18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish. 

Such a text is rich fodder for numerologists. I once came upon a New Age interpretation that had the two standing for the Sun and Moon, and the five for the five planets visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The twelve, of course, are the twelve signs of the Zodiac. I can’t recall now the upshot of this astrological analysis…

And then there are those who suppose that the five loaves are the five senses proposed by Aristotle—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—whereas the two fish are senses of the soul and spirit, whatever those might be. 

And then there are those that draw more explicitly from Jewish mystical thinking. The 12 are, of course, the Tribes of Israel and the Twelve Apostles—that is, the people of God. The five are the Books of Moses, and the two are some other set of texts, say, the psalms and proverbs, or the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. There is some variation here.

Hilary of Poitiers—he of the university term—agreed the five were the Books of the Law, but supposed the two to be the prophetic warnings, from the Hebrew prophets on one hand and from John the Baptist on the other. Augustine has the two as the Old Testament figures of priest and king. As did Jerome, I think. Much is also made of the arithmetic observation that five and two make seven, which is of course the number of perfection. 

This is all good fun, and totally underdetermined by evidence. I don’t mean to knock the effort. But even if blessed St Matthew intended some hidden meaning in the numbers, that really is lost to us now. It seems to me, however, that what we are left with is, like the scraps of food in the story, plenty.

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The idea of a “scarcity mentality” or “scarcity mindset” seems to have emerged in the academic literature only in the 1960s, commenting on the economic landscape of the American 1920s and ‘30s—that is, the Great Depression. Indeed, it was in 1932 that Lionel Robbins defined economics as the science of “human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means”.  Not that it took a twentieth-century British economist to observe the limits of nature’s resources relative to human appetites. It is arguably even there in the Book of Genesis, which has the post-Edenic earth resistant to yielding its fruits to fallen humanity. Certainly, it is there in Aristotle and his bounded, finite universe. 

All the same, as an economic concept in the West, scarcity has developed over the centuries. Or, more to the point, views about what we ought to do about scarcity have. Once upon a time, so the intellectual historians tell us, people accepted that natural resources were scarce, and so our appetites had to be curbed accordingly. Then, in the late medieval and early modern period—and its age of exploration and scientific revolution—the fixity of nature’s limits came into question. Perhaps the world was larger than it seemed; perhaps there was more stuff available than we thought. Now, the quest was to increase both efficiency and volume in our extractive efforts to satisfy our unbridled desires. 

This is, some people say, where it all went wrong: but there is some disagreement about exactly what it is that is wrong. For some, it is the abandonment of the scarcity mindset itself, the jettisoning of the idea of natural limits. According to them, resources are limited, and we pretend otherwise to our peril. We need to, all of us, live more restrained and austere lives. Others say that scarcity is more apparent than real, and that we can, with the right techniques, force nature to yield her limitless hidden treasures. Others still suppose that scarcity is a construction, enacted by those who wield the means of production in order to maximise profit. All we need, then, are better—more equitable—means of wealth distribution. And so it goes. 

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Whatever else it is, this story of the five loaves and the two fish and the five thousand men (not to mention women and children) and the twelve baskets leftover is a story about scarcity and abundance. On its face, it is a parable of the techno-utopian capitalist vision of a world without physical limits, and thus in which perpetual economic growth is possible, and efforts towards such growth obligatory. 

And I must admit that there is something to this. It is axiomatic to most theists that God is limitless: or, if you are the late Australian Marist priest and brilliant analytical philosopher Barry Miller, God is the limit case; or, if you are John Donne, perhaps God is the infinite and super-infinite. The steps from the limitless God to the God whose love is limitless to the God whose largesse is limitless are small and sensible ones. 

And yet, to read the story this way, from the perspective of potential beneficiaries, is to miss at least half the point. It is, at least, to misidentify the heart of it, the line that is its hermeneutical key, which is the oft-forgotten and easily-neglected, “You give them something to eat”. All of which is to say that the feeding of the five thousand jolts us out of the kind of scarcity mindset that encourages stinginess and selfishness.

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We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish. Or, the UK housing supply is too small to justify welcoming refugees. Or, inflation is too high to enable charitable giving. Or, there isn’t enough time to stop to show someone some kindness. 

Bring them to me, he says: the loaves and fishes; our household budgets, and national ones; our work-life imbalance. But also the hungry bellies, all the needs of all comers that everyone else finds too easy to neglect, given the overwhelming limits of our lives. But also these limits themselves, and the walls they built around our hearts, choking our ability to be generous. Bring these to him. He takes them too, and gives thanks and breaks them.