Every Crumb
THE NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
2 Kings 4:42-44 • Psalm 145:10-19 • Ephesians 3:14-21 • John 6:1-21
A Roman Catholic priest once told me a joke about a young boy in a class that prepared 7- or 8-year-old children to receive Holy Communion for the first time. The year-long class instructed the children on the meaning of communion in Roman Catholic tradition, including the doctrine that the prayers at Mass transformed the bread into the real body and blood of Jesus Christ.
In one of the class sessions, the boy was given a thin, round, wafer like the one he would receive at communion in his church. (We’ve used these wafers here at St. Paul’s for much of the pandemic.) The boy looked at the wafer in his hands and said, “You want me to believe this is Jesus? I don’t even believe this is bread!”
That boy makes a good case for using real bread at our own Eucharistic celebrations when we can. Real bread shows us that God works with the very real things of this world, transforming them and stretching them to meet the many needs of many people. Real bread is baked by members of our own community as a ministry, rather than mass produced in a liturgical food factory.
Receiving a torn piece of that bread also reminds us that we’re part of a larger whole. Now I know that the gluten-free among us miss out on some of this symbolism by receiving a self-contained wafer. A friend of mine who’s an Episcopal priest has Celiac disease, so she can’t consume any trace of bread that contains gluten. She receives the wafer as a very partial “foretaste of that heavenly banquet,” as our Eucharistic prayer puts it. The gluten-free wafer is kind of like manna or Passover flatbread—just the beginning of the feast. One article of this friend’s faith is this: “In heaven,” she says, “there will be bread,” and she’ll be able to eat it.
Even without receiving any bread at all, I’ve come to appreciate that a nice big loaf looks great on camera. It gives us something to hold in mind when we praying the Prayer for Spiritual Communion: Lord Jesus, “we beg you to come spiritually into our hearts . . . and let us never be separated from you.” We see the loaf of bread and ask Jesus to close the distance between that altar and our innermost selves in miraculous ways.
There’s a problem with using real bread, though: crumbs. Crumbs accumulate as we break the loaf and tear off tiny pieces for each person. Crumbs float around in the communion cup after people dip the bread in the wine. And these crumbs aren’t just a messy nuisance; for many, they’re a source of anxiety.
Some of us have such a strong conviction that every single crumb, no matter how small, is the literal flesh and blood and divinity of Christ, that to let a crumb fall on the floor or end up in a wastebasket is a painful offense to Christ himself. Wafers keep us much more comfortable in this case. We don’t have to break them, and when they do break, they’re crisp enough not to make crumbs.
That perception of the sacrament isn’t part of my own formation, but I still get a little stressed out when I have the chance to share communion with people from other denominations, and I see a heel of bread left over from communion without a plan to consume it properly, or to see flakes and chunks scattered on the floor after passing around a blessed loaf of particularly crusty bread. I try to keep track of every single crumb as part of my own Eucharistic sensibilities, and the many ministers who tend this altar and its sacraments take care of every crumb as well.
In some ways, that feeling of responsibility to account for and revere every crumb of the bread made holy probably comes from my long life as an Episcopalian. But today’s gospel also sheds some light on why here at St. Paul’s every crumb matters.
There’s such an emphasis in today’s gospel on little bits. For Philip, small amounts are cause for alarm; they mean that there’s not enough to go around. He worries that two hundred denarii—the equivalent of half a year’s living wage—would buy only enough food for everyone to have a little bit—or, “a morsel” [trans. David Bentley Hart]. What’s the point of spending so much money for so small a dent in people’s hunger?
But the story that follows has so many words that have a different perspective on little-ness. The words for “fish” and “boy” are diminutives in the Greek. (Quick grammar lesson: the word “duckling” is a diminutive of “duck.”) What our translation calls “fish” are sometimes translated as “little fish” [trans. Sarah Ruden], but they’re sort of like “fishlets.” The boy who contributes the loaves and fish isn’t just a boy, but “a little kid” as a different translation has it [Sarah Ruden]. I like to think of him as a “tyke.”
After Jesus gave thanks—or literally, after he “eucharisted”—these small contributions from a small person turn into plenty. Another image of smallness appears in the “fragments (κλάσματα)” that the disciples gather into twelve baskets—one full basket for each of them.
An instruction manual for the Eucharist from the second century actually uses this word for “fragment” when it spells out what to say over the Eucharistic bread. The manual calls the bread “the fragment,” rather than “the loaf.” I like to imagine these early Christian communities, who didn’t mass produce wafers or even bake a whole special loaf, but laid aside one portion or fragment of what they had so they could gather around it as Christ’s body. These early Christians must have had a strong sense of the importance and value and potential and holiness of fragments.
In today’s gospel, Jesus himself explains the importance of gathering the fragments from the miraculously multiplied loaves and fish. “Gather up the fragments left over,” he says, “so that nothing may be lost.”
These instructions from Jesus suggest that no matter how miraculously abundant our resources, there isn’t enough to waste carelessly. The words “so that nothing may be lost” also foreshadow Jesus’s prayer at the end of his earthly ministry, describing how he guarded and protected the people entrusted to him, so that “not one of them was lost” (John 17:12).
The crumbs matter, because Jesus asked us to gather and care for them after he took, blessed, and broke bread. The crumbs matter, because small contributions are how God closes the gap between the little we have and the vast needs of the world.
And the crumbs matter in a special way today. The crowd of many thousands of people in today’s gospel has come to Jesus for one reason: they’re desperate to know what can be done for the sick. What they find instead is a sign that little children have tremendous value. And they find a reminder that our small actions have exponential effects.
© 2021 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas