Bread - Its Power to Transform

by Sr Francine Schwarzenberger ~ February 28, 2008, 3rd week of Lent

                                                    Mark 6:34-44

When I look at a dinner table, one of the first things I see is bread – any kind of bread calls my name and awakens taste. Growing up we always had bread on the table – a connection to the stuff of life.  Fond memories trip through my head, recalling nostalgically those grade school days when…

We reached the back porch door about 4:05. Coming past the south kitchen windows we could already smell it – fresh bread in the oven or coming out of it. Three or four times a week my mother would bake bread. Oh, that first slice off the loaf, melting in the mouth. How strange it seems today that we thought “bread from the store” was so much better!

Bread, a staple for people throughout the world, dates back a long way - to early Egyptians, pulverizing wheat, then mixing it with a little water into a paste, holding it over a fire. From there it was no big leap to discovering yeast. And circumstances led to saving some of the yeast to begin another batch of dough. Discovering, multiplying, to sharing as the Egyptians the knowledge to the Greeks and the Greeks took to Europe.

So today we have bread – all kinds of bread, Jewish bread, black bread, rye, wheat, oat, beer, hallah, tortilla, pita, French, 7-grain  . . .

“As he went ashore, Jesus saw a great crowd; and he had compassion on them. They were like sheep without a shepherd. The disciples said to Jesus as it was growing late: “Send them home so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat. But Jesus answered them, “You yourselves give them something to eat.” They said, Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?  And he said to them: “How many loaves have you?  Go and see?” “Five and two fish.” Then he ordered all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. …Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, then gave them to his disciples to set before the people…And all ate and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces.”  Mark 6:34-44

And Jesus saw a great crowd and he had compassion on them.

And we – we see a great crowd and it frightens us. There seems to be no end to the great crowd. Whether we see our own family, the displaced families in Iraq, the people brushing the flies off their faces in the refugee camps outside the borders of Darfur. We have the great crowds, men and women facing us with vacant stares in our jails and veterans’ hospitals or the back alleys of the Tenderloin in San Francisco and the squalid trailer courts outside of Albuquerque. There are SO MANY OF THEM!

“Send them home so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.”

There are times when those words could very well be our own.  “Just everyone of you go home and leave me alone. I don’t want to see you on the Evening News. Nor do I want to read about you in the newspaper.  I can’t spend 200 dollars or 200 hours or even 200 minutes. I cannot do anything more than is already being demanded by my family, my work!

And so Jesus asks: How many loaves have you?

 It is hard to figure that up. Just what does that mean – how many loaves have you? There must be a moral stance Jesus is asking us to take. . . . Will we? Will we not… avail ourselves to do at least something that will feed someone? The economics of well-being, of perhaps even life itself, are unsettling.  Is it greed?  It is personal finance?  Is it an obligation?

Grace comes by invitation. Won’t you share – at least something? Maybe ONE loaf?

All of a sudden bread becomes a significant, a stance that has the capacity to proclaim our Christian tradition. Ours is a sacramental world where bread is more than a sign. This bread can become a guarantee of life to the neediest, the least, the last, the ones without claim or resource, if only we can open our hands to let it go.

And like the loaves in the Gospel they could be  taken to be blessed,  broken, shared, and the fragments are even of worth,  gathered and cherished.

“Oh, but that lesson was for the disciples of Jesus,”  we say. “Not us.”

             But Jesus does not let us off the hook. 

             “Why are you talking of having no bread

             Do you still not perceive or understand?

             Are your hearts hardened?

             Do you have eyes and fail to see?

             Do you have ears and fail to hear?

             And do you not remember?  (Mk 8:17-18)

All of us need to sit with this Gospel. The beggars and the lepers, the poor, the blind, the lame, will not go away. They are around our tables where we sit and eat from the storehouse of plenty.

As Walter Brueggeman says: “The Jesus’ community is in the bread business.”

And so we can learn how to do it . . .

In 1944 Yevtushenko’s mother took him from Siberia to Moscow.  They were among those who witnessed a procession of twenty-thousand German war prisoners marching through the streets of Moscow.

“The pavements swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police. The crowd was mostly women—Russian women with hands roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick, and with thin hunched shoulders which had borne half of the burden of the war. Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans. They gazed with hatred in the direction from which the column was to appear.

At last they saw it. The generals marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanor meant to show superiority over their plebian victors.

‘They smell of perfume, the bastards, someone in the crowd said with hatred. The women were clenching their fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back.

All at once something happened to them. They saw German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty, blood-stained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades; the soldiers walked with their heads down. The street became dead silent—the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.

Then I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman’s shoulder, saying, ‘Let me through’. There must have been something about her that made him step aside. She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a coloured handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now from every side women were running toward the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people.”

Making Friends of Enemies by James H. Forest.

One piece of bread of bread can make all the difference.