by CCW | 19 March 2023 10:00
So little and yet so many in need. Andrew’s words echo Mary’s statement about the human condition. “They have no wine,” she said about the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee. That was the story of the first miracle that Jesus did, “the beginning of signs” which pointed us to the thing signified, namely the Passion of Christ. “Mine hour,” he said to Mary, “has not yet come” (Jn. 2.3-5). The turning of the water into wine with its apparent eucharistic emphasis is really about the centrality of the Passion in the understanding of Christ as the Word made flesh. The Orthodox theologian, John Behr, notes that the Prologue of John’s Gospel which we read at Christmas is also the reading for the paschal midnight liturgy of Easter Eve.
The various feasts of the Hebrews contribute to the structure and meaning of John’s Gospel, particularly the Passover which is mentioned three times. The first time follows upon the wedding feast at Cana and introduces John’s account of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple; in short, our misuse of the holy things and holy places of God as well as a pointed reference to “the temple of his body”, which he says “in three days I will raise it up” (Jn. 2.19); passion and resurrection but in the context of purgation of our sin and evil. “His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for thy house will consume me’” (Jn. 2.17).
The verse which immediately precedes today’s Gospel is the second reference to the Passover: “now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand” (Jn. 6.4). Thus this passage, too, is read in terms of the centrality of the Passion. It belongs to the strong teaching of the sixth Chapter of John’s Gospel sometimes known as the Bread of Life discourse; in short, the theme of illumination. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me; and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day” (Jn. 6.35, 38-40). This occasions murmuring among the Jews (Jn. 6.41) about the identity of Jesus, and, as well, the murmuring of many of his disciples about Jesus as “the bread of life … which comes down from heaven” (Jn. 6.48, 50), “the holy bread of eternal life,” as the eucharistic prayer says (BCP, p.83).
For them it is “a hard saying, who can listen to it?”(Jn. 6.60) and results in “many of his disciples [drawing] back and no longer [going] about with him.” But it also is the setting for the ending of Chapter Six with Simon Peter’s great profession of faith: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn. 6.68, 69). And yet, the context is again the Passion in Jesus’ reference to Judas, “one of the twelve” who “was to betray him” (Jn. 6.71). This ends the chapter but already points us to the third reference to the Passover in John’s Gospel; Christ’s own Passion read on Good Friday.
The whole chapter connects powerfully the theological ideas of Christology – the union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, the Trinity – in the relation of Jesus to the living Father who lives in him, and the Passion in Christ’s rejection and betrayal. It does so in reference to the wilderness of Exodus and to the eucharist as the form of our participation in Christ’s saving work. The journey is not a random walk in the park; it is the way to the Father, and to Jerusalem as “the mother of us all,” and the way in which we participate in the greater “liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Gal.5.1).
In this sense, this Sunday is not simply “refreshment Sunday” or “mothering Sunday” in the sense of a reprieve or a break from the Lenten journey; rather it intensifies the focus on the Passion of Christ and our participation in his Passion. The Gospel reading recalls us to the exodus journey in the wilderness. It is impossible to read it apart from the events of the exodus. It highlights the idea of God’s provisions for his wandering, murmuring, and complaining people; the provisions of water from the stricken rock, (and Christ will be that Rock), the provision of manna from on high, the bread from heaven which in Christ is “the true bread” (Jn. 6.32) “which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (Jn. 6.33), “the bread of life” (Jn, 6.35).
Five barley loaves and two small fishes. So little among so many, even five thousand. Thomas Aquinas, drawing upon the commentary tradition of the Fathers, sees this passage in terms of the Scriptures as a unity and in terms of different kinds of teaching. “In the mystical sense, wisdom is a symbol for spiritual refreshment” understood in terms of “the human teaching of the philosophers” and “the teachings found in the written law” but, above all, in the wisdom of Christ, “the power of God, the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1.24). Human reason, signified in “the two hundred penny-worth of bread” (Jn. 6.7) is, Aquinas says, “not enough to completely satisfy our desire for wisdom”. Like creation itself, reason is good but not perfect, and just so the Law, too, is good but not perfect. The Law of Moses, he suggests, is indicated in the five barley loaves but the Law, as Hebrews puts it, “brought nothing to perfection” (Heb. 7.19). Something more is required than simply human reason and the Law; it is the grace of Christ.
The five barley loaves signal the teaching of the law contained in the five books of Moses either because “the law was given by Moses” or “because it was given to men absorbed in sensible things, which are made known through the five senses”. What is revealed in the Law is also known through human reasoning. The two small fishes “indicate the teachings of the Psalms and the prophets”, thus referencing the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole, known as TANAKH, an acronym for the Torah or Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Or, by way of Augustine, he allows that the two fishes might also “signify the priests and kings who ruled the Jews” and as such prefigure Christ, the true king and priest.
Such ways of thinking are Scriptural and Christocentric. They belong to the history of the Scriptures and their transmission to us. They belong, in other words, to the thinking of those who have gone before us with the mind of Christ, as Wycliff put it (I think). They counter a docetic reading of both the eucharist – bread and wine as empty signs, mere appearances – and docetic understanding of Christ – his divinity, too, as merely an appearance in the flesh but not really made flesh. As Ignatius of Antioch puts it, the “bread” is “the flesh of Jesus Christ” given for us. Those who abstain from the eucharist do so because “they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ who suffered for our sins and whom the Father raised up” (Smyrna 7.1). That Jesus came in the flesh means that he died on the cross and who is given to us as the living bread of eternal life.
It happens in the wilderness, even in the wilderness of a messy Maritime March. Today’s readings draw us into the Passion as the central focus of the Incarnation. The ancient readings are not only Christocentric but cross-shaped. Here in media res, we are in the wilderness on the way to Jerusalem but fed and nurtured by the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation through the Passion. This feeding in the wilderness is spiritual refreshment because it anticipates and prepares us for the greater Passover at Jerusalem itself in Christ’s Passion. How?
Here Christ makes so much out of our so little. Out of five barley loaves and two small fishes not only is a great multitude fed and provided for but so are we. Twelve baskets of the crumbs, as it were, are gathered up – one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel in the wilderness and equally one for each of the twelve apostles of the Church. We are sustained and fed by Christ himself.
The greater Passover is on Good Friday. For on the Cross, Christ makes something out of the ‘greater’ nothingness of human sin and evil. Out of his wounded side flow water and blood, the symbols of baptism and communion, the forms of our participation in the Passion of Christ.
This was once almost a commonplace understanding for Anglican divinity. John Donne notes that “the whole life of Christ was a continuall Passion, his birth and his death were but a continuall Act and his Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day.” Lancelot Andrewes in his Passion Sermon of 1605 states that “it is well known that Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continuous cross. At the very cratch, His cross first began. There Herod sought to do what Pilate did, even to end His life before it began.” This is to underscore the interrelated nature of the moments in the life of Christ and the way in which the feasts and festivals all connect and inform one another. He goes on as if in reference to the features of John 6 about our murmuring or complaining against God and Christ. “All his life after … was nothing but a perpetual ‘gainsaying of sinners,’ which we call crossing.”
Christ’s life as “a continuous cross” is concentrated for us in the crucifixion. Here Christ makes so much out of our so little to draw us into the greater work of redemption, our recreation and restoration by his Passion and Sacrifice. Already it sustains and feeds us not with empty signs but with the one whom the signs signify.
No one, perhaps, has connected better the teaching of John 6 and John’s Prologue with the meaning of “our daily bread” in the Lord’s Prayer than Origen of Alexandria (c.185-c. 253). This illustrates the way in which the mysteries of Christ all interrelate and interpenetrate each other and gather us into their meaning. May his words help to refresh us in the continuation of our journey into the Passion of Christ.
This is the “true food”, the “flesh” of Christ, which being “Word” has become “flesh”, in accordance with the statement, “and the word became flesh”. When we “eat” and “drink” him, he also “dwelt in us”, and when he is distributed, there is fulfilled the saying “we beheld his glory”. “This is the bread which came down from heaven, not like that which the ancestors ate, and died, Whoever eats this bread shall live for ever.”
So much from so little but more than enough.
Fr. David Curry
Lent 4, 2023
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