have some left.’ He set it before them; they ate and had some left, according to the word of the Lord.” (2 Kings 4:42-44)
Elisha feeds a hundred men with twenty barley loaves. Jesus feeds 5,000 men with five loaves and two fishes. Count on your fingers: Jesus is greater than Elisha.
*
The other thing to notice in our story is the undertone of the Jewish Passover. In our modern translation, which goes right back to the King James version, Jesus tells the crowd to sit down. In Matthew’s Greek, Jesus causes the crowd to recline.
Reclining at meals was not usual. Ordinary Palestinian Jews ate their meals while sitting. Only the well-to-do or people celebrating a special occasion, such as a marriage, would recline in the Roman fashion.
The great exception was the annual obligation to recline at the Passover meal. This held for even the poorest person in Israel, to show that those celebrating were not servants or slaves but, thanks to the divine deliverance from slavery in Egypt, free men and women.[5]
By the same token, the family Passover meal routinely included men, women, and children. So Matthew adds to Mark’s 5,000 men the phrase “besides women and children”.
If the average Palestinian family had two children, this gives us five loaves, two fishes, and 20,000 people – a clear sign, along with the 20,000 reclining on the grass, and getting bitten by midges, that this is not a story we are supposed to hear as historical fact. It’s not that kind of story.[6]
*
The miracle in today’s service, then, is not the word we have just heard, but the sacrament we are about to celebrate. No reclining here, to be sure; but the bread and wine we share are not just bread and wine we share. They are bread and wine the risen Christ shares with us, as he did so often with his followers in his earthly life.
Jesus, the bread of life, shares with us a tiny morsel of bread and a tiny cup of wine or grape juice, and in so sharing, unites us with him and with each other in his risen life.
In so doing, he tells us that he is greater than the fossil fuel lobby, the genocidal state of Israel and its callous Western supporters, and all who inflict death and destruction upon us. He tells us that, never mind how it may now appear, the other side is not winning.
[1] Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, Words We Use (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2006), 7
[2] Bill McKibben, “High Heat, High Drama”, Substack, August 1 2026; Naomi Oreskes, Erik M Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010)
[3] Rawan Suleiman and Liza Rozovsky, “Israel will not withdraw from current Gaza positions, official says”, Haaretz, August 3 2026; Liza Rozovsky, Jack Khoury, Rawan Suleiman, The Associated Press and Reuters “Board of Peace Envoy Slams Israeli Strikes in Gaza, Urges De-escalation”, Haaretz, August 3 2026; Nouri™️, Manufacturing Dissent, “The West Bank is Being Violently Ethnically Cleansed”, Substack, June 26 2026; Mohammad Hesham Huraini, “What an Israeli settler pogrom feels like”, +072 Magazine, July 27 2026; Peter Beinart, “The Shame of the American Jewish Establishment”, Jewish Currents, July 29 2026
[4] Roger David Aus, Feeding the Five Thousand: Studies in the Judaic Background of Mark 6:30–44 par. and John 6:1–15. Studies in Judaism. (Lanham, MD: University of America, 2010)
[5] Aus (2010)
[6] Ibid.