"My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together." “When I hear people say politics and religion don't mix, I wonder what Bible they are reading.” (Archbishop Desmond Tutu)

"And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, and to love kindness and mercy, and to humble yourself and walk humbly with your God?" Micah 6.8

"Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." Philippians 4.19

"Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." Philippians 2.12



Saturday, July 25, 2015

The Feeding of the multitude: John 6.1-21




After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.

I don’t know whether it is something to do with the street I live in but this time of year seems to me to be characterised by the smell of barbeques.

I must be deeply anti-social or I have some other personality defect but I don’t find chasing paper plates around someone’s garden in the teeth of a gale, while balancing a cup of indifferent wine and avoiding ketchup stains and salmonella, a recipe for unbridled fun.

Today’s Gospel, though not exactly describing a barbeque on the Galilean hills, tells of Jesus meeting the needs of his hungry followers. When I was thinking about how best to approach this reading I had a look at a book by the theologian Canon Dr. Jeffrey John called “The Meaning in the Miracles.” He wittily relates how as a schoolboy two of his teachers had approached the miracles in contrasting ways and this really resonated with me because I had a similar experience when I first started teaching. One of my colleagues, Mr. Forest, a Biology teacher embodied the literalist or fundamentalist approach to scripture where everything was to be taken at the plainest level of meaning and must have happened exactly as it said. His response to this miracle would be to say “Well, it just goes to show that Jesus is God, doesn’t it?” Doubting that a miracle story happened exactly as it was recorded was tantamount to doubting the divinity of Christ.

Mrs. King, my first R.S. Head of Department, on the other hand, took the reductionist approach, wanting to “demythologise” the miracle accounts to reveal the morals within the stories. In this case the moral to her was that when Jesus fed the five thousand, he and the disciples shared out what they had and their example encouraged others who had been holding back their own food to share theirs too. The “real” miracle was when everyone discovered the joy of caring and sharing with others.

She referred to him as a snake-handling Baptist and he referred to her as a wet, liberal Anglican.

I didn’t sit with them in the staffroom.

Life’s too short.

While their approaches seem diametrically opposed, they were in fact quite similar in the sense that they both treated the miracles as straightforward descriptions of events: they concentrated simply on what did or did not happen. Dr. John, on the other hand, concludes that the real nature and purpose of the Gospel miracles is found in the depths and dimensions of meaning found in the account and these passed both the teachers by completely.

The problem with Mr. Forrest’s approach where miracles simply exist to prove the divinity of Jesus is that it can say very little else about the event because it either rejects or simply doesn’t understand any symbolism at the heart of the stories. The problem with Mrs. King’s approach as a call to greater charity is that it hardly sounds like good news and certainly not a tremendous demonstration of God’s free, miraculously overflowing generosity to his people.

What I discovered, before I gave up on them and went and sat with the Maths Department, was there was no middle ground between them. For where two or three are gathered together in my name….there will inevitably be an argument. (To paraphrase Matthew 18).

But I digress.

This was the day Jesus was trying to get away from the crowd. Jesus crossed the sea and climbed a mountain just to get away and get some time for prayer. He often took some time out, insisted on getting some quiet time; some prayer time. Jesus modelled for us that no matter what you're involved in, you¹ve got to make time for God, time for reflection and time to listen to God – a good learning point for us all.

Well, on this particular day, Jesus had crossed the Sea of Galilee and climbed up a mountain; he’d sat down to catch his breath, looked up, and can you believe it? Here they come. The crowd had somehow found their way to Jesus: here they came scrambling up the mountain to be with Jesus.

So, let’s look again at the story and, two thousand years down the line we don’t instantly recognise the subtext as the original listeners and readers would have, and that diminishes our understanding of the Gospel. There are so many layers to the miracle stories.

Now in this passage notice that John tells us the crowd “saw the signs.” This would have had Mr. Forrest and Mrs. King arguing straight away, so let’s be clear. In John’s gospel, miracles are signs that point beyond themselves – to God. Every time Jesus performs a miracle he is saying something about God and about himself in relation to God. The miracles are not important merely because this or that person is healed or because Jesus changes water to wine or whatever. The miracles are signs that point to the reality of who Jesus is. Yes the crowd gathered for healing, but they kept following him because of the signs, even if they didn’t yet fully understand the implications.

Perhaps the most obvious theological emphasis of this feeding miracle is to tell us that Jesus is the new Moses. Even with a sketchy knowledge of the Old Testament most people are likely to remember that Moses had done something similar with the manna in the desert. Like Moses Jesus crosses the water into the desert, sits the people down and feeds them with miraculous bread in such abundance that there are basketfuls left over. Much less obviously, because this Old Testament story is perhaps less well known, Jesus’ actions also recall Elisha. Some of the details of the feeding stories reflect an incident in 2 Kings when Elisha takes an army into the desert and feeds them miraculously with a few loaves.

Taking Moses and Elisha together, the story seems to be hinting that in repeating what Moses did, Jesus is fulfilling the Law and, in repeating what Elisha did, Jesus is fulfilling the Prophets. Whatever else this feeding miracle is intended to teach us, it also reaches us that Jesus is truly the one whom the Law and the Prophets foretold.

Some commentators go further: the words and actions of Jesus over the bread are exactly the same as at the Last Supper. The association with Moses and the Exodus here, in what we are told was the Passover season, points to the new Christian Passover, the Eucharist.

These are the signposts which point to Jesus’ divinity and to the readers and listeners of the day they must have been akin to flashing neon lights which spelt out the truths, hopes, patterns and meanings and modern relevance of the Old Testament scriptures those elements represented.

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy). Only all too often we have lost the key and therefore miss many of the nuances.

What should this mean for us today? When we read the miracle of the feeding of the multitude, how should we react? Well, perhaps the best response is the one provided by scripture itself, the discourse of Jesus on the Bread of Life in John’s Gospel. In John, it's Jesus himself who will become the real food:

“I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from Heaven so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from Heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Jesus understood all too well that if he let people claim him as their physical provider, they would miss the reason for his coming. His intent was to point them beyond their physical needs to their spiritual ones. He wanted them to look not merely to bread, the most meagre sustenance of the poor. “The bread you will eat”, John tells us Jesus said, “is my flesh.” In a profound spiritual sense, Jesus wants his followers to understand that their communion with him, their participation in his very life, will lead to new levels of maturity and understanding.  

What would Mr. Forrest and Mrs. King have made of it all, I wonder?

 



 


 

1 comment:

  1. Very good. Thank you. I am always bothered by the attempt to explain rationally how the things might have realistically occurred. IMO that is succumbing to the same literalist thinking that also bothers me.

    I often tell the story of going to see a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago many years past. I wisely chose to rent the recorded audio tour do I might learn something beyond staring at endless paintings of the same haystack. This was the largest collection of the haystack paintings displayed in one place. What I learned was that Monet wasn't painting haystacks, he was painting light. Autumn morning light. Spring dusk. High noon.

    It seems to me that to get caught up in the literalist arguments is to focus on the haystacks. The events in the gospels aren't about the "haystacks" - they're about the Light. Peace.

    Rev. Deacon Larry

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