by CCW | 22 March 2020 11:00
“He himself knew what he would do,” John tells us about Jesus in a parenthetical remark. It signals a providential sense of purpose. Jesus is in a mountain wilderness with his disciples. But “lifting up his eyes,” he sees “a great company come unto him.” His first question to Philip is about how to provide for them, how to care for us, we might say. Yet, as John immediately states, “he himself knew what he would do.” It is a profound lesson about what God seeks for us.
In the ancient and biblical understanding, the wilderness is a place of contemplation, a place of prayer, the place of communion between God and man. There is a great good to be found for us in the wilderness where we are removed from all of the busyness and distractions, all of the confusions and fears of our lives. There are, to be sure, many different senses to the word wilderness but here the focus is on what is learned in the wilderness of our lives itself when we take time to think and pray.
In our current distresses about Covid-19, it may seem that we are all in a kind of wilderness. My hope and prayer is that something good may be learned that is the counter to our fears and worries, our fears about ourselves and our fears about one another, especially our fear of others. For in this powerful Gospel story, we learn about what God seeks for us. We learn not only about being fed and provided for; we learn about thanksgiving. That is especially important. Why? Because it gathers us into the very life of God.
The sixth chapter of John’s Gospel is traditionally known as ‘the bread of life discourse.’ It is intentionally sacramental. It shows that the essential life of Jesus is eucharistical; in short, it is thanksgiving. What is enacted visibly goes to the inner reality of the Son’s relation to the Father. He gives thanks. To whom? To the Father. How? Through the breaking of the bread. “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down.” This all becomes part and parcel of the Church’s sacramental life which is nothing less and nothing more than our participation in the life of God in Christ. It is about “letting Jesus pray in us,” live in us, as Archbishop Rowan Williams observes. “The whole of our life says Our Father,” Origen says. We are gathered to God in prayer by word and sacrament. The mountain wilderness becomes a place of refreshment, a place of comfort and strength. We are fortified spiritually.
The images of wilderness abound in sacred literature. It was in “the dark wood,” the selva selvaggia, Dante says, that he learned “a great good.” It requires going into the darkness of human sin and evil but as learning there about the greater power of God’s grace and goodness. The wilderness journey seeks to gather us into the garden or paradise of eternal love. We are fed with the heavenly food of that garden now in the sacramental life of the Church.
With God, there is always more and never less than what we truly need and want. The great company in the wilderness is fed from “five barley-loaves and two small fishes.” God makes so much out of so little; even more, he makes something good out of our evil, out of nothingness itself. God’s creative power ex nihilo is also his redemptive work in the wilderness of human life.
From that feast in the wilderness, what is gathered up signals God’s provisions for his Church throughout all time and in all ages. Jesus’ command is especially striking. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” The fragments, the crumbs that fall from the master’s table, we might say, fill twelve baskets. The reference is symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel, and now the twelve disciples who will become the Apostolic Church. In other words, we are in this story through the life of the Church.
We are, because of the precautions being taken in the face of Covid-19, socially isolated from one another. My hope and prayer is that you can read this and, even more importantly, read the lessons for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (BCP, p. 147[1]) and take strength and comfort from them. In so doing, you are making a kind of spiritual communion. We are recalling God’s providential care in the wilderness of our isolation physically from one another; yet we are together spiritually in prayer, in the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. We are being gathered into the knowing love of the Son to the Father in which love we find our good and our fellowship, our refreshment and the cause of our rejoicing.
Fr. David Curry
Lent IV, 2020
(Posted during the closure of Churches owing to the Covid-19 outbreak)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/03/22/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-in-lent-10/
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