Month: March 2023

“Five barley-loaves and two small fishes; but what are they among so many?”

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.

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“For ye were sometimes darkness”

At first glance, it must seem that there can be no greater contrast than that between the Epistle reading from Ephesians and the Gospel reading from St. Luke. “For ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul tells us, while bidding us to “walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us,” bidding us to “walk as children of the light,” and not the darkness, the light which is given us by Christ, the light which reproves the things of darkness, the light which overcomes the darkness of sin and death. It signals hope and life, light and love. But the Gospel sounds a more sombre and disquieting note where the goodness of Christ is called evil and where, ultimately, “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Where is the light in that?

It is, I think, in naming the darkness. The Gospel speaks prophetically and powerfully to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It is really a telling portrayal of nihilism, the sense of the empty meaninglessness of life. Why? Because of a despair of knowing, a despair of God that results in an intellectual and spiritual emptiness. There is, as is commonly noted, the problem of information overload in the digital culture of our time that only contributes to something more serious, a knowledge deficit, and even more, a loss of wisdom. T.S. Eliot’s verse pageant-play “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” (1934) offers a sustained critique of the intellectual and spiritual poverty of our world.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Information is not knowledge, and wisdom is more than knowledge, and while this is ancient truth, it is truth which we have forgotten. It is not simply that the Church is forgotten and no longer wanted but that the churches, too, have forgotten or ignored or denied what belongs to their essential being.

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying
within and attacked from without;
For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while
there is time of prosperity
The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity
they will decry it.

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