The Limitless Love of God: Lessons from the Feeding of the Multitudes

We have in the Armenian Church a book which we use. In Armenian, we call it Dzasan. It is also otherwise known, or if you translate Dzasan into English, it’s like a book of liturgies or rituals. So this book of rituals is the book that we use when we are conducting services in the Armenian Church, besides the Divine Liturgy, which we experience today, and besides our daily prayer hours. So these include services like baptisms, weddings, funerals, other special services, Antastan, which is the blessing of the four corners of the world, which we perform on special occasions, and many, many more. Some of these will be familiar to you. And in the books that we have, particularly here in the United States or in the West or in other areas, you’ll find translations in that book. For example, most of our books have Armenian and English. I have a book, I have the Etchmiadzin Mashtots. We also call it a Mashtots. That’s colloquially what we also call it, because many of these services and their origins can date back to a document which we call the Mair Mashtots, of course, referring to St. Mesrop Mashtots, who was the originator of the written form of the Armenian language, our alphabet. So these are early documents which tell us how it is that we conducted these rituals in the Armenian Church.

So I have a Mashtots from Holy Etchmiadzin, which is only in classical Armenian. I have a Mashtots from Tehran, which is in classical Armenian and in Eastern Armenian with modern orthography. I have a Mashtots from Antelias, which is in classical Armenian and in Western Armenian. I have a Mashtots, of course, several Mashtotses from our dioceses in North America that are in English and Armenian, and several sort of subtle differences in translations of Armenian. And we have others as well. So you can understand in the Armenian Church sometimes it gets a little bit complicated. And on top of that, there are some services that we don’t actually have official translations for, because we don’t perform them so often that maybe we’ve seen the need to offer official translations of them. Maybe sometimes they’re performed and translated off the cuff if the need be, or they’re just performed in the classical Armenian.

Some of these services are a little bit less observed, so maybe they don’t have translations. One example of this would be the blessing of the first time a child’s hair is cut. That’s a service which some people observe, but not many, to be honest, particularly here in the United States. But we did that with my kids. We had the first time a child’s hair is cut service, that ritual and that blessing in the church here, and we kept a lock of their hair. This symbolizes an important moment of growth and transformation in a person’s life, which has biblical foundations as well. It’s also something that we see in the church during the blessing of an acolyte or tabir. In that service, a lock of their hair is cut, again, to symbolize transformation or growth in their life. There are other services like the blessing of holy vessels or books that are used in the church. And I have never seen an official English translation of these services either, though again, they’re translatable, and we can do it on the cuff if need be.

And there’s another service that I was actually called to help translate this past week. A brother in Christ reached out to me and said, “Can you help me translate this service?” It was a service which was being conducted on a less than happy occasion, a special service which thankfully many of us will never have to encounter in our lives, and that is for the funeral of a child. We have a special service for children’s funerals. We don’t have an official translation of that, and so I tried to do my best to help contribute to the translation of this service for the funeral that was held yesterday in Los Angeles, and our prayers go out to the family during this very difficult time.

However, I had never, or at least in a long time, not reviewed or encountered these prayers, and as I was helping the translation of them, I was struck by how deep and how meaningful and how beautiful they were in their content and in their meaning. And what is reinforced at the conclusion of one of the prayers is the relationship that Christ had with children throughout the Gospel, which was in many ways revolutionary. Here in our sanctuary, in fact, we have a stained glass window on the right-hand side of the church, and in that stained glass window is depicted a quote from the Gospel, which is when Christ says, “Do not prevent the children from coming to me, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” There are other passages as well where we see Christ interacting with children in a very special way, not only because of his love for all of humanity and creation, but because for him and in his teachings and through him, we understand that the outlook that children have in this world is particularly important for us to know and appreciate because it’s this outlook that can help bring us closer to God.

Sometimes we err when we assume that the state of childhood that Christ is referring to is one of innocence. That’s not what he tells us. But he says we must be like a child if we wish to enter into the kingdom of heaven. He’s not referring to innocence necessarily. That’s not how we, especially as parents, understand children. They are very rarely innocent. They suffer from many of the same maladies that we do as adults when it comes to making mistakes and sometimes doing so knowingly. That’s part of being a human being. But there are other aspects of a child’s outlook on this life and in this world that are very important for us to be aware of.

I’m bringing this up today because today we encounter the story of Christ as his followers were gathered with him, as he was preaching the Sermon on the Mount, and they were so tired, so hungry, they were getting restless, and the disciples come to Christ and they say, “We should send the people home so that they can eat and rest. Otherwise, it’s going to get very difficult for them to be here.” And Christ admonishes the disciples saying, “They have everything that they need here with me.” But yet still they were hungry, and so the fulcrum of this story, the solution comes from a child, a young man who comes to Christ bearing the loaves of bread and the fish that eventually he’ll be giving to the disciples and asking them to pass out that will not be exhausted and will be enough for everybody in the crowd.

So this is very important, I feel like, to note that it was a child that brought this gift to Christ that was then passed on to the disciples. Any adult would be wise enough to know that what they brought with them for lunch would not be enough to feed five thousand people. I think that you and I would understand that the impact of that offering would be minimal to the degree that it would be irrelevant. You would be embarrassed, in fact, to say, “Here, I’ve got the solution. You can just share my lunch with everybody.” But for a child, this logic is not in error. They don’t understand limitations the same way that we do. Like when I go to Target and my son asks me to buy a toy and I say it costs too much money, and he says, “Go to the money store and get more.” He doesn’t understand limited amounts in the same way that you and I do. Children can’t fathom limitations. It’s something that we come to understand and appreciate as we grow old, and the world has its impact on us, and in doing so, we begin to contract and possess and to own, and therefore feel as though we have to be careful with what we have because there’s not enough in the world.

I remember being at camp with Deacon Nishan many years ago when he was a counselor. And I think it was the only time you were a counselor, right, Deacon Nishan? So I remember there was something going on in the cabins where all the children were. There was a commotion. They were running around, they were fighting, they were yelling. And I said, “Well, Deacon Nishan, what’s going on? Why are the kids behaving this way?” And he says, “They’re fighting over brooms.” Because with some amount of indignation, why would adolescent kids be fighting over brooms? The one object in the house that they would never touch if you asked and begged them to. But they had to have brooms. Well, the thing is, we didn’t have enough brooms for all the cabins up at camp. So I turned to Deacon Nishan and I said, “It’s the lot of mankind that when resources are limited, conflict will ensue.” And this is the case when we have this mindset, this limited resource mindset, then from it comes all sorts of negative behavior. Behavior which hurts others, and behavior which is also dangerous for ourselves. We see this impact on the economy. I’m not an economist, but clearly, supply and demand, and we see the effect of that in our lives as well.

Well, the world works one way, but God works a different way. Children understand the way that God works because God is limitless. God is infinite, without beginning and end, and a child can understand that in a way that is intuitive, or at least accept it in a way that adults find it very hard to grasp or appreciate. We’ve seen this recently with these photos which come from the James Webb satellite or spacecraft. We see these pictures of this unimaginably, inconceivably large universe, and people go into existential crisis. How could this be? How could we be looking at a universe which is endless, and what does that mean for who I am and my role in it? But limitlessness is part of understanding who God is. When a child gives his meager lunch to Christ and says, “This is for everybody,” for Christ, it is for everybody, and that is what happens.

This lesson that we take away from the miracle of the loaves and fish and the feeding of the multitudes is a miracle to open our hearts to the concept of limitless, boundless, infinite love. It is very hard for us to accept when we feel like our own love is limited or finite and has to be rationed, has to be saved, has to be portioned out according to value or worth or retribution. Then we fall very far short of the mark of what Christ has created us or has ordained us to do in this life. And we also reinforce a view of this world that makes us more distant and alienates us from Christ, whose love is limitless and infinite. We need to be like that child who brings whatever limited, whatever meager, humble, modest thing that we have to Christ and say, “Make this enough,” and He will. This is what we are called to do. For us as adults, we have to be brave and courageous to do that because we think it’s never enough. For a child, that step is absolutely natural and in line with the world that they’re a part of. Let’s try to adopt and apply that philosophy, that outlook in this life. And in doing so, hopefully we can become a part of the miracle that was exhibited at the Sermon on the Mount on this occasion, growing closer to God and one another for His glory. Amen.