Food

Everybody loves food. Yes? In our household, food is surrounded by rules. Some food is good; some food is bad. A person might be allowed to eat a piece of bad food provided that they follow it with a piece of good food. I suspect that there is an emphasis on cleaning teeth, because it wipes away the traces of food - good, but, more importantly, bad. I believe that our son is afraid of food. A typical conversation:

Son: I'm hungry.
Dad: What would you like?
Son: What am I allowed?

When the disciples confronted Jesus with the people's lack of food (in Matthew's gospel), he, in turn, confronted them - you get them food. Impossible, replied the disciples. Then Jesus proceeded to feed the five thousand. Or did he? One of my primary school teachers believed that what happened was that the people shared the food they had brought along. It wasn't a miracle. Or, he would have said, it was a miracle, but, I would say, if so, it doesn't challenge our view of the world. Jesus isn't the only person in history who has changed people's minds. Should we place Jesus and Bob Geldof on the same level?

But if it was a 'real' miracle, how did it happen. Did Jesus produce the food from the folds of his robe? Did the loaves and fishes somehow multiply? Some kind of supernatural process - if we'd looked into the basket, would we have seen each loaf become two loaves, and each of these loaves become two loaves, and so on - and the same for the fishes?

Or do we treat the story as magical? Maybe it didn't happen. Maybe Matthew's gospel is to be read like Harry Potter - a clever work of fiction. Maybe it's exaggeration. Or maybe something, to us, incredible, happened.