Wouldn't it be more helpful if Jesus were a tad less miraculous?

For one of my midterms (I cannot believe it's already midterms, nor that I've been on and off ill the entire semester), I was asked to tell a story from my internship experience and reflect on it theologically.

Briefly, the story I told was about a woman who comes to the weekly community dinner and was "caught" one time carrying bags of food collected for a different ministry out to her car, ostensibly for her own use. Because of this experience, the food is now hauled into the office and locked up if staff are not present. The woman showed up on my watch last week and asked what the food was for and could she take some. I told her I thought it was being collected for "Ministry X" and wasn't available for distribution. She told me it wasn't for her but rather for a "very poor friend" who could use even a can or two of soup. I told her to stop back after dinner when some of the staff would be back to see if anything was available. She did and both the staff person and the minister turned her away. No one seemed upset about the situation and it appeared this was almost a weekly ritual in which the only one not clued in on the script was me.

The situation left me thinking about a number of things:

• Was there really a "friend" in need? If so, why didn't she bring him along to the community dinner for a hot meal?
• If there was no "friend" why would she feel the need to invent one? Does the story of a friend do anything to further her cause to others or is it a way for her to "save face" and distance herself from her own poverty?
• What is to be gained by hanging onto every bit of food collected for some other ministry that feeds hungry people when there may have been a case of someone being hungry and in need right in front of us. Were the unrepresented hungry people somehow more important than the ones in our presence?

Then I got to thinking about some of the famous stories of the mythical Jesus feeding hungry people. In the loaves and fishes stories there are varying numbers of loaves, fishes and people, but the end result is the same -- gobs of people are fed until satisfied from a meagre amount of food. Not only that, but there are plenty of leftovers. While that tells a pretty amazing story, that does little to help us today. What about these community outlets where there are plenty of hungry people but only so many bags of groceries. I would have liked to see how the Jesus depicted in these gospel stories would have triaged the situation.

While the loaves and fishes stories are supposed to give us hope and inspire all of us to share our resources, and I totally agree that we could do a much better job of sharing and no one would go hungry, what about the very real daily struggles of feeding the masses now who don't have time to snack on a pretty story about what could be? Would it really have killed the gospels if once in a while Jesus were a tad less miraculous so we could see how the human Jesus would have handled the situation without the God-part jumping in?

We're all part God and part human, but I don't see a whole lot of people who can take a couple of cans of beans and some rice, feed a few thousand people, and still end up with a stack of to-go boxes at the end of the meal. The coordinator of the community dinner I participate in is good, but even she isn't a miracle worker.