Title Bob, October 10
rice
Matthew 14:13-21
After the death of John the Baptist
The story we read today, the so-called ‘Obyeongyi’ incident, is one of the most well-known stories in the Gospels. Perhaps this story was widely known in early Christianity at the time the Bible was written. Although each Gospel is slightly different in some parts, the overall framework is consistent. Let's start with the content of the Gospel of Matthew and follow the outline of the story.
Five loaves, two fish
It is a common occurrence in our lives when there are so many people to eat and only five loaves and two fish. When I was young, not only my family, but everyone in our country lived in poverty. I have that memory too. A family of five had to eat lunch, but there was only one bowl of rice. My mother put the rice in a pot, filled it with water, and boiled it. It then grows to a sufficient amount to be shared by all family members, whether distant or dead. It is better to say that you drink this porridge rather than eat it. Less than an hour after drinking, you will be hungry again.
Even today, we are clamoring for the economic situation of our country to be unreasonable. The productivity of SMEs is falling and business is not cool. However, exports remain the same. However, no matter how difficult it is to live now, we are living incredibly well compared to the past. There is a lot of resentment against the government that there are no jobs, especially for young people, but there are still many places to work if it is okay to work physically. But maybe our fundamental problem is that we don't want to do that.
It seems to me that these days, complaints such as bad domestic demand and lack of jobs are usually relative rather than absolute difficulties. Absolute difficulties refer to the same crisis of survival that I experienced when I was young, but relative difficulties are related to the dignity of life they think. It's hard to live, but almost every family has a car, every young person owns a cell phone, and few say they wouldn't want to send their kids to college because of money. Of course, it's not that I don't understand people's desire to live a better life than in the past, but it means that our problems can never be solved in this way, and no matter how much the economy improves with this spirit, we can never live happily ever after.
tear apart
Jesus had them bring five loaves and two fish. He took it in his hands, prayed, “breaking the bread and giving it to the disciples.” And the disciples also gave it to the people according to the words of Jesus. It is said that all the people who had gathered there had enough to eat, and twelve baskets were full of leftovers. The number of people who had gathered there was five thousand, excluding women and children.
The above possibility is only a possibility, not an actual truth. It may be impossible to grasp the facts that have been passed down in the early church for a long time today. We need to pay attention to why the early church transmitted this event to be so important. The most desirable way to read the Bible is to follow the faith and theology of the early church rather than tracing the objective facts of the event. What kind of religious significance did this five-byeong-yi, which was so important to be recorded in all four Gospels, accepted by the early church?
Look at verse 19. Jesus took the five loaves and the two fish, looked up to heaven, gave thanks, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples. Does Jesus' deeds catch your eye? What do you recall? The act is directly related to the liturgy of the Lord's Supper. The ceremony of the Lord's Supper in the early church, after holding bread and wine in hand and praying to heaven, sharing and drinking, is very similar to Jesus' prayer in the wilderness now. Herein lies the theological intention of the early church, which cherished the Oh Byeong-Eye incident. I'm not interested in the increased amount of bread and fish. It was important to them that Jesus Christ, present at their communion table, was the one who fed the starving crowd in the wilderness.
Today, just like the early church, we believe that Jesus is the 'food' of life. The reason Jesus is the food of life is to be explained by another sermon, so I will shorten it today. But we cannot miss the fact that He is the food that ultimately saves us. This bob not only refers to the ultimate and absolute dimension that will begin in the apocalypse, but is, as in today's story, practically the ability to solve the problem of poverty in this history. For that purpose, the mission to fight and practice in detail is the responsibility of each Christian who believes in Jesus as the food of life.