by CCW | 30 March 2014 16:06
For our food obsessed culture, this gospel story is either welcome relief or anxiety inducing. It just might get our minds set on our bellies, thinking of food and all manner of kinds of breads and cakes! Relax! This Sunday you get to have your cake and eat it too but only after the service.
In a way, that is the real point. It is a question of spiritual priorities. What defines us? Are you what you eat? Though sometimes attributed to the French gastronomer or connoisseur of food, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, it is literally a phrase from the 19th century theologian Ludwig von Feuerbach, who influenced Marx, in his Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, suggesting that our minds are affected by food and other aspects of the physical world. It was also the title of popular British TV dieting programme, “You-are-what-you-eat”. Food r’us, it seems! What eats and drinks today walks and talks tomorrow.
I want to suggest that this gospel story belongs to a theology of food that is really about our lives spiritually and sacramentally. As the great patristic preacher, St. John Chrysostom put it, “we do not preach so as to eat; we eat so as to preach.” We do not live for food; we need food to live for God and for one another. If we are part of a culture where “people treat food like religion,” as has been recently observed (Dr. Yoni Freedhof, National Post, Sat., March 29th, 2014[1]), then perhaps we need to think about the role of food in religion.
“Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world and all our woe,” begins Milton’s great poem, Paradise Lost. It all begins with food, it seems; that is to say, the story of human suffering and woe. The story of the Fall away from God is told in mythic form by way of eating what was forbidden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We fall into a world where there is not only sweat and tears – working in the sweat of our brow and in the literal labour pains and tears of child-birth – but blood, sweat, and tears are the realities of human experience as the fall-out from “man’s first disobedience.” Yet food – bread – becomes an integral part of redemption. It belongs to the story of our return to God.
In The Book of Exodus, the people of Israel undertake a wilderness journey out of slavery and into liberty, a freedom which is about learning to be defined by God’s Word in the Law and being fed by what God provides in the wilderness, namely, “manna from heaven” and “water from the stricken rock.” Along with God’s revelation of himself to Moses in the burning bush, this marks the beginnings of a sacramental understanding. God uses the things of the natural world to make known what is transcendent and spiritual about the truth of God himself and about our relationship to him. “Man cannot live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God.” This is the essential spiritual insight. It changes how we view food. It becomes the means of our living for God and with one another.
But of course there are our complaints. In the Exodus story, the people of Israel murmur and kvetch about what God provides. Our complaining, particularly about food, is not just about wanting things to be good or better – there is, after all, something true in that idea. The problem about our complaining is the absence of our thankfulness for what we have received and for what we are given to work with by God. Our complaining about food is really a complaint against God. Food becomes our religion, our God, and that is false.
Jesus’ question in the Gospel is a lesson about what defines us. The entire sixth chapter of John’s Gospel is sometimes known as The Bread of Life Discourse. In it Jesus identifies himself as “the bread of life,” picking up on the Exodus themes of God’s provision for our humanity in the wilderness journey. Here, Jesus asks the question which haunts our humanity. How to feed ourselves? And even more, “Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?” How to feed others? How can we feed the starving multitudes of the world? Do we think that we can solve human poverty? These perplexing economic questions are really spiritual questions about ourselves and our sense of responsibility and care for one another.
The lesson of the Gospel is not that there is a simple and pat formula about solving world poverty. It is about how we are fed by God and that what God feeds us is more than enough. Our relationship with Christ is a relationship of trust and faith out of which comes our life including our works of charity and care for others. It is very much about what we do with what God has given us. The divine generosity compels our generosity.
The Gospel is intentionally sacramental. Jesus takes the loaves and gives thanks; only then is the bread distributed. Out of “five barley-loaves, and two small fishes,” a multitude, numbering “about five thousand,” are fed. A miracle, to be sure, but the miracle lies in what is signified – the power and the idea of sharing. Generosity is greater than envy and greed, greater than our selfish self-regard, our preoccupation with selfies and self-image that is so much a part of the religion of food. As Dante puts it,
Because the more there are who there can say
‘Ours’, the more goods each has, and charity
Burns in that cloister with a larger ray.
Twelve baskets of crumbs are taken up from this picnic feast in the wilderness. The symbolism can hardly be missed: a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel; a basket for each of the twelve apostles of the apostolic church. The echoes to the themes of the previous Lenten Sundays are clear. Christ counters the satanic temptation to turn stones into bread, a kind of alchemy, with the defining words about living not by bread alone but “by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.” We have heard, too, the great words of the Canaanite woman that even “the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” and we have seen how that informs The Prayer of Humble Access in the Prayer Book liturgy in our approach to the sacrament. Here we are reminded of the divine generosity which makes so much out of so little and which provides for us in the wilderness.
It is in the nature of the goodness of God himself, the highest good of our humanity, that the more spiritual goods are shared the greater the increase of the good itself. In a profound way, we are meant to realize that the material goods of this world, even our daily bread, are about living spiritually from God and with God and for one another and with one another. The divine generosity is about goodness shared.
We learn from him and we are fed by him in the wilderness because he is with us. He gives himself for us in the sacrament: his body, “the holy Bread of eternal life”; his blood, “the Cup of everlasting salvation”. Such is the divine generosity. God gives himself. We find the means of our life, “our daily bread”, in what God provides for us in Word and Sacrament. We cannot buy it. We can only receive it and be thankful for it, letting the divine generosity move our hearts and souls.
Fr. David Curry
Lent IV, 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/03/30/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-in-lent-4/
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