July 31, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Waiting for Clark Kent

Matthew J. Helms
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 126
Genesis 32:22–31
Matthew 14:13–21

If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.
Mother Teresa

Glorious God, your generosity floods the world with goodness, and you shower creation with abundance. Yet often we meet you in the night of change and crisis and wrestle with you in the darkness of doubt. Give us the will and spirit to live faithfully and love as we are loved. Awaken in us a hunger for food to satisfy both body and heart, that in the miracle of being fed, we may be empowered to feed others in Jesus’ name. Amen.

One of my college writing professors once shared that if you want to make a scene memorable, you need to be able take something from ordinary life and make it mysterious and extraordinary. The stories of Jacob wrestling God and the feeding of the 5,000 each qualify as inherently memorable—in large part because they are both mysterious and quite literally “beyond ordinary.” Walter Brueggemann writes in his commentary on Genesis that this wrestling story has inspired more interpreters throughout history than any of the other stories from the patriarchs. The feeding of the 5,000 is the only miracle story to appear in all four Gospels. These stories are ones that were woven into cultural and religious history, informing us of the values that were underlying in each group and giving this group lessons about how they should live their lives. However, before we dive in to exegeting these stories, it is important for us to do a little cultural exegesis on our own times. So I ask, what do you think are modern stories and themes that seem to be woven into the fabric of our American culture? Is it tales of underdogs succeeding? Looking for the American dream? Family/community?

While these are all certainly core pieces of our popular fiction and nonfiction, no story seems to be bigger right now than that of the superhero—someone who has been gifted with extraordinary powers and who is able to stop a seemingly unstoppable villain. From the continued success of comic book movies like Spiderman and Batman to the Harry Potter series, our culture seems to truly be fascinated with this idea of a particularly gifted and special individual who is able to make everything better.

As a recovering comic book nerd, I’ve got to admit that this fascination has been kind of fun for me. I used to ride my bike a few miles to the nearest comic book store for new issues of X-Men and Spiderman every week, and my friends and I would get into frequent discussions about what the best super powers would be. I used to climb trees pretending to be Spiderman, and I’d put sticks between my fingers pretending to be Wolverine. There was even a time when I was younger when I was convinced that it was my destiny to be a superhero and to save the world. While I doubt that many of you ever harbored such delusions of grandeur, there are other ways in which this mindset can stay with us even as adults. Perhaps you are like me and you’ve wished that you were as rich as Bill Gates so you could use your money to help others, or you’ve imagined yourself as President of the United States, making all of the tough but correct decisions.

I think we dream up these scenarios not out of vanity but because we have both a deep desire to fix things and a deep distrust in our own ability to make an impact. We live in a time when the scope of our problems seems far larger than any normal person could handle, and so we end up feeling like we need a superhero to come and fix them. Last year’s film Waiting for Superman examined the education within the U.S.—albeit from only one perspective—but it ultimately made the argument that we are waiting for someone to swoop in with new policies rather than digging into the hard work of educational reform. Many of us have felt powerless watching the gridlock and party politics surrounding the debt ceiling these past weeks and months and have ended up hoping for someone to swoop in with a magic solution. And then there are chronic problems such as poverty and hunger, each of which seem to, again, need something that goes far beyond what any normal human being can do.

Since we as a culture seem to want stories about individuals who are superheroes, it is not hard to imagine that we bring that lens to both of our stories today. Indeed, both Jacob and Jesus appear do things that we would label as supernatural: Jacob somehow wrestles with God overnight without tiring, while Jesus somehow provides food for 5,000 people out of five loaves and two fishes. These two scenes match up even further to our modern vision of a superhero: Jacob changes his name to Israel as though this were Clark Kent suddenly Superman in the telephone booth. While looking online, I found an action figure of Jesus that had dividing loaves and fishes, as well as a jar where water became wine. So if we have changing identities and action figures, I think we have to ask, aren’t these really just ancient superhero stories?

However, even though some of the surface details seem to back this up, a closer look at movement within these stories suggests that they are actually quite the opposite. The story of Jacob wrestling God comes from the middle of Jacob’s wider narrative. Many of you may remember that we first meet Jacob when he tricks his father into blessing him rather than his older brother, Esau, a ruse that soon forces Jacob to run away from Esau. Jacob then goes on to deceive a farmer named Laban, who had deceived him, and again he is forced to run away. Far from being any sort of a superhero, Jacob enters into this scene continually running from his problems and never willing to stay and wrestle with them. But then, on the banks of the Jabbok River, Jacob finds himself wrestling with a mysterious and shadowy man, a faceless encounter in which we can envision Jacob wrestling with all of his past transgressions and trickery. Amazingly, they are still wrestling at daybreak, until what seems like a bizarre footnote in the story: the mysterious man puts Jacob’s hip out of joint and Jacob is left clinging to him.

In the midst of a story in which Jacob receives the new name of Israel and seemingly triumphs, Walter Brueggemann highlights this injury and Jacob’s subsequent limp as proof that this name change and blessing do not in any way make Jacob superhuman. Despite being chosen by God to begin this new nation of Israel, Jacob is still just a human being with a very human injury, an injury that will specifically prevent him from running away like he has in the past. Rather than a throwaway line in this seemingly epic struggle, Jacob’s injury is a significant marker of his new identity.

So if this story is not about Jacob as superhero, how would an ancient audience have heard it? In Hebrew, the name Jacob (ya-akov) meant “heel” or “circumventer,” an allusion to his earlier proclivity to deceit. However, his new name of Israel means “persevere with God,” a clear communal identity for a small nation that constantly needed to persevere against poor odds. For the ancient Israelites, God remained the source of all authority and power, and yet they as a community would be defined by their resistance no matter how human and frail it was. This story of Jacob wrestling God was no superhero story; it was encouragement from Israel’s history of human struggle.

Just as the wrestling story does not portray Jacob as a superhero, the feeding of the 5,000 does not portray Jesus in that light either. Cliff Kirkpatrick, the former Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), argues that this story is actually primarily about what it means to be a disciple. First, we are given a clear demonstration from Jesus that we are not only to attend to spiritual needs but also physical ones. It would have been very easy for Jesus to dismiss the crowds after speaking with them, but instead Jesus insists that they be fed with actual food as well. Jesus goes on to bless the collected loaves and fishes, but it is remarkably the disciples who feed the crowds in this account from Matthew. As Cliff Kirkpatrick notes, “Jesus did not feed 5,000. He told the disciples to do it. God has entrusted us to be the body of Christ—the hands and feet through which God’s work is done in the world. God does not work alone, but through people—you and me.” Kirkpatrick’s observation is important, because it shows us that Jesus is not acting like a superhero in this story. Instead, feeding these people becomes entrusted to the disciples, the Clark and Claire Kents, the imperfect human beings. “When Jesus told the disciples to feed the 5,000”, Kirkpatrick says, “the disciples surely thought it was impossible. The needs were so great and the resources so few. Haven’t we all felt the same? However, when the disciples worked together and followed Jesus, they discovered that they had more than enough.”

We each have a deep desire to fix things, but we also have a deep distrust in our own ability to make an impact. Many of us give both time and money to those who are in need, but often we question how much of an impact we are making, because we know that the needs are so great and our resources are so few. However, if we as disciples of Jesus are the ones entrusted with the task of feeding and helping this world, we should not be waiting on a superhero to do the work for us. We should instead offer what we can, trusting that the God who provides will help us discover that we have more than enough to offer out of our limitations, just as the disciples discovered that they too had more than enough.

The feeding of the 5,000 is a great reminder to our modern culture of how there is power in weakness, but it also was an equally important lesson to its ancient audience. Just as our popular culture wants a superhero to solve our problems, the Jewish people of the first century wanted a messiah who would be a great warrior and king, roughly the equivalent of a first-century superhero. There were many popular stories about how this messiah would defeat the Romans and create a new era for the Jewish people. Instead, Jesus’ messiahship was defined by his humility and weakness, dying on the cross before being raised by God.

Jesus refused to be the superhero messiah that the people wanted, instead entrusting the great power of the gospel into the hands of the disciples, in all of their human frailty and weakness. We are each given gifts by God through the Spirit, but ultimately the greatest gift that we have been given is that we do not need to be superheroes. As the Apostle Paul once wrote, “If I must boast, I will boast only of the things that show my weakness.” Being a disciple does not mean that our lives will be free of struggle and pain. One only needs to look at Jacob’s painful wrestling with God as an example of what it means to struggle and persevere. But just like Jacob, it is only when we stop avoiding problems and we wrestle with them that we might know God’s blessing and grace. Jacob was able to limp away as Israel—the one who perseveres with God—not as a superhero but as someone who found power in weakness. Our world is not waiting for Superman; it’s waiting for Clark and Claire Kent, regular people like you and me, to offer what we can and to discover, just like the disciples did, that our five loaves and two fishes are more than enough. Amen.