2 Kings 4:42-44 Psalm 145: 10-19
Ephesians 3:14-21 John 6:1-21
In this church calendar year, we are reading
predominately from the Gospel of Mark; however today and for the next four
weeks we are given reading assignments from John’s Gospel, the sixth
chapter. We begin with the
multiplication of loaves from John’s particular edition of this event. And this event is expanded into a long
discourse of Jesus that is called the bread of heaven discourse. John’s Gospel has long discourses from the
mouth of Jesus in the first person and these are not included in the other
three Gospels. Scholars variously contend that these discourses were taken from
the secret instruction that Jesus gave to the 12 disciples or they in fact may
be the development of teaching and preaching within the community of the
beloved disciple in the late part of the first century. Words that are attributed to Jesus may have
come from the disciples who believed that they had permission from Jesus to
speak in his name in the power of the Holy Spirit. So the apostles believed that were inspired
enough to speak as an oracle of Christ.
Only modern people who speak about authorship, intellectual property and
plagiarism would call such attribution dishonest. The words of Jesus and the Spirit come from God
belong to God and nobody can take exclusive credit for them. Of course, if I prefaced something like this
to you: “The Lord told me to tell you to
give the church, a million dollars”…you naturally would be quite skeptical,
even though I preface each sermon with the presumption of speaking in the name
of God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Each person has their own way of determining what might be a genuine
word of God for him self or her self.
The writer of John’s Gospels uses templates
from the Hebrew Scriptures to retell the life of Jesus and its
significance. Jesus was someone new and
profound in terms of a revelation but Jesus was also in continuity with the
Hebraic tradition. He was presented as a
fulfillment and update of the Hebraic traditions.
The Hebraic tradition included celebration of
certain feasts and the Gospel of John and the discourses of Jesus present his
teaching about replacements of those feasts.
It is most likely that when the final edition of John was written that
the church and the synagogue were separated.
There was a significant population of non-Jews in the Christian communities;
there were non-Palestinian Jews and many Jews who lived in the Diaspora
migration of Jews into the Roman cities of the Palestine
and Asia Minor region. The Gospel of John has many descriptions of
Jewish terms and customs and such descriptions would have been totally
unnecessary in the time of Jesus because they would have been commonly assumed
knowledge of Jewish customs.
Today’s appointed Gospel is a retelling of
the multiplication of loaves stories.
And it is followed by story of the calming of the storm and Jesus
walking upon the water. This is also a
part of the section called the Book of Signs; there are seven signs that are
presented in John’s Gospel. Feeding of
the multitude and the calming of the sea are two of the signs. These two signs revisit the setting of the
feast of Passover. The Gospel writer
states that the time of the signs was the approaching feast of Passover. Passover was a family feast that was originally
held by the Hebrew families who were preparing for their exodus from Egypt Red
Sea through the intervention of Moses, so that the Hebrew people
could escape from the army of the Pharaoh.
And once the Hebrew people
crossed the Red Sea , they were stuck in the
wilderness. And how were they fed in the
wilderness? They were given miraculous
bread from heaven called Manna.
Do you see how the Gospel writer was
retelling the story of Jesus using the Hebrew Scripture themes as the
template? But this multiplication of
loaves event will be expanded in the discourse to be evidence of the practice
of the early Christian community of making Christ present as heavenly food and
drink in the Eucharistic feast of bread and wine. So the Passover and the manna in the
wilderness event are used to teach about the practice of breaking of bread in
the early Christian community.
If the original setting for this Gospel
writing is far from us both in time and culture, how do you I find something in
this to edify our own minds, souls, spirit and community today?
First, of all we should not assume that the
ancient writers were literalists. They were
adept at using figurative language. They
did not fall into the modern trap of thinking that something that could be
verified by the eyes of a witnessing journalist was the only thing that was
true. The truth occurs when signs of God
bring us to have faith and to believe that our lives are worthwhile.
The truth of our Eucharistic faith is this;
we are a people on pilgrimage and in our earthly pilgrimage we need the company
of people and the help and presence of God.
The Passover became the Eucharist because unlike the Passover, the
Eucharist is eaten with more than just flesh and blood relatives. The Eucharist is a family meal of those who
have come to know themselves as sons and daughters of God. Jews in the time of Jesus would not have
shared their food in such a large gathering.
They would have hidden their picnic lunches; they would not have eaten
the food of someone else, since they could not have been certain of whether it
was prepared according to their dietary rules.
The little boy who shared his picnic lunch did so out of the pure heart
of a child and Jesus took that gift from the boy’s heart and offered
“eucharist” that is Greek verb for
thanksgiving. Offering something to God
means that it is blessed and purified for sharing. And suddenly there was food for many. We need to get over our fears to share; often
we minimize our gifts as being too small or inappropriate, but gathered and
combined with the gifts of others they provide the eucharist that could feed
the world, if we really, really were serious about Eucharist. And so there is a lesson in sharing about the
eucharist; we should not separate the multiplication of bread on the altar from
the need of many people in our world to have bread. If we are ever really successful as a Eucharistic
people worldwide, then hunger will be eradicated. And so there is that hope for us to aspire
for in this story of the multiplication of loaves.
But we need also to remember that it is not
just about our hunger or world hunger.
Jesus would have been king of the world if he just did tricks to feed
everyone. The ministry of Jesus was not
to be a bread-making machine. As we know
from the society of those with excess having plenty or too much bread does not
make us any more adept at understanding the word of God or God’s purposes for
us. So there is a spiritual purpose for
us to learn about bread of another sort.
That bread is food for the mind and spirit.
I think that there is something for us to
learn about the logic of the signs or miracles of Christ. Did you ever wonder about the multiplication
of loaves? If this was a miracle, why
did not God and Christ do a prior and greater miracle of eradicating hunger in
the first place? If Jesus could calm the
sea and walk on the water for the disciples, why did he not do a prior miracle
of keeping the storm away in the first place?
And if God and Jesus accomplished the resurrection from the dead, why
did they not abolish and prevent death in the first place? Do you see how fuzzy our thinking can get
when we are so certain about the specifics of the miracles?
We have hunger, storms and death in life
because that is reality of the human experience. That reality is accepted by God and Jesus
since they obviously tolerate lots of hunger, storms and death in human life.
So what is the point? The point is that the Gospel message is not
God and Jesus being unrealistic about hunger or storms or death; the point of
the Gospel is that Jesus is the event of a sign of knowing God’s presence in
some telling way in the midst of hunger, storms and finally in death itself.
The Gospel is not escape from life as it is;
it is finding the presence of Christ as a sustaining presence in the midst of
life as it is. And we really don’t need
religious escapism. We need religious
realism or faith that is honest to God, honest to human experience of life.
In our hunger for what we need today let us
look for the sign of Christ, not in mere material reality but in the
extraordinary that comes in the midst of the ordinary. In the storms of our life, let us find the
presence of Christ who is God with us, not in life as we wish it might be, but
in life as it is.
Jesus in our hunger. Jesus in our storms. Jesus in our life. Jesus in our death. Jesus as true to the full
extent of human experience. Amen.
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