The incident of the loaves

A good friend recently tipped me off to the homilies of Charles Chaput, the Catholic archbishop of Denver. This is the guy typically depicted as leading out the ranks of "ultraconservative" American Catholic bishops -- so go figure that he'd be a humble, gentle shepherd to boot.

He's also, in last week's sermon, the first clergyman I've heard to address head-on one of the most pervasive bits of foolishness rattling around the Church today.

The reading (from John's gospel) was of Jesus' miraculous multiplication of loaves and fish to feed a crowd of his followers. Apparently, Chaput had been tipped off that some priests in his diocese were preaching that the real miracle in the story was that Jesus had merely inspired those in the crowd who had already brought food to share it with others.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have heard this "interpretation" all the time. In fact, I know a fair number of good, faithful Catholics who find it incredibly edifying. But there are at least two massive problems here.

The first is that it's simply not what the scripture says. Believing the "sharing" interpretation requires you to ignore not just the actual words of the passage, but every single theme the gospel writers are building around it. This is most obvious in Mark's gospel, where, immediately after the feeding of the five thousand, the disciples see Jesus walking on water. Mark says they were "terrified" and "completely astounded," because ... "they had not understood the incident of the loaves."

So: What, precisely, did the disciples not understand? That they were supposed to share food with each other? Or that Jesus posesses the full power of God?

The significance is even more clear from the Old Testament. The first reading last week was from 2 Kings, where Elisha performs a similar miracle. And, of course, there's God's provision of manna to the Israelites in the desert -- which Jesus references directly in the susequent Bread of Life discourse in John's gospel.

The takeaway: "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst."

And that's the second thing wrong with the "sharing" gloss: It puts the focus of the story on us, exactly when Jesus is revealing something hugely important about himself.

It might be objected, of course, that I'm reading way to much into what remains a nice story with an important message: Jesus wants us to share. And, surely, anyone who's ever preached that interpretation of the loaves and the fish passage would readily admit that, no, it might not actually have gone down that way.

But they still do serious violence to the faith in the process. No one is going to remember the point of more than 2 percent -- tops -- of the homilies they hear. But what does stick with us is the posture towards the things of God that's communicated, constantly and ever-so-subtly, from the pulpit.

With regard to Scripture: Is it simply a collection of nice stories that we can take or leave at will, or spin however we want? Or is it the authoritative, trustworthy chronicle of God's deliberate revelation of himself to his creation? Show me a preacher whose words convey the former, and I'll show you a flock that looks elsewhere in times of trial.

Clearly, Chaput's not about to let that happen in Denver, even if it means calling a few priests to the mat.

Keep it up, Your Excellency.