Matthew 14: How to feed 15,000 people with a basket of bread and fillets.

Had a student in my English class handed in the story of the demise of John the Baptist as an assignment, I would probably have made a note to place the first paragraph at the end of the story; not at its opening. It seems unlikely that Herod would have conjectured that Jesus was John raised from the dead while John was still alive in a prison cell.

      It would also be useful to a reader to know a bit more about this Herod and his wife, Herodias, and their daughter-with-no-name. Either the ghastly, ISIL-like perfidy that ends in murdering and publicly displaying the head of an adversary illustrates some point, or else it's just grisly story-filler. Obviously John and later Jesus are seen as threats by the Herod household; the new movement is becoming popular with a large group by now and politicians don't like people to be admired and followed if those people are not them.

      Perhaps the point of Herod's weak-kneed acquiescence to his wife's and daughter's cruel whimsy simply portrays the unbelievable moral weakness that creeps into undeserved power and influence (a point well worth making) but beyond that, the story seems simply to contribute to the overall theme in Matthew, that the religious/political establishment can become unbelievably morally lax, if not downright evil, and will fight back mercilessly against the arrival of the new kingdom.

      The point of power is to hold on to power. Take a walk around our world today and see this phenomenon at play.

      Change the order of the story as I suggested to my student, Matthew, and it becomes a foreshadow of that which is to come; good story-writing uses the foreshadowing device to heighten theme and develop plot in a satisfying manner.

      Jesus sets aside time to mourn the death of his cousin and fellow traveler, of course.

      There follow two more “magic events,” both of which ought to be read—in my opinion—as teaching legend rather than as reportage. The first is called The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the NIV heading, but it had to be at least 15,000 given that only men were included in the 5,000 number and women and children were also in attendance. Turns out, the number is superfluous; it might as well have been 100,000 since the point that five loaves and two fishes were able to feed any number over 20—with 12 baskets of leftovers—signals to me that this is not to be read as a magic trick proving Jesus to be the Son of God.

      I can relate to one interpretation that says the generous production of a few items of food by someone started a firestorm of similar generosity in which persons brought out and pooled whatever they had, ran to nearby stores and brought back bread to the point of way-more-than-necessary. The lesson here is not that Jesus is the best magician; it's that generosity and community are signs of the kingdom's arrival. That people should begin to behave better—and together—given the newly-found Gospel is the miracle.

      And then Jesus walks across Galilee . . . on the water. Somehow we find this legend so bizarre that jokes about it are not uncommon. We do extract from Peter's attempt to meet him the truism that faith undergirds success; loss of confidence undermines it. I'm convinced that I could never muster enough faith to walk across the South Saskatchewan in my oxfords (except maybe now when it's frozen); I'll always be using the bridge. So if we're reading this as proof that Jesus is proving himself to be God by outperforming all the other magicians around, it's obvious to me that we've blown the image and read it as reportage, again, in a way that was never intended.

      In the end, our concepts of the Kingdom, its nature as described in Chapter 13, our part in it are all basic. Our dependence on an unwavering allegiance to what Christ has started, our attention to and obedience to his teaching is at the core of the Kingdom's prosperity. This dependence is illustrated by the two stories, not because they are physically magical but because they allegorically, dramatically underline essential themes.

      But I haven't yet grappled satisfactorily with what “Kingdom” is, I realize. Perhaps it's the wrong word, like “ghost” can be a misdirection today for an understanding of the Holy Spirit. What Matthew seems to be illustrating about Jesus and his inauguration of Kingdom may have suffered in translation because words don't always carry the intended connotations across cultures and across ages. What if I take out “kingdom” wherever Matthew uses it and think “community,” would that come closer to an understanding of how our shared faith works in my experience, being 21^st Century democrats as we are?

      I'm tempted to leave the last paragraph, the mass healing of all kinds of diseases by touching Christ's garments, for another day.  My mind wants to go to power of suggestion, faith and confidence effecting physical health and mass hysteria as being involved here. Others will deride my skepticism but my conviction remains that Matthew's theme is not God's power to heal diseases, but rather the renewal of a right faith in God (Jewish faith, that is) in a time of stagnation and degradation. His chronicling of the miracles quite obviously means to prove Christ's authority as the Son of God to the people of his time and place; transliterating this need into our time and place would undoubtedly see us emphasizing spiritual rebirth far more than physical healing to support Christ's sonship. At least, that's been my observation.

      Not to put too broad a generalization on it—and however we read Matthew's miracle stories—his experiences and ours are surely tending toward the same goals.

      They'd have to be.