01.04. Poverty
THE QUESTION OF POVERTY ’ Whence should we have so much bread? ’
When the popularity of Jesus was at its height, great multitudes followed Him. The disciples, with their notions of what His Kingdom should be, saw in the crowds armies of possible supporters; to Jesus they were like shepherdless sheep, scattered and torn. He was moved with compassion for them, healed their sick, and day after day spoke to them of the Kingdom of God. As they lingered in His company, loth to take leave, and ill able, many of them, to face the journey home, He suggested to the disciples that they should give them something to eat. The disciples had a right to be astonished. They were poor men who had left their all to follow Him. They knew what hunger was, and had sometimes no more to stay their appetites than the ears of corn they plucked in their way through, the fields, or the figs they gathered from a chance tree on the wayside. As they looked at the thousands crowding round their Master, and thought of their ill-furnished wallets, is it any wonder they asked, ’Whence should we have so much bread as to fill so great a multitude?’ The question is virtually a disclaimer of responsibility. The problem presented by Jesus to the Twelve is the problem of the Church today. The world lies before us, full of destitution, both material and spiritual; and its misery, if not its wistful waiting upon the Church, appeals to our compassion. The imagination is oppressed if we try to present to ourselves vividly the dimensions of its need. We cannot count the millions who are famishing for the bread of life; we cannot estimate the weakness, the misery, the lingering pain, the low vitality, the expiring hopes, the stupor, the vice, of those incalculable numbers. But if we see these things at all, and if we have learned anything from Jesus, His words will rise in our hearts, ’Give ye them to eat.’ No doubt they have come to us again and again, and have probably been answered with the disciples’ question, ’Whence should we have so much bread?’ ’What are our resources compared to the demands made upon us?’ If the Lord made windows in heaven, and manna fell over all the earth, it would no more than meet the need. When we confront it with our paltry resources, it seems out of the question that we should attempt anything. Our five loaves are nothing among so many.
Jesus does not accept this disclaimer of responsibility. He feels so deeply for the crowd that He invokes the divine power to succour them, and the characteristics of the great miracles in which the bread is multiplied are a virtual answer to the disciples’ question. We shall not be able to plead non-responsibility if we observe what these are: for they show how the seemingly impossible task is actually accomplished.
It requires, in the first place, the consecration to Christ, for His service, of all that we have. ’How many loaves have ye .? Bring them unto Me.’ This is fundamental, and till we have come so far it is idle to look beyond. Christ does not ask much, nor anything definite, but what we have. It is on the basis of the resources actually in our hands that the great task is to be accomplished. This requirement applies to the material resources at our disposal. Many churches are crippled by financial difficulties, especially in their missionary work. Some of their members see the hungry multitudes, and are as eager to help as the love of Christ can make them, but the necessary means are not forthcoming. It is very rarely the case that this is due to poverty. There is plenty of money — no one knows how much — if only it were brought to Christ. Churches ought to feel, far more profoundly than they do, that avarice is a sin, and that there is nothing more repulsively unlike Christ than to weigh against the world’s need of the gospel selfish indulgences of our own. If the wealth in the churches were consecrated as it ought to be — if it were ours only to be laid at Christ’s feet — many aspects of our duty to the world would be much more practicable than they are. The same holds good of spiritual resources. How few Christian people comparatively give themselves exclusively to the service of God in the gospel! How few men, especially from those classes in which it would imply the renunciation of a business, a fortune, or a career, give themselves to the Christian ministry! Surely there must be some whose hearts have been touched by the world’s destitution, and have heard the Master saying: ’What hast thou? Bring it unto Me.’ Let no man say that what he has is nothing to the need: that his infinitesimal quantity of knowledge, faith, hope, charity, could only mock the world’s distress. It is with what His disciples have that Christ is going to satisfy the universal hunger, and He can do nothing till their whole store is at His feet. The necessity of the world appalls us because the great mass of disciples will not bring anything: they are like non - effectives in an army, a burden, not a strength. In most churches women are far more loyal than men to the world’s claims and to Christ’s command. They put their spiritual resources as teachers, administrators of charity, visitors of the poor and the sick, far more freely at His disposal. But the force which the Church sends into the field is nothing to what it should be. It is nothing to what it would be if there was not one of her members who did not bring to Christ whatever he had. I suppose if the Twelve had reserved or saved any of their stores on this occasion, the miracle could not have been wrought: and certainly the world’s needs remain unsatisfied, not so much because the Church is poor, as because she lacks that compassion and that faith in God to which the consecration of all she is and has would be easy. Why are we so slow to learn that all spiritual possessions are multiplied by use, and that, however it may be with gold and silver, the more we give the more we have of all that satisfies the hunger of the soul? It is spending, not saving, which is the way to wealth here.
Consecration of what we have, however little, is the first and most essential point of Christ’s answer to the question, ’Whence should we have so much bread?’ But to consecration He adds method. ’ Make the men sit down by hundreds and by fifties.’ No conceivable supplies could feed five thousand men pell-mell, and the women and children would be sure to be overlooked. The difficulty of feeding the multitudes has been aggravated by the haphazard fashion in which it has been attempted. Our own country is a conspicuous example of this. The want of method is seen in numberless evils. One is the mutual jealousy of Christians. Often they seem to contend with each other instead of with evil; they are more like merchants trying to cut each other out of a market than good men seeking in Christ’s compassion to relieve human need. Another is the wrong ideas which the multitudes acquire of the gospel. They can hardly help thinking that they are being courted by rival churches, and instead of seeing in the gospel something which they deeply need, they are tempted to see in it only the private interest of some church or minister, to which they are willing to lend their patronage — for a consideration. Another is the waste which is inseparable from want of method. And another still is the tendency to evade responsibility. Churches are played off against each other: the Established Churchman is content if the people say they are Free, and the Free Churchman if they say they are Established; and neither then is so much concerned with the more serious question, whether they have received Christ. Want of method, generating all these evils, makes the resources of the Church far less adequate than they might be to the demands upon them; and method must be mastered if we are ever to give the multitudes to eat. The miracle culminated in the thanksgiving of Jesus before the breaking and the distribution of the bread. The thanksgiving was evidently a characteristic and striking act. When John wrote his gospel, perhaps sixty years after, he referred to the scene of the miracle as ’ the place where they did eat bread, after that the Lord had given thanks!’ This was what stood out in his memory. The thanksgiving indicates the spirit in which alone anything can be done answering to this miracle. We can imagine that the disciples, as they lifted their eyes from the five barley loaves and the two small fishes to the hungry thousands on the green hill-side, were uneasy, alarmed, and not a little miserable; but Jesus was grateful and glad. That scanty store was the Father’s gift, and it is as easy for God to feed five thousand men as to make five loaves. Those very loaves sprang from His blessing upon the seed, and He who multiplies the grains in the ear can multiply all that we put at His disposal. When we bring what we have to Jesus, let us remember that it is not our own. If it were, we might disparage it, and calculate the disproportion between it and the need it has to meet; but it is God’s gift, and though it seem a small thing, we are to rejoice in it as His. Our little store may seem ludicrous to others; they may laugh at our contribution of money or intelligence, of faith or love, to the world’s necessities; but if we are grateful to God that there is at least this which we can offer for His service, it will multiply as we use it. It was so with the disciples; the bread never failed under their hands, and when the multitudes had eaten and were filled, their own baskets were full. They were richer than before they had given up their all.
Thankfulness is the only spiritual temper in which hope and joy can live, and without hope and joy we can never approach the multitudes for Christ. Perhaps the most signal illustration of it in Scripture is the thanksgiving of Jesus at the Last Supper: as He took the bread and the wine He gave thanks. Can we doubt that as He made them symbols of His body and blood His thanksgiving covered His own sacrifice for sinful men? Can we doubt that He gave God thanks that it was His, in accordance with the Father’s will, to give His life a ransom for many? Too often we regard the demands which are made on us by God and the world as a grievous tax: as long as we do so, no response we make to them can ever be equal to the world’s need. But that need would not be beyond the Church’s resources if Christians with one consent laid all they have at Jesus’ feet; if they distributed the common duty among themselves; and if their hearts rose up to God in gratitude that He had called even them into the fellowship of His Son’s ministry. If we could only learn these secrets, or rather attain to these virtues, we should know the answer to the question, ’Whence should we have so much bread to feed so great a multitude? ’