by CCW | 18 March 2012 14:18
The sixth chapter of The Gospel according to St. John is sometimes known as “the bread of life discourse”. It is a fascinating and complex chapter and one which challenges Jesus’ disciples and the people of Israel in general, and, for that matter, all of us. As today’s Gospel reading makes clear the overarching theme is about the provisions God makes for us in the wilderness journey of our lives. Taken with the epistle reading from Galatians, the food of our wayfaring is food from home, “the bread of heaven,” as Jesus later names it. Jerusalem, as Paul makes clear, is our spiritual home, our alma mater, our nursing mother, as it were. The Gospel passage is about how we are sustained, nourished and refreshed in the journey with spiritual food. The teaching is the feeding on this day which is variously known as Mothering Sunday, Laetare Sunday and Refreshment Sunday, terms which are all derived from the readings in one way or another.
The word, wilderness, is used twice in the chapter and in both cases refers to the Exodus journey of the Hebrews. The text from Psalm 78 reflects on the trials of that ancient wilderness journey. A critical feature of the psalmist’s reflection is the complaint of the people in the wilderness. The question, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?” is a rhetorical question that challenges God; in short, puts God to the test. We are recalled instantly to the First Sunday of Lent, to the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations, too, belong to the wilderness, quite literally to the desert.
This Gospel story is the answer to the question but in such a way as to highlight our disbelief and distrust of the essential goodness of God. Here the Word by which we live and which nourishes and refreshes us is bread, food for our wayfaring souls. The bread in the wilderness is about the divine generosity from which we live; “twelve baskets” are taken up from “the fragments” of “the five barley-loaves that remain” a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, we might say, a basket for each of the twelve apostles of the new Israel, the Church, too, we might add.
“Jesus then lift up his eyes, and saw a great company come unto him.” So begins our Gospel reading. Jesus had gone “to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias”, John informs us, a comment, like the one about “there [being] much grass in the place,” which suggests a closeness to the event as well as a sense of distance from it that requires explanation. A multitude had followed him, “because they saw the signs which he did on those who were diseased.” “Jesus went up on the mountain and sat down with his disciples.” This is the setting for the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness. A great company of people had continued to follow Jesus into the wilderness.
Why? We are in the wilderness seeking healing and salvation, seeking the meaning and purpose for our lives. This New Testament story is a kind of critical commentary on the older wilderness journey of the Hebrews during the Exodus, a journey of learning about what it means to be the people of the Law, about what it means to live by the Word of God. On that journey, the people complained; they murmured; they kvetched! Their complaints deny the goodness of God. God both punishes and provides in the wilderness, giving them bread from heaven, the proverbial manna from on high, and water from the stricken rock. In the canticle known as the Venite, Psalm 95, we recall the problem. It is about “the hardness of our hearts,” our hearts as hardened against God. And yet God provides for us.
Here the fuller extent and nature of that provision is being emphasized. It belongs to the larger lesson of the chapter. The larger lesson is that Jesus is himself “the bread of life”, “the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread,” Jesus says, “he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The sacramental emphasis and teaching is unmistakable. And, yet, “this is a hard saying” and results in many of his disciples drawing back; in short, rejecting Jesus and his teaching as if to ask, rhetorically and skeptically, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?”
All of this dialogue and teaching follows upon the actual feeding presented to us in our Gospel reading. It is a sign, to be sure, but of what? That Jesus is “that Prophet that should come into the world?” This is an incomplete view which is why the rest of the chapter is taken up with an exploration of the deeper meaning of this miraculous feeding. Ultimately, this story will take us to the Upper Room, to the night of the Passover, to the Last Supper when Jesus gives himself to us in bread and wine at once anticipating his passion and providing for us through his passion. Will we draw back in disbelief and cynicism, the easy cynicism of our contemporary world? Or will we accept with grace and gratitude the wonder of our salvation?
You see, these stories are presented to us for a purpose. They recall us to the fundamental realities of our lives in faith. There is a kind of holy magic, if I may put it that way, about the reading and the hearing of these stories. We often don’t really listen for if we did then we would be constantly breaking down the doors of the Church to hear and receive more and more.
Augustine tells the story of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, reading silently in his cathedral. Why? So that he would not be interrupted if, in the usual custom, he read aloud, by people demanding an explanation about what they were hearing. Ambrose was a great teacher and preacher but he, too, needed time to read without having always to explain. There have been moments in the life of the Church when the desire to learn the meaning of the biblical message is a primary and all-consuming demand. There is a yearning for the understanding of God’s Word to us. It drives us into the wilderness to learn and to be fed with the fragments gathered up from the picnic in the wilderness, from the crumbs, as it were, that fall from the Master’s table. The point is that they are more than enough to sustain, nourish and refresh us.
And yet, the sad tragedy of our humanity is our neglect and denial of God, his provisions for us, and, his teaching. “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?” we ask skeptically and with scorn. We deny the God who provides for us, the God who feeds us with more than we can ever desire or deserve. We don’t really get it. Our blindness remains. How, then, shall we come to see? Only through the journey to Jerusalem. Only through the agonizing experience of Christ’s passion. Only through the grace of God who illumines the darkness of our souls in disarray. Here is the God who provides for us in every way in the journey of our lives. Why? Because we are his children, “the children not of the bond-woman but of the free,” as Paul puts it; the children of God.
Human freedom and dignity are not ultimately to be found in the claims of the world’s courts about rights and privileges, I am afraid. Human freedom and dignity are found in our being with Christ, with the God who prepares a table for us in the wilderness of our lives, the God who feeds us with his love. It is sacramental. I often think about this when I am taking the sacrament to those who are shut-in and to the sick and the dying.
“The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh,” Jesus says. Strong words and yet they are the words which signal the divine generosity. God can and does prepare a table in the wilderness moments of human lives. The only question is whether we will “taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” Only then shall we be free.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Lent IV, 2012
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