If we speak of the sign of the Bread of Heaven, we anticipate the commentary that will follow in the weeks to come. The lectionary presents us with John's version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. This is then the first of a series of readings focussed on Jesus and bread. Oddly enough our lesson today ends with the interruption of another “sign”- that of Jesus walking on the water.
You see, the Fourth Gospel is organized in such a way to speak of “signs” and seasons.
A sign is an indicator of, a witness to, the power of God at work among us;
the seasons are the holy days which God has established for human instruction and edification, as well as those of joyful celebration. The sign of “bread” is linked then to the season of Passover.
John the Evangelist wants us to understand the life of Jesus over and against the context of the Exodus. We are to see the parallels between Jesus' actions and God's work among the Hebrew people as they were led by the great prophet, Moses.
Many people believed that the Messiah was to be a prophet like Moses.
And so John sets about showing us that Jesus' works were not merely echoes of Moses' actions, rather John's curious repetitive use of the words “I am” in Jesus' discourse is a theological statement. Moses encountered the great and holy God of his ancestors in a vision of the burning bush, and learned the name of this God which sounds something like Yahweh – meaning “I am, that is who I am.” John invokes Moses to order to introduce us to “I am” as manifested, not in a burning bush, but in the person of Jesus.
The mundane and the spiritual are intertwined. Humans have basic physical needs, one of these is for rest, another is for food. And so when Jesus sees a great crowd coming to him when he has withdrawn to a mountain, he asks Philip, Where are we to buy bread for these people? Philip, with his quick mind, calculates that even if they were to find a place to buy food they don't have the money necessary to feed these people. Andrew has found a boy with five barley loaves and two fish... but observes that they are nothing among so great a crowd.
But just as Moses taught the Hebrew people about waiting on God through the sign of manna in the wilderness, so Jesus will teach the people of God's grace through the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.
I suspect that the funny interruption of the sign of Jesus' walking on the water echoes the Israelite walk through the Red Sea, a moment of great historical import, which is re-called at each Passover Seder in such a way as to be a contemporary encounter.
Each participant at the Seder chooses anew to accept liberation.
When I was younger it became fashionable to “rationalize” all of Jesus' miracles. So one interpretation of this event ran something like this: like the young boy, lots of people were also carrying food, it was simply that Jesus' act of blessing and sharing inspired others to do the same.
As with the joke about the priest and the minister and the rabbi, Jesus was walking on a shoal, or stepping stones when the disciples saw him walking on the water...
It's a nice idea, this trying to provide people with logical arguments for the miracles or signs, but does not do justice to the theological purposes of the Gospel.
We want to reduce everything to fit our understanding of the operations of the physical world. But John did not care about that. He is trying to help us understand something of the mystery of life.
The feeding of the five thousand is meant to remind us of the giving of manna in the wilderness – It foreshadows the Eucharistic feast where we share the Bread of Heaven.
We know that people went to Jesus for healing; they went to hear his teachings. Once again he has withdrawn to a mountainside. It was on a mountain such as this one that he taught the people to pray... The reference to “our daily bread” in the Lord's prayer takes us back to the wandering in the wilderness. We are dependent upon God for our very lives. In the time of the Exodus the children of Israel learned by trial and error that they must live with a radical trust in God's reliability. They were allowed to collect only enough manna/bread for the day... they learned that if they collected too much it would spoil horribly. And, as if that lesson was not hard enough, they were told that they must, however, collect a double portion on the sixth day so that they did not labour on the seventh day which was God's sabbath.
What is this sign of bread?
The simplistic answer is, of course,
that even when things do not make sense to us,
we are meant to trust in the grace and power of God.
Let us allow mystery to intersect our ordinary lives. Let us look once again for the presence of God in and among us. The stories of the Gospel have one purpose:
they have been recorded so that we might encounter the person of Jesus Christ.
Step into the story: Imagine the mountainside, the angle of the slope, the sun shining down, the taste of bread and dried fish. Hear the Baruch, the “blessed be” as Jesus praises God for the gift of bread –
It is in quietly giving thanks for the blessings of life that we find ourselves drawn close to God; our hearts return to their centre and we are at peace.
