Loaves and Fishes: Interpreting Away a Miracle

Loaves and Fishes: Interpreting Away a Miracle

By Bobby Neal Winters

Let’s talk about “the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes,” also known as “the feeding of the 5000,”  and use it as an opportunity to discuss the practice of biblical interpretation.

This miracle is mentioned in all four Gospels: Matthew, Chapter 14; Mark, Chapter 6; Luke, Chapter 9; and John, Chapter 6.  The gist of the story is this: There is a hungry multitude (the number 5000 is given) that needs to be fed. Jesus and his disciples don’t have enough food for so many.  The disciples despair of being able to feed them and want to send them away, but Jesus won’t let the disciples off the hook that easily.  As a result, they poll the crowd for what food the people themselves might have, but come up with only five loaves and two fish. (In John, this sharing of food comes from a child.)  Jesus blesses the food; it is distributed by the disciples; and miraculously, not only is everyone fed, but there are 12 baskets that are left over.

This is an intentionally telegraphic account of the story, but the gospel accounts themselves don’t have many more details. Some have a few details the others don’t, although they could all be harmonized quite easily.  But the point is, the event is described simply; it is clearly meant to be taken as a marvel. 

There is a lot of room for interpretation here.

No mechanisms for the miracle are described. That is to say, we don’t know how it all played out.  A child might imagine that the disciples started handing out food and just didn’t stop; I’ve seen it portrayed this way on television, and it is not inconsistent with the text. 

But--and this is important--we don’t know the details.  They aren’t described.  One might imagine that is because the details weren’t important to the point of the story.

When each of us comes to a text, we have a role, and we need to know what that role is.  Are we just readers? Are we coming as critical scholars?  Are we coming as interpreters? That is to say, do you just want to read it, do you want to analyze it, or do you want to take part in conveying the message?  

I must be careful here, because I am not sure if these last two roles can be separated.

Let’s talk about interpretation for a bit.

The woman who cuts my hair has some artistic quasi-photographs hanging in her shop. On occasion, we’ve talked about them.  They are essentially headshots of people who have other pictures imposed behind their faces. One is a picture of a pretty young woman. She has a wistful expression on her face, and the other picture is that of a young man with a more strident expression.  

Were these pictures drawn by hand or was a computer used? You could talk about the technique of layering pictures; you could talk about using photoshop versus literal cut-and-paste. 

Or you could talk about what the artist was trying to say in each. You could raise the question about whether the artist meant us to connect these two pictures.  Are the young man and young woman connected with each other?

Either of these approaches is good for the right audience. Learning about the artist, the artist’s background and education, the artist’s environment might help with interpreting the portrait, but an over-emphasis on the mechanism skews the interpretation. The meaning of the portrait is not about the technique. It’s about what the artist was trying to say; it is about what we can understand.

Jesus did his miracles with a purpose. In his actions, he is teaching us something deeper. In relating his miracles, his disciples are trying to convey that teaching.

In interpreting the Gospels, we have to look at the accounts of the miracles as if they were portraits.  We have to see the picture itself and not let ourselves be distracted by how the picture happened.

This is made difficult by the spirit of the age that wants to make everything understandable and repeatable. An age that strives to make the transcendent mundane. 

For example,   I’ve heard of some who preached that Jesus broke the food into tiny pieces and each of the multitude got--by my calculation--one one-thousandth of a loaf of bread and four ten-thousandths of a fish.

That’s just the math of it; don’t blame me.

By enough mental gymnastics, by holding your nose, you can make this fit the text.

Making the mechanism of the feeding the focus of the interpretation is a mistake. It misses the point entirely. It creates an easy way out for the modern, scientific mind and, by doing so, cuts-off, indeed, kills other interpretations.  

By explaining the miracle, we explain the miracle away. Read that sentence again, and make it a mantra.  We snuff-out the child-like faith that Jesus said we had to have.

As has been said by others, it is like the dissection of a butterfly: it not only kills the butterfly, but destroys its beauty as well.

As hard as it is for us to do, bound as we are in the chains of a scientific age, let’s try to look at this through a lens other than that of scientific analysis.

Consider the theme of food as it is offered in the scriptures that Jesus and his disciples used, that is to say, the Old Testament. 

The theme begins early. Eve brings Adam the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  Melchizedek the King of Salem and Priest of the Most High God gives Abraham the gift of bread and wine. Abraham gives his angelic visitors food. Jacob gives a bowl of pottage to Esau.  Joseph gives grain to his family.

And that is just Genesis.  

The theme continues, but to focus on our current topic, consider God giving manna to the children of Israel as they wandered in the desert.  This is parallel to Jesus feeding the multitude.

Food is important. Food for the body is important.  We have programs in my town through at least three different churches that give food to those who need it.  They can barely keep up with the need.  Indeed, sometimes they can’t, but that is beside my point.

Food for the body is not the only kind of food.

Jesus was a human, and he was tempted by food in the desert when Satan challenged him to turn stone into bread.  Jesus countered this with a quotation from Deuteronomy 8:3: “...man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”  

This quote was taken from Deuteronomy and “bread” is referring specifically to the manna God had bestowed upon the Israelites.  Through the use of this Jesus is comparing spiritual food with physical food, saying both are necessary. (Manna has been explained away as well, but I digress.)

To connect this with the point at hand: God gave manna and the Law; Jesus is giving bread-and-fish and his teaching. One can use this to argue that Jesus is Lord.  The Gospels are doing precisely that.

As noted above, in addition to feeding the multitude, Jesus is teaching the multitude.

I am a teacher. Teaching is a profession like being a farmer or a cobbler.  Farmers sell food; cobblers sell shoes; teachers sell knowledge.

There is a difference.  When the farmer and the cobbler sell their goods, those goods are gone. The farmer can grow more food; the cobbler can make more shoes; but when the product is gone, it is gone.

When a teacher sells his knowledge, he still has it.

But it’s better than that.  The teacher learns his knowledge, but in the act of teaching someone else, he learns his knowledge better.

What is more, teaching is scalable. That is to say, what you teach to five can often be taught to five thousand just as well.

I could go on, but my point isn’t to preach a sermon, it is to show another interpretation is possible.  This is lost if one gets hung-up on the mechanism of the miracle.  We go from “maybe this is what happened” to “this is what happened.”  Instead of reading meaning from it, we read mechanism into it.  Instead of a miracle we have the mundane.

For me to say, this is the only way to interpret his story would be to defeat my purpose.  

Let me now return to interpreting a painting.  This time the painting wasn’t where I was getting my hair cut, but in an actual museum.  It’s been a while, so I will get the details wrong, but when I looked at the portrait from a distance, it looked like a princess dressed as a shepherdess tending her sheep in the meadow.  When I got closer, I could see dirt on her face and clothing, like an actual shepherdess.

Where I stood, my perspective, made the difference.

I didn’t have to see how the picture was drawn.  I didn’t have to know about the kind of paint.  I just had to look at what was presented to me.

And it was simply marvelous.

We shouldn’t read our modern “explanations” into the story. We shouldn’t exclude the possibility of the mysterious, the marvelous, the reality of the child-like wonder.

 A brutal mowing season

By Bobby Neal Winters

It has been a brutal summer of mowing, but I am not complaining. That may seem like a self-contradictory sentence, so let me explain.

As has been said, and more often that once, there is nothing free in this world but the Grace of God.  Having a lawn is no exception to this.  If you want to have a lawn, you are going to have to mow.

I look at that sentence, and it is dripping with potential. It could be adopted by self-help gurus.  There could be weekend workshops on it.  It could be put on t-shirts with evocative pictures. There could be coffee mugs with it on sale on Amazon.

It could be my gateway to fame, to fortune, to immortality.

But I digress. 

Those who are not in the lawn game, don’t realize what all is involved in it.  The basic framework of mowing is scheduling. An example of a classic setup for this would be mowing every Saturday.  Sunday, go to church; Monday, go to work; Saturday, go to mow.

It works well on paper.

But what if it rains all day Saturday?

Well, if your religion doesn’t prohibit it, you go to Sunday. If it does, then you are knocked into the workweek, and you have to try to fit it around work. If you can’t, you’d better learn your Bible well enough to open up Sunday.

Now even if you do manage to get your mowing in, your lawn will not be quite as tall as it ought to be the next time, so you are off schedule.

The system that was so pretty on paper has been ripped apart by one rainy day.

One rainy day.

Over the years, reality has forced me to take that ideal schedule and modify it.  It has evolved to fit the environment, shall we say. 

As I’ve grown older and time has extracted its price from me, I’ve been forced to divide my mowing responsibilities into three parts and to spread the mowing process over three days.  But even before that happened, I’d made the discovery that in this part of the country you can cheat the system.  At the beginning of the season, you can mow every eight days, and then, as the frequency of rain decreases naturally as part of the progression of summer, you can correspondingly decrease your frequency of mowing.

Typically, after the Fourth of July, you can adopt a 14-day cycle.

I said, typically. Resting on that word “typically” is why I am not complaining about a “brutal” summer of mowing.

There are outliers from the typical.  In one direction, the outliers take us to not having to mow from the Fourth of July until October because “decreased frequency of rain” translates into “stopped raining entirely.” 

The last time that happened “didn’t have to mow” translated into “you shouldn’t mow because of the dust.” Grass died; crops died; the landscape looked apocalyptic. 

This summer has been an outlier from the typical in the other direction.  It kept raining. There were days when the lawn needed mowing but to do so would’ve required mowing through puddles. 

The frequency of rain has decreased, but we are “getting rain at the right time.”  That is to say, not so much water as to make a puddle, but enough to keep the grass growing at an atypically fast pace.

So “brutal” means I’ve not been able to expand to that 14-day cycle I aim for.

While rain is the restraining factor during the early part of the season, heat controls the schedule now.  I have people who constrain me from mowing when it is too hot because I am old, decrepit, and don’t have sense enough to judge for myself.

I have to choose an hour here and an hour there around my torturous summer schedule of coffee with the lads and woodworking.

Like I said, “Brutal.”

All the brutality aside, there is hope.

Slowly, some increasing number of seconds every day, the days are getting shorter. Autumn will eventually be upon us. September will come, then October.  Mowing will pause for a while.

We can rest then and restart next March.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Whining at a higher level

 Whining at a higher level

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is the Dog Days.

You wake up in the morning and it is almost 80 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Last year at this time I was fortunate enough to be on vacation in Scotland with my beloved wife.  It has the climate for which my Anglo-Saxon ancestors were evolved. One day we rode the Hogwarts express from Kyle of Lochalsh to Fort William.  The 20-something young lady complained about the heat: “It’s just hotter here than other places.”

It was almost 70 degrees.

Jean and I remained silent, but we shared a pregnant glance.

We silently conspired not to tell her about the Dog Days. 

Humans are adaptable.  We can adapt from an animal that whines at a high of 70 degrees who whines at a low of 80 degrees. We are a species of whiners.

Whining is the constant.

I grew up in third world conditions.  So did just about everyone in my community. We had two channels on the television set. During the summer one of those channels mainly broadcast snow. Oddly enough, this didn’t make us feel any cooler.

We had a swamp cooler. To refresh your memory, a swamp cooler is a means of cooling off the house that cools air by the evaporation of water.  This makes the assumption that the air is not already saturated with humidity.  They work quite well in the high desert, not much in rural Oklahoma.  There the name is a reminder that your living room is cooler than a swamp...maybe.

Before it got to the time of year when we closed our doors and turned on the swamp cooler, we sat with our doors open. If the one channel of television wasn’t sufficient, we could entertain ourselves with the variety of insects that make their way in despite the screens.

I say variety. It was mainly junebugs.

While I am not an entomologist, I can say with certainty that junebugs do not eat meat.  If they did, my family would’ve been skeletalized before the Fourth of July during any given year.

And I whined.  Not with the expertise that I have now, but I did whine.  As tool-using animals, we make use of technology to help us whine better.  The thermometer was a God-send for this purpose.  We can look at it to see how much whining is appropriate.

When I went off to study mathematics at grad school, I used the time and temperature number to keep track.  I developed the mathematical theory that it wasn’t really hot until it was at least 93 degrees.  In Stillwater, Oklahoma, it would frequently get really hot.

It is odd. Although there is nothing to this other than the pronouncement of a self-important 20-something, this stuck with me.  I made decisions with it.  Ninety-three degrees became the critical temperature for me.  Above ninety-three, I would yield to the heat. Below ninety-three, heat did not provide an excuse to cease activity.

Then one Tuesday afternoon I came home with the idea of mowing. I checked the temperature: It was 91 degrees: Okay to work. I changed into my work clothes; I picked up fallen branches in the yard.  I rolled up the garden hose.

I was then greeted by my daughter: “Are you planning to mow?”

There was an inflection on this that indicated it was more than a question.  There was judgement both on my intelligence and my sanity implied.

She’d that from her mother.

I said little or nothing. I certainly didn’t say what I was thinking. I learned THAT from her mother.

Technology has now progressed, it seems.  We’ve gone beyond the thermometer to the heat index. We have another number to tell us how miserable we ought to be, another number to help us whine.

I put off my mowing until Friday morning at seven.  By eight, I’d sweated through my t-shirt completely, but the lawn was done.  

Now we are under an extreme heat warning. To my mind, it is still not too bad. Maybe that’s because I’ve got a house that we can air-condition down to 75 degrees, with doors and windows tight enough to keep the junebugs at bay, and with more entertainment coming through the Internet than I could ever possibly watch.

But, it is the Dog Days. Keep cool; be safe.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Take your time

 Take your time

By Bobby Neal Winters

“What is the Truth?”

You might recognize that as being a quote from the Bible. If you are a New Testament scholar, you will recognize the question as coming from Pilate.

Pilate, being an administrator, needed to have information to base his decisions on.  But sometimes (often? frequently? most of the time?) when a decision is made which requires action, it is less about the truth and more about the consequences of the action that is taken or the lack of action.

Pilate chose his action, and, at least according to some sermons I’ve heard, is now continually washing his hands while being eaten by maggots and being roasted in a lake of fire.

Pilate was working under political pressure, within a narrow window of time, and with a constrained stream of information.

Things have changed a little in the intervening millenia. We have more “information” than Pilate.

Not only do we have information about that world coming at us through our eyes, through our ears, through our noses, and through our skin. We also have newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet.  Within the Internet, there are various news sites that have varying degrees of legitimacy for the entire spectrum of views on every subject.  

Then there is their propagation through social media.  In the time of Pilate social media was the group of men drinking tea at the city gate.  Now it is coming at us through all our electronic devices and is curated for us.

This last bit is important. It is very easy to get swept into a corner in social media where the Algorithm (peace be unto it) will bring you things it thinks will make you happy. If you believe in Bigfoot, eat Mexican food, and like limes, it will bring you stories about Sasquatl drinking margaritas in Cancun. 

Soon that is the only thing you will be getting.  It’s the only sort of information you will be exposed to. You will be--and perhaps are already--trapped with your own worse version of yourself.

Now I am not saying there is no truth.  There is a real world and we do live in it, but we are living in that warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you get what I am saying?

That is one level of the world.

There is another level of the world. I mentioned that when I talked about decisions.  We often make decisions in the light of the information we receive. You can think of it as “the world of business”, “the world of administration”, or “the world of living.” 

In this world, you look at the information.  You make a good faith effort to understand the truth. You’d really like to know what it is. (And maybe not. There are some truths I know now that I wish that I didn’t.  And I am not going to tell you.) But regardless of what the truth is you have to take or--and this is important--not take an action.

One simple technique that I have been taught is using two dimensions to make decisions. Along one axis we can classify decisions as being “urgent” or “not urgent.”  On an orthogonal axis we can classify them as being “important” or “unimportant.” Not everything that is urgent is important and not everything important is urgent.

The ice cream truck coming down the street is urgent but not important.  The Ambulance coming is urgent and important.

There are people who will try to force you to make a decision without giving it adequate thought by trying to make you believe it is urgent.

Here is when you really need to exercise agency.  Can it wait a minute? If not, is there something on fire?  Can you smell the smoke? 

Can it wait ten minutes? Is someone turning blue in front of you?

Can it wait an hour? Is there blood coming out on the floor?

Can it wait a week? Can it wait a month?

How hard are the people wanting you to make a quick decision trying to manipulate you?  Are they trying to imply you are stupid by not acting quickly?

We started talking about Pilate.  Let’s end by talking about Thomas.  Everyone else had hopped right on board.  “Jesus had risen from the grave!”  They were plainly crazy.  Thomas insisted on proof.  He had to touch the wounds with his own hands.

He was given the time and he was not rushed.

True, Thomas is not pictured as being the sharpest tool in the shed, but so what?  So-called smart people are often the first to jump on the band wagon whether it is going in the right direction or not.

So, what is the truth?  The answer is, take your time and find out.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 

When will I learn?

By Bobby Neal Winters

We have moments of clarity, moments of epiphany, moments where God just drops knowledge into our heads and mental dominos that had been in the process of being set up for years just fall into place.  

Sometimes you can go years between instances of this happening.  Last week it happened to me twice within three days.

I will tell you about these in reverse order.

The morning of Friday, July 4, I took my brother out for an outing.  He’d been visiting me in Kansas for 36 years and he’d never visited Girard before.  I told him he was in for a treat.

We drove to Girard and made an orbit of the courthouse.  I looked my brother over and he didn’t seem to be too worse for wear. The excitement of Girard had not been too much.  So I decided to press our luck and drove over to Greenbush.

The destination I had in mind wasn’t the Educational Service Center at Greenbush.  My brother has just retired as a teacher, and I did believe he would appreciate it, as it is a fine resource, but I had another destination in mind: The Old Church next door to Greenbush.

I’ve been driving past that old church for the better part of four decades.  It looked interesting from the road; it looked well-kept; but I’d never stopped.

I’d never even noted its name. In my mind it was the old church next to the Greenbush Educational Service Center.

We drove the few minutes from Girard and pulled into the drive.  I looked up and read it’s name Saint A******s Catholic Church.  I put the *** in there, because I’ve seen the name in other places, and that is how my brain has always dealt with it.  I often do this with words I don’t think I am going to use again. I get the beginning; I get the end; the rest is fuzzed out; and the whole thing becomes a hieroglyph. Sometimes I don’t learn how to pronounce the word, how to own it, until I force myself--or am forced--to break it all down.

My brother and I got out of the car and started looking around.  The site is very nicely kept up. I read the legend of how the church was founded: A priest was caught in a storm and vowed to build a church on the site if he lived.  He lived and kept his vow.  He built the church and it was subsequently destroyed by weather related incidents twice.

I wondered whether horrible weather is perhaps not the best sign that a church should be built.

Anyway, I decided this was an interesting enough place that I ought to learn its name:  Saint Aloysius.  “Saint Aloy-see-us?”  That didn’t seem right.  “Saint Alo-y-sius?”

Then the penny dropped: Saint Al-oh-WISH-us!

I’d heard the name all my life.  I’d seen it and buzzed through it for years.  I’d never taken the time to walk through the name a letter at a time.

It now works for me.

Let us now go back to Wednesday, July 2.  Jean and I were at the funeral of our neighbor Dan, who we’ve lived next to for the better part of four decades. We knew him to be a good man, a good neighbor. 

The funeral was at Our Lady of Lourdes.  We sat in the back.  This has become my main strategy when I go to Catholic Churches.  You watch the people in front of you: Stand when they stand; sit when they sit. You discover that either there are a lot of Protestants who sit too near the front or there are a lot of Catholics who don’t know when to stand and sit either.

The priest preached on the text: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I’d never understood what was meant by “poor in spirit.” The phrase had never conjured up the image of an individual that our Lord would call blessed.  It was a mystery to me.  It was like the name Aloysius. I looked at the beginning; I looked at the end; but it had never come together for me.

Then the priest, Father Mike, I think, related poor in spirit to my neighbor Dan. I’d never thought about him in that light before.

And it was then, for the first time ever, I understood “poor in spirit.” 

Dan served as a lens to better understand the Gospel.

Here we come to the hard part. While I could spend some time describing Dan, trying to convey him to you. Those would just be words. You would’ve had to know him. You probably know someone like him, but the words just haven’t slid into place.

I wish I had known him better.

I find I am always saying that to myself, especially after a funeral.

When will I learn?

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 A tiff with my table saw

By Bobby Neal Winters

I lost a chunk of my left thumb in a fight with my table saw.  I am not calling the cops because it was a fair fight.  

Lest any of you worry, I only lost a bit of the fat at the end of the thumb and a tiny moon shaped portion of the nail.  When I tell women about the injury they arrange their faces in a rictus of horror; when I tell men, they say, “Dude!”

When it happened, I turned off the table saw (that’ll show it who’s boss), took off my noise cancelling headphones, took off my dust mask, and then wrapped my thumb in a paper towel.

Then I drove myself to the ER at Mercy.

After having received their tender ministrations, I asked if they had anything that would make me feel less stupid, and the response seemed to indicate they would be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice if they had such a medication.

I have continued with my woodworking but having a sore thumb has slowed me down a bit.  

I’ve completed the lean-to on my potting shed.  I’ve purchased and assembled a new bandsaw. (It’s a Grizzly!) I’ve gotten some chunks of walnut and oak from a couple of different friends of mine and have proceeded with turning projects with them.

But I hadn’t turned on my table saw until just a couple of days ago.

Whenever you fall off a horse, you are supposed to get right back on again.  That is good advice.  I believe it.  Indeed, I was planning to do just that.

But it was almost as if an invisible barrier had erected itself around the table saw.  Any time that I moved toward it, I saw something else I needed to do.  Usually that something else had to do with cleaning up my shop and putting it into better order.  

I threw things away.

I built shelves and put tools on them.

I swept the floor.

I took one of my handy little brushes, swept off the table tops.

I swept the floor again.

My shop looked better than it had in months.

Finally, I got to a point where I needed to use my table saw.  Nothing else would do the job. 

And I used it.

Now, we are cool with each other.

This is important.

It was learning to use my father-in-law’s table saw that got me into woodworking, so it is the founding part of my experience.  But, additionally, table saws are the centerpiece of the modern woodworker’s shop.

You need them to rip (cut lengthwise) your wood; you need them as an aid to milling (squaring up) your wood; you need them to make repeated cross cuts.

Yes, you can do all of these things some other way.  Indeed, it can all be done much more safely with hand tools.

But here’s the kicker.

The folks who did all of their work with hand tools invented power tools.

While I do enjoy learning their techniques in order to preserve that tradition, using hand tools at every stage of the process adds a lot of time and effort.

That is fine.  

Some of the time.

But a lot of the time you just want to get the job done.

You want to take your construction lumber, slice off the round sides with your table saw; run it through your planer to smooth it up, and then proceed with your detailed hand tool work.

And if you want to get it all done within the disjointed fractions of time that modern life allows us, you will need to use power tools and, most especially, the table saw.

So me achieving a rapprochement with my table saw it critical.

But, while I always respected my table saw, I think I’d gotten a little too comfortable with it.

That has been corrected, and I now have a reminder on the tip of my thumb that will be around for a while.

But I still have the thumb.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.