– We are back today in John’s Gospel – actually in the chapter 6 of John’s Gospel and we are going to spend the next four weeks reading from it. I was almost tempted to read the whole thing today, but it’s almost a ten minutes read, so I hope you get a chance to read it at home, it would be really helpful to have the whole thing in mind as you hear those different passages in the coming Sundays.
Interestingly, although we aren’t reading from Mark’s Gospel anymore, we pick up exactly where we left off. If you remember from last week, I told you that in our lectionary we had two short extracts of Mark that left aside what was in the middle – the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on the water. Well, this week, the lectionary comes back to those stories, but we will hear them from John’s point of view.
So why do we have such a thing? Well, as you may remember from our previous study, John is the most developed Gospel of all – it does not only tell stories, it explains stories. And this is certainly very true of this very Chapter. Jesus feeds the 5000, and then the rest of the chapter is dedicated to explain the miracle. In fact, we don’t have “miracles” per se in John’s Gospel. John calls them “signs”, for this very reason that the wonderful deeds Jesus perform are not performed for the show (that’s also true in all the Gospels), moreover, the signs aren’t only an expression of Jesus’s care and compassion – the signs Jesus performs in John’s Gospel have a spiritual significance, and each time John speaks about a “sign”, we will have a long discourse after the sign so we can understand, so we can believe, what’s it’s all about – and that is exactly what happens in this Chapter. Jesus gives the bread to all people to make understand that he himself is the true bread that comes down from heaven.
Our lectionary invites us to spend five weeks on this because, of course, we are a liturgical church, we receive every week the body of Christ – so we want to think deeply about what it means. And it’s especially interesting that we think about it now because this time of pandemic, and the changes in our worship that have occurred because of that, have certainly raised concerns in our minds as we have had to think differently about the way we celebrate communion: receiving “spiritually” rather than “sacramentally”, receiving only the bread, not the wine and so on…We’ll spend more time on that the two last weeks of August, when I would like to really dedicate time the meaning of communion.
For now, we have the story, the “facts”, what happened on that day by the Sea of Tiberias, we’ll come later with John to the spiritual significance. Yet if we want to understand the meaning, we have to be attentive to the story, and so today I would like to point out a few things we really need to notice:
– First thing we need to notice is that the feeding of the 5000 has been reported in all four Gospels, and each time it’s at the center of the Gospel – which gives us a cue that it is a very important passage. Yet John, tells it in a very unique way if we pay attention to the details.
First of all, John places the story close to the feast of the Passover, which is of course this time where the Jews remembered their liberation from Egypt and how they had been fed by the manna sent by God in the wilderness. So we know the story here is not only about material bread.
Then, in John’s story, Jesus takes the initiative of the miracle. If you remember from Mark’s Gospel, each time Jesus does a miracle is when people beg him, fall at his feet. In this case, Jesus asks a question to Philip about how to find bread for the people, when nobody has asked Jesus for food. Besides, in other accounts of the story, people have spent three days listening to Jesus in the wilderness – they would have been really hungry – here people are surrounded by villages and everything happen in the same day, they certainly must have been hungry, yet they were “regular hungry” if you will, not starving, and they would have been able to find food on their way back. They didn’t need a miracle.
So what’s important to notice is that John shows us that Jesus does not act out of compassion in this account of the 5000. It does not mean that Jesus wasn’t compassionate of course, but here it wasn’t his main motive for action.
– So then our question should be, like in a proper investigation: “What was the motive?” Well, we don’t have to look for an answer for very long, we have it in verse 6 of our passage: Jesus asks in order to test Philip, and actually, all the other disciples. And of course, when he does so, he tests us as well, so I would like us to think a bit about that today.
First we have to understand what is a “test”. I guess, for most of us, when we say that a problem, a trial or a temptation in our lives is a “test”, we understand “test” as a student in school, kind of a “pass or fail” thing. We imagine that God wants to see if we are good or bad students, good or bad disciples, good or bad people. Will we overcome the difficulty, or will we be overcome by it? Well, it’s surprising that this kind of thinking is so well spread among Christians because it isn’t what the Scriptures are about. When God “tests” or Jesus “tests”, there is no ready made answer we have to find out, a correct one among all the wrong ones. Rather, tests of faith are opportunities to deepen our relationship with God, to grow and to mature spiritually: There comes a problem, a trial or a temptation in our lives and the level of faith we have seems to not be enough to cope with what’s going on, we have to come closer to God.
In this case, we see that Philip is quickly overcome by the difficulty. A problem shows up – We need to feed all those people says Jesus – Well, there is not enough money to do that replies Philip, so you know, “thanks for bringing that up” but basically there is no way to fix the problem. I guess Philip is a realist, which is not always bad, but from our point of view, we realize he still does not get it. Jesus had turned the water into wine at Cana – and this, Andrew seems to remember. Andrew turns to the boy who can only provides five loaves of barley (the cheapest ones) and two fish. Not very realistic, as he himself notices, but it’s at least something and that gives Jesus a place to start. Instead of renouncing because they don’t have enough, they give what they have and they trust Jesus to take over.
Instead of renouncing because they don’t have enough, they give what they have and they trust Jesus to take over. Well, I think this is very true for all of us. Certainly they are times we feel overwhelmed by a problem or a difficulty, in our personal lives,in the life of our church, when we see what’s going on in the world…
Yet each time, Jesus still ask us if we are:
– willing to help
– willing to share what we have, as individuals but mostly as a community
– willing to give even if we have very little (he does not ask us to give what we don’t have)
– and if we trust him to do something with it.
It may be financial or material resources, it can also be intellectual or spiritual resources, it can be about giving a little bit of our hearts or a little bit of ourselves. He won’t do it without us, but he will use whatever we give him when we give generously. Yet are we willing to help, or are we waiting for God to fix our problems and other people’s problems? Our desire to help is our prayer and our offertory.
So I said that this story is about the Eucharist, right? We have stopped bringing offertory to the altar during this time of pandemic, but it is exactly to this part of the story that it relates: As the young boy, as Andrew, we bring the little we have: the bread, the wine, our money offering, and we expect God to transform them through Jesus. And of course, bread, wine, donations are only what’s visible. The offertory is this time when we are asked to offer ourselves to God in prayer, so God can use us in the same way Jesus used the bread to feed the people. Jesus gives thanks, bless what has been given, and then there is enough for everybody.
So, this is the test: Will we seek for enough faith to be willing to help? Will we seek for enough faith to give the little we have? Will we seek for enough faith to trust God to take over, or, as one theologian puts it: Do we believe that God is big enough for ours problems?