What Is That Among So Many

He has been standing by the gate of the courtyard for a good while now with a small covered bowl in both hands, waiting for a gap at the table that is somehow never quite there.

The table is doing what those tables do in late afternoon. Somebody keeps arriving with something else. A tray came out under a cloth and got set down and the cloth came off and there was a noise from the whole courtyard. A woman is arranging things to make room and has already moved the same platter twice. Under the vine at the far end, three men are laughing at a story that has been going for ten minutes and has not reached the point.

And he is at the gate with his bowl, which is small, and covered, and has in it a plain thing he made himself, and it took him longer than anybody would guess.

He could walk over and put it down. That is all this requires. Eight steps, a gap between two dishes, set it down, take the lid off, go and get a bench. He has been about to do it for six or seven minutes.

Here is what stops him, and I want to say it accurately, because it is not shyness. It is the arithmetic. He can see the table. He can see what is on it. And he can see his bowl, and he has done the sum, and the sum comes out the way it always comes out: what is this, among so many. Not wrong. He is not being hard on himself. It is genuinely small next to that table, and he is a man who tells himself the truth.

And it goes further than the bowl, because it always does. If somebody at that table turns and asks him what he has been up to this year, his honest answer would fit in one sentence, and it would be the same sentence as last year. His year has been the same three streets, and one person who needs him at the same hours every day, and a job that does not travel, and one Tuesday evening a week. He is not ashamed of any of it, exactly. He simply cannot see how it would sound out loud at a table like that, in front of people whose years have shape and distance and things to report.

So he stands at the gate with the lid still on. And what he would say, if you got him alone and he were being completely honest, is not that his life is bad. It is that his life is small, and he does not know how to bring something that small into a room this full without it looking like an apology.

Maybe you are at your own gate holding your own covered bowl. Everything you have would fit on one shelf. And you are not asking anybody to be impressed. You just do not know how to offer it in front of people.

The arithmetic is right, and it is not the point

There is a day in the gospel where a whole crowd is out on a hillside past supper time, and one of the disciples goes and finds the only food in the place, and it is a boy's lunch, and Andrew brings it and says the most honest sentence in the story.

There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?John 6:9

Hear the tone of that. Andrew is not sneering at the boy. Andrew is not saying the lunch is pitiful or that the boy should have brought more. He is doing exactly what the man at the gate is doing, which is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is correct. Five loaves. Two fish. Five thousand men, plus the women and children nobody counted. There is no version of that sum that comes out different. Andrew is right.

And Jesus takes the lunch anyway.

That is the hinge of the whole story and it goes past most people. Nobody in that account argues with the numbers. Nobody tells Andrew he is being negative or tells the boy his lunch is secretly bigger than it looks. The smallness of the lunch is never denied and never corrected. It is simply handed over, and after that the size of the lunch stops being the operative fact in the field.

You are not wrong about the size of what you are holding, and being right about it has never once disqualified you from the table. John 6:9 has the smallness said out loud by a disciple standing next to Jesus and nobody rebukes him for it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written sum from a hillside and sets it beside a man at a courtyard gate so that he can stop trying to talk himself into thinking his bowl is bigger.

And notice what the boy is never asked to do. He is not asked to make the lunch grow before he hands it over. He is not asked to explain why he came out with so little. He is not asked to feel any particular way about it. He is asked for the lunch.

You are welcome to bring exactly what you have, uncorrected, and nothing is added to it before it is received. It is written in John 6 that they took the loaves, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an old handover on a hillside into a bowl actually going down on an actual table this afternoon.

He is the difference, and He always was

Now what happens next in the story, because this is where the small life gets fed rather than commended.

And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.John 6:11

As much as they would. Not a taste each. Not a careful ration handed round a hungry field. They ate until they were done wanting more, out of five loaves and two fish, and when it was finished there were twelve baskets of pieces left over, which is more food at the end than there was at the start.

And I want you to see who did that, because it matters for the man at the gate. The boy did not do it. The lunch did not do it. There was nothing latent in five barley loaves waiting to be released by the right attitude. Jesus took them, and He gave thanks, and He was the difference. The boy's whole part was the handing over, and his whole reward was sitting on the grass eating with everybody else.

You have a place on the grass tonight, and the size of what you brought is not what buys the seat. John 6:11 says He distributed to them that were set down, as much as they would, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries that off a hillside into a courtyard where somebody has been standing at the gate for ten minutes doing sums.

And let me say one thing plainly to some of you, because it needs saying and it does not need decorating. Some lives are small by force and not by choice. Illness decided it, or somebody who needs you decided it, or a loss decided it, and nobody asked you. I am not going to hand you a page that admires your small life as though you had chosen it out of wisdom, and I am not going to tell you to make peace with the size. God is not grading the size. He is at the table you are standing next to, and the bowl in your hands is not too small to go down on it.

You were never being measured by the size of the year you could report, and the arithmetic was never the thing standing between you and the meal. It is written that He took what was there and gave thanks over it, and His Spirit is the One who makes that true of an ordinary Tuesday and not only of a famous afternoon on a hill.