Good Questions: Uncertainty, Jesus Feeding the Multitudes, and How to Stop Wrongdoing

Uncertainty

Dear Dr. Tom: I cannot shake the feeling that everything I believe in—everything good and honest and beautiful—has fallen into disfavor in the country I love and call home. I try to quiet my mind through meditation, but when my quiet time ends the world awaiting me thrashes upside-down. I might seek professional counseling. Can you offer any guidance from theology or metaphysics?

—Distraught in Detroit

Dear Distraught: First, this is a good time to affirm divine order in all things. Even when circumstances feel out of control, I know there is an unseen force operating to bring about the highest good. Health, prosperity, and harmonious relationships are the norm, and left to its own devices life will bend toward these natural consequences.

Some of my agnostic friends will raise their eyebrows at any suggestion of unseen spiritual powers lurking behind the scenes, getting ready for intervention like Cinderella’s fairy godmother. And I quite agree. Divine order isn’t magical or even super-natural. So, to make the spooky abstracts a bit more tangible, let’s add evolutionary science to your list of resources.

Look at the natural world. It’s not a Disney movie out there, folks. Evolution works by trial and error. It seeks balance between resources and needs, but the balancing act of nature can be painful. Most species to evolve on this world long ago vanished to extinction. Successful species survived and thrived only by adapting and outlasting the changes in climate, withstanding the competitive pressures from other life forms, and learning how to find food and shelter as the world changed around them.

In other words, by trusting their gifts of intelligence and problem solving in whatever environmental niche they found themselves. That is how divine order works. Be true to yourself while swimming within the tide.

Too often humans complicated the picture by sparring over who’s in charge and who gets the most speared fish and coconuts. In times of crisis, spiritual leaders reminded people to turn inward to seek guidance and outward to reconcile with their gods and neighbors. Instead, time and again people turned to ambitious leaders with disastrous results.

This brings us to a few suggestions about spiritual practices for any circumstance when the world seems out of control. Here’s my formula. Take a stiff dose of the Psalter twice daily. I recommend starting with my favorite, the Shepherd’s Psalm 23, followed by one called the Magnificat of the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 146. A few key verses speak prophetically to social turmoil throughout the ages:

Do not put your trust in princes,

in mortals, in whom there is no help.

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,

whose hope is in the Lord their God,

who made heaven and earth.

The Lord will reign forever,

your God, O Zion, for all generations.

Praise the Lord!

The great teachers and saints of humankind frequently endured challenges far worse than we face today. We will come through whatever lies ahead by placing our faith in the slow-grinding mills of God, the arc of the moral universe, divine order, or whatever mechanism you believe operates within the fabric of reality to balance the yin and yang of existence. No fairy godmothers required.

Jesus Feeding the Multitudes

Dear Dr. Tom: What kind of fish would have been eaten at the feeding of the multitude? I am interested in the deep symbolism, since the Bible is our textbook when understood “metaphysically” (meaning symbolically).

—D.R., Lee’s Summit, Missouri

Dear D.R.: Not just fish on the miracle menu. Don’t forget the loaves. Unity cofounder Charles Fillmore, in his comprehensive work on symbolism, Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, said the “loaves” of bread represent substance, and the "fishes" are ideas of increase. That’s a whole semester in a sentence, so let’s stick to probable history and surrounding legends.

According to the gospels, Jesus fed the multitudes twice, with 7,000 and 4,000 attending respectively. Since we’re dealing with reported miracles, this could be one legend fragmented by oral tradition before the gospels were penned. The story seems to take place near the village of Tabgha. If so, they probably ate freshwater tilapia from the nearby Sea of Galilee, or sardines and salted salmon from the Mediterranean Sea.

Some commentators have suggested the key to understanding what’s happening here is not by dissecting the fish to look for secret symbolism, but to watch Jesus take the free offering of a young believer and distribute it to thousands with miraculous results.

People flocked to Jesus, not to hear a lesson on Jewish moral ethics, but because he was a traveling healer in a world with little medical care. They brought the sick and lame to him, and he apparently succeeded in providing some relief.

They met in the countryside, away from authorities who might disapprove of his methods. The savvy folks who followed Jesus wouldn’t show up in rural country without bringing food and drink to sustain them. Likely, when they saw the meager love offering, they broke out their travel packages and staged the equivalent of a tailgate party for the fans of this young traveling rabbi, Yeshua ben Yosef.

Not as glitzy as a supernatural event. No hidden secret meaning in the smoked tilapia with a side order of bread and sardines. But divine miracle nonetheless.

How to Stop Wrongdoing

Dear Dr. Tom: If we are not to judge, how do we stop others, or ourselves, from doing wrong?

—Better Judgment, Online Submission

Dear Better-J: It’s a semantics thing. The idea of going through life without making judgment calls makes no rational or biblical sense. The Greek New Testament word used by Jesus in the “judge not” passage of the Sermon on the Mount is κρίνω, pronounced krinō. Taken out of context, Mattthew 7:1 does sound like Jesus is saying never critically examine anyone’s behavior.

However, in Luke 7:43, Jesus explicitly selects a similar word when his chief disciple, Simon Peter, evaluates the actions of a forgiving master. “And Jesus said to him, ‘You have judged rightly.’”

The teaching point Jesus was apparently making was that unjust, angry judgments are like boomerangs that fly back at us by generating similar reactions in other people. This is an extraordinarily important lesson to remember in the bitter and divisive sociopolitical environment in which we live and move and have our being. Even when other people see the world so differently from me that I have trouble inhabiting the same reality with them, I must remember that disagreement does not need to travel with angry disapproval as its guidepost.

Jesus reserved his harshest criticism for hypocrites of his day, whose motives overcame their God-given, divine-human nature and drove them to disparage anyone who did not walk their path.

We can’t stop others from “doing wrong.” The only person I control is the one facing me in the mirror each morning, and then only on a good day. Bless, release, forgive, and follow the examples of so many great ones who walk among us. And judge not yourself.