The Divine Universe

In the gospels there are six accounts of occasions when Jesus fed a huge crowd of people with just a handful of food. I find it difficult to imagine these events happening in real life because crowds of people don’t generally go off with charismatic teachers to lonely spots these days. But apparently in Northern Palestine (Galilee) in Jesus’ time this sort of thing did happen. The region was a hotbed of political unrest. The Jewish people were fiercely nationalistic and greatly resented the Roman occupying forces. There were rebel movements springing up all the time, gathered round charismatic leaders.

New testament scholar, Prof. Allen Calaghan of Harvard Divinity School, describes a typical one of these charismatic characters:

“Some guy wakes up in the morning and he thinks he’s the Messiah or something. Or he’s a prophet, and he gets a group of people to follow him. He says, ‘We’re going to go out in the desert and we’re going to an empty place. We’re going to go out there and we’re going to wait for God to do something for us.’ So a whole bunch of people go with him, maybe thousands, go with him out to this deserted place . . . . “

This basically describes what Jesus did in these gospel stories, but the story writers believed that Jesus was really the true Messiah, as Christians do today, and they describe specifically what God did for the multitude – he provided food. The gospel authors saw this as a real sign from heaven, a breaking in of the kingdom of God.

So let’s look more closely at what happened. Most of the people had travelled a considerable distance from home and the afternoon was wearing on. Generally, if someone was going out to work or travelling for the day, they’d take some food with them in a little wicker basket or woven bag called a ’scrip’. But many might have joined the crowd on the spur of the moment, so the disciples suggested to Jesus that they wind up proceedings so that people who needed to could get to the nearest village store for food before it closed. Jesus, however, told them to provide what was needed themselves. They were flabbergasted, of course. They had brought a little food, but what use would that be?

My favourite of all these stories is the one by John. In this a small boy, who heard what was being said perhaps, offered his own food to Andrew. Andrew was very touched and told Jesus. Jesus then told the disciples to hand round the boy’s food: two fish and five bread rolls.

A remarkable thing happened. For the small group of disciples to distribute food to thousands of people would have taken hours but, suddenly, food seemed to appear everywhere. Some people believe the food dropped from the sky or just materialised out of thin air or something, but that is just idle speculation. I want to focus on the boy’s inspiring act of generosity. I believe this is the key to understanding what happened. I believe that this was the sign from heaven, the breaking in of God’s kingdom. The boy was an authentic kingdom person. What he did was an example, and acts like that have an effect on people. What happened was a sign of how things are in the kingdom of heaven.

The broad message of Jesus’ two feeding miracles is that God provides plenty for everyone if we follow the ways of his kingdom. But, no matter what we do, whether we are kingdom people or selfish individualists, it is all, ultimately, a gift from God.

But there is another important part of the gospel writers’ agenda – the central act of Christian worship, the Eucharist. At the last meal Jesus had with his disciples, the night before he was killed, he did an odd thing. He passed bread and wine round saying that they were his body and blood. The tellers of that story believed that Jesus was a unique and perfect human manifestation of God’s wisdom, God as a human being. This is a foundational tenet of Christianity still. So what Jesus did was a symbolic way of indicating, not only that God provides all we need in life, but also that he provides it from his own being, his own body.

That’s a way-out thought, but it makes sense. Christians believe that God created the universe from nothing (ex nihilo). What does that phrase mean? Even in what the book of Genesis calls ‘the deep’, the ‘formless void’, and what modern physicists call the ‘quantum vacuum’, there is God. So the ‘nihilo’ was, in effect, God himself. The raw material of the universe was God. By universe I do not mean an entity of which there may be more than one, but the totality of physical existence; some call it the ‘multiverse’. The universe, then, is God’s body, or his ‘incarnation’ to use the theological term. (This is not to compromise our belief that Jesus was the perfect human manifestation of God’s wisdom – his ‘logos’). So everything we eat and drink, the air we breathe, the sun that provides the energy of life, gravity and the other fields of energy – all this is the body of God. The Eucharist can be seen as an affirmation of the sacredness of physical nature.

We are part of that cosmic Body ourselves; we are specialised little images of God. Read up what scientists have to say on fractal theory or holography. It’s about every tiny part of a larger whole containing all the information of the whole. It’s not easy to follow but it relates closely to the Bible idea of us being “in the image of God”.

This may all sound like obscure theology, but Christians believe that a basic grasp of the message of the Gospels is a key to understanding the meaning of existence. They unlock the deepest wisdom. Religious people call it salvation. They believe too that sharing in the Eucharist with an understanding of its significance will also reveal deep truth and eternal life. This belief goes back to the earliest days of Christianity, before the Gospels were written.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to grasp these meanings; you don’t need a whole lot of theology. When I said a basic grasp, that’s what I meant. For most people it’s intuitive. You either get it or you don’t.