pentecost 8 Year B

 

2 Samuel 11: 1-15
2 Kings 4: 42-44
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3: 14-21
John 6: 1-21

 

Bread. Feeding. Super-abundance. Exodus. Wilderness. Shepherd-kings. Eucharist. Signs. “Who is this man?” The love of God in Christ. All these themes – and probably several more –link this week’s Lectionary readings. There are anomalies in the selection of the texts. The first is that we leave Mark’s gospel precisely at the point of the feeding narrative for John’s version. This is unfortunate in the sense that we lose the narrative impetus and strategy of Mark if we are to do justice to John’s account. The incident threatens to become simply a discrete focus on “The Feeding of the Five Thousand (men!)” rather than part of Mark’s presentation of Jesus’ “campaign”. It is the case, however, that John takes up and emphasises the major synoptic themes (this is the only miracle he recounts that is common to the synoptic tradition), so that it is legitimate to read it in connection with Mark’s gospel.

The second is the inclusion of the story of David and Bathsheba. It follows the David narrative, but the story of David’s adultery and the plot to kill Uriah has little connection with John’s narrative of the feeding. However, Mark presents Jesus as a shepherd-king in his account (Mark 6: 30-44). In verse 34b, he states that Jesus had compassion on them “because they were like sheep without a shepherd”. John probably deliberately omits this synoptic tradition (I say “omits” because he is clearly aware of the detail of the story) because of his sign/”I am” saying structure. He places the “I am the Good Shepherd” in a different place. His account of the feeding leads on to the “I am the Bread of Life” saying in 6:35. However, he retains the elements of the sheep/shepherd image from the synoptic tradition: the countryside, the isolation, the hunger of the crowds who flock to Jesus. If we include Mark’s account, therefore, we find a helpful link between the feeding and the David and Bathsheba story: the contrast between the first shepherd-king, and Jesus.

The third anomaly is Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians. Densely theological, it appears to stand on its own, with little or no connection to the feeding story. However, his phrase in Ephesians 3: 19 is significant: “… so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God”. The feeding narrative is about being filled. Paul uses the sense of being filled with the knowledge of the love of Christ (and the Spirit) in a parallel sense to which John presents Jesus as the Bread of Life: it is Christ who fills and satisfies.

 

Signs … of what?
John presents Jesus through a series of seven “signs”. They are miracles that reveal Jesus’ identity. This is important to note: the stress is not on the miraculous nature of Jesus’ actions (this is taken for granted) but on their meanings. Look at John’s treatment of this in our passage. In v2, the crowd that “kept following him” did so because “they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick”. Jesus was alleviating suffering. He was someone who could “make life better” – ease the burdens of living. If they were sick, he could heal them; if they were hungry, he could feed them. Yet Jesus did not come just to “make life better” – he came to bring Life in all its abundance (John 10:10). If we see Jesus as “just a miracle worker”, John tells us, we miss out on all that he offers. Jesus does not come only to satisfy hunger for bread: he is the Living Bread that satisfies the deepest human hunger for the Life of God. Those who are fed fail to understand that. They see the sign, but fail to comprehend its meaning (John 6:26). They wasn’t to make him king. Yet Jesus is only king in terms of his crucifixion. They wish merely to survive; they need to be born again.

 

Eternal life and a new world order
To preach about feeding miracles in the face of global hunger and poverty runs the risk of obscenity. Those of us who have plenty to eat instinctively read Jesus’ rebuke in 6:27 in spiritualised terms: “Don’t bother about food that perishes (we don’t bother in the sense of being distressed about whether or not we’re going to be able to eat!) but instead, focus on “spiritual food” – eternal life!”

Yet, as I have said before, this is to misread John. When John speaks of “eternal life”, he isn’t talking primarily about life after death, and about duration. He’s talking about the quality of life that God intends for human beings. Eternal life is life in this world (and beyond death), lived in proximity to God. It is God’s presence within life that makes life “eternal” – or “life in all its abundance”.

In this sense, John is very close indeed to the synoptic tradition. When Jesus rebukes the crowds, he is not talking about the satisfaction of less than physical hunger, but of more than that! For those of us who live affluent lives and never have to face the struggle for daily subsistence, John’s theologising can easily run the risk of obscuring Jesus’ engagement with the material conditions of his hearers. Yet Jesus was concerned with them! The gospel of Jesus in John (as opposed to the gospel of the kingdom in the synoptic tradition) is no less the promise of transformed reality. John’s is not Good News of some sort of Great Escape from worldly reality, but the Good News of the God who comes to dwell with us – to share our lives and to transform them with God’s presence.

This takes us back to Mark’s presentation of Jesus in his account of the feeding. The “crowds” are the poor people of the region; the economically helpless. They are the ones for whom life is fragile, and who live constantly on the edge of extinction. These are the people for whom a bad harvest signals disaster, and for whom daily bread literally means the difference between life and death. The inclusion of 2 Kings 2: 42-44 is not only because of the obvious parallels of feeding crowds with a few loaves of barley (it seems clear that the gospel writers consciously evoke parallels between Jesus and Elijah/Elisha), but also because of the context. In the story, all this takes place in Gilgal during a famine. This is what makes the first-fruits offering so precious and costly: in a time of famine, every grain is vital! The man from Baal-shalishah nonetheless offers the first-fruits to Yahweh, and as a result, Yahweh feeds far, far more people than expected!

Mark’s Jesus consciously evokes the Elisha story. The point, though, is to stress that one greater than Elisha is here. Whereas Elisha fed a hundred men, Jesus feeds five thousand. Whereas Elisha is confirmed as a prophet of Yahweh by providing food in the midst of famine, Jesus ushers in a new economic order. The feast of bread and fish in Mark’s telling do more than just evoke Yahweh’s provision in the wilderness. This is a Jewish feeding, and Mark will go on to describe the Gentile feeding of the four thousand. Whereas scholars have concentrated on whether or not the second feeding is simply a re-run of the first, they have missed the political point that Mark makes. The parallels with the Exodus mean that this is the new messianic community – the new Israel. By including the Gentile feeding, Mark stresses that this is a new world order – an order in which the poor are fed with daily bread. And it is an order based on sharing. The food is provided by a young boy, who offers his packed lunch. The generosity of the donor (as in the Elisha story) is matched by God’s super-abundant provision. There is enough for all – more than enough!

There is a fundamental truth here about global poverty and starvation. There is enough to go round! God has created a fruitful world, in which there is more than enough for everyone – provided we are prepared to share equally! The problem is that our global economy creates widespread starvation on the one hand, and problems with obesity on the other. The problem is extraordinarily simple. It is an absence of compassion. What motivates Jesus is compassion for the crowds. The disciples place a monetary value on the food required. It is economically too expensive even to consider feeding such a crowd. The hard-heartedness of the disciples is contrasted with the open generosity of the boy who shares his food freely. This is the new messianic world – a world in which Jesus’ prayer for daily bread for all is answered. The challenge for us is to recognise the failure of compassion that traps the world in deadly cycles of starvation and eating disorders. On the one hand, sharing will eradicate poverty. But equal sharing will mean an end to excessive consumerism, and so eradicate the problems with food common in our bloated, capitalist First World.

 

Eucharist and mission
The Eucharistic shaping of John’s narrative is unmistakeable. In v11 he takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks and gives. The five Eucharistic actions, described in detail in Jesus’ treatment of the bread, demand that we link this feeding miracle symbolically with the Eucharist. We are drawn into the nexus of relationships between Eucharist and the promise of the kingdom; between Eucharist and mission.

The community that eats the bread is called to struggle for a world in which all shall eat. I shall never forget hearing Malusi Mpumulwana from South Africa, a friend of Steve Biko’s, Black Consciousness leader and bishop, telling us of an experience he had had conducting the Eucharist in one of the so-called “Independent Homelands” during the Apartheid era. He was some 15 miles from Cape Town, a city in which the white population enjoyed fantastic wealth. However, in the homelands, starvation was rife. A mother brought her baby to the altar and made to take a communion wafer for the baby. “No my daughter!” said Malusi. “You know our tradition. I will bless your baby for you.” “Father,” said the woman, “this piece of bread will be the only food my child eats this weekend. Yet you refuse it, and then you tell us that Jesus is the Bread of Life! For shame!” It was a conversion experience for Malusi. How could a community celebrate the Eucharist – a symbol of life and plenty – if it bore no relation to the starvation around it? To be part of the messianic, Eucharistic community called Church is to be called to struggle for a world in which all shall eat and live, because Jesus is the Bread of Life.

 

Kings and kingdoms
The issue of power is not far below the surface in this narrative. Jesus is portrayed as the shepherd-king, and the crowd’s response is to want to make him king. By including 2 Samuel 11: 1-15, the compilers of the Lectionary invite us into the whole vexed question of kingship in the Old Testament. When Israel asks for a king, Samuel (on Yahweh’s authority) tells them exactly what it is going to be like. Israel’s demand to “make us like the other nations” is faithless. The nation brought into being at Sinaii and constituted by the Law was never meant to be a monarchy. There is an unresolved tension throughout the Old Testament about kingship. Basically, Yahweh gives them what they want, but the promise of monarchy is never realised.

David is presented as the ideal monarch. He is the shepherd-king. Everything, as I have noted before, starts so well! And then it goes spectacularly wrong. No more so than over Bathsheba. What we ought to note in the context of the feeding narrative is how utterly David fails. It isn’t just that he letches over Uriah’s wife, abuses his power to seduce her and then murders his loyal subject, Uriah: the king is Yahweh’s regent. The king has to uphold Yahweh’s Law. And here, Israel’s shepherd-king breaks virtually every one of the laws that constitute Israel! He covets Bathsheba, steals her, commits adultery and murder.

Yet, if the institution of monarchy is bound always to fail, consider Jesus, the shepherd-king. Here is a king to be trusted. Here is a king who rules with the power of Yahweh’s compassion. In Jesus’ message and practice, the eschatological hope for provision for the poorest and most helpless is realised. The crowd’s reaction is to do what the Israelites of old did: they try to force God to grant them a king – Jesus – who will look after the “new Israel” and make sure there’ll never be a hungry belly in the kingdom! But, as we have noted, Jesus is on a bigger mission than this. This is the one through whom all things were created, and in whom all things will be summed up. This is a king whose compassion will take him to the cross, where he will be crowned and will draw all people to himself! The Bread that he gives – himself – will be nothing less than salvation for the world (John 3: 17).

 

Filled to overflowing (Ephesians 4: 14-21)
Paul wants his readers to be as filled to overflowing as the recipients of bread and fish were. He wants them to be “strengthened in their inner beings with power through the Spirit”, “have their hearts filled with Christ through faith”, “be filled with the love of Christ” and with “all the fullness of God”. Mark portrays the bread as a symbol of the gospel. John takes that further, and portrays Jesus himself as the Living Bread. Paul similarly reflects on just how astounding the grace of God in Jesus is. It is “more than we can possibly imagine” (v20). Yet for all Paul’s use of cognitive categories – of “knowing” – he is, in fact, talking about experiencing. To “know” in his sense is live by and out of Christ. Christian faith isn’t believing things about Jesus: it is knowing Jesus, being filled with Jesus. When we reflect on just how much God loves us in Christ, we are awestruck. Typically, Paul is never one to be stunned into silence! He waxes lyrically eloquent. This is a beautiful prayer. It needs to be read slowly; to be tasted; ingested; fed upon, until we are overflowing with the same sense of wonder, praise and worship.

 

Amen.

« Previous Page