“They filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley-loaves”
Paradise and wilderness are the complementary images that belong to the pilgrimage of Lent as the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Today’s Gospel wonderfully encapsulates the soul’s journey as imaged in other cultures, religions, and philosophies in one way or another, such as: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plato’s ascent from the Cave (and the descent back into the Cave!), Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, and of course, Dante’s great poetic and theological master-piece, The Divine Comedy, to name but a few. Yet the story which informs this Gospel most completely is the story of the Exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures.
We so easily forget that the Christian faith largely arises out of the Fathers reading of the Hebrew Scriptures first and foremost. That has shaped profoundly the doctrinal, devotional, and liturgical reading of the Scriptures as a whole in the life of the Church, and often expressed in the hymns of the Church. This Gospel story is essentially a recapitulation and intensification of the themes of the Exodus, the paradigmatic journey par excellence of the pilgrimage of our souls. This mid-Lent Sunday highlights the images of paradise and wilderness. For the pilgrimage journey to God cannot be accomplished simply by us on our own strength and merits. With this Sunday we begin, paradoxically, to enter into the deeper meaning of the Lenten pilgrimage: it can only happen through the provisions of God’s Providence for us in the way of our journeying. This Sunday sets before us ‘a taste of paradise’ in the wilderness of human experience. God provides out of our lack or little. Ultimately, God provides himself as Holy Week and Good Friday show us.
John’s Gospel begins with an emphasis upon God’s all-knowing and all-embracing will in contrast to our human limitations. Jesus in the wilderness sees a great multitude and asks Philip “whence shall we buy bread that these may eat.” John immediately adds parenthetically that this is to prove or test Philip “for he himself knew what he would do.” This already alludes to the Exodus in which Israel was put to the test while also presuming to put God to the test. Philip’s response is about our human limitations and inadequacy to solve the problems of the world through economic means. “Two hundred penny-worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may have enough.” It is a telling critique that extends to our modern world. The expansion of production in part through the techniques of industrialization and the false infinity of consumer desire haven’t and can’t solve the problems of the world to which they themselves contribute. The problems of our world and ourselves are fundamentally spiritual, not merely material.
To drive the point home further, Andrew pipes up to say that “there is a lad here with five barley-loaves and two small fishes,” only to immediately add the rhetorical question: “but what are they among so many?” There is a kind of despairing awareness of our human limitations on the part of both Philip and Andrew that is essential to the setting and the meaning of the story; in short, the miracle of God’s provision for us in the pilgrim ways.
To understand this Gospel story we can perhaps do no better than to look at the hymn, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” (# 406 – our Offertory hymn this morning). The three verses of that hymn are a commentary on the Exodus journey of Israel and of the Christian pilgrimage. Jesus is not mentioned even once in the hymn and yet is present in its spiritual meaning throughout in terms of the interplay of paradise and wilderness. This is signalled in the opening verse. “Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land.” In the barren land of the wilderness we are fed and filled with “the bread of heaven” so much so that we “need no more.” Our lack, μεν, and God’s all-sustaining fulfilment, δε. In the Exodus story, the Hebrews are fed in the wilderness with “manna from on high”, the bread of angels, the bread of heaven, the bread of life itself, as Jesus says. Chapter Six is a commentary on the Exodus as reworked in the person of Christ. He is “the bread of life.” The whole miracle here is about the essential life of God who is the means of our journeying even as he is the end of the journey.
Pilgrimage implies an end, a telos, a destination and that is equally what sustains us in the journey. The word, “Jehovah,” too, belongs to the Exodus. It is a mediaeval Latin term based on the four Hebrew consonants interspersed with vowels of the Greek word, “adonai” meaning Lord which is used as a circumlocution, a way of speaking around the holy name of God, the tetragrammaton, I AM Who I AM, constantly used in the Scriptures and in its various translations. It is a way of recognising the transcendent nature of God whose name should not be taken in vain and made subject to us; the inversion of the relationship of our humanity to God. We are made in God’s image, not the other way around.
The second verse of the hymn looks back to another episode in the Exodus as well as to the last book of the Christian Scriptures, The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, thus capturing the complementary images of paradise and wilderness rather nicely. “Open now the crystal fountain, Whence the healing stream doth flow.” The reference is twofold: first, the story of Moses’ striking the rock out of which flows water to assuage the thirst of the people in the wilderness, and secondly, the image of “the water of life” flowing out of the fountain in the midst of the heavenly city of Jerusalem in Chapters 21 and 22 at the end of The Book of Revelation. Jerusalem above, the celestial city, is equally the celestial paradise where the four rivers of paradise in the Genesis story of Creation are recalled and recollected in Redemption.
The second verse recalls another Exodus image: “the fiery cloudy pillar” after the crossing of the Red Sea. The Lord, we are told, “went before them by day in a pillar of cloud” and “by night in a pillar of fire to give them light” (Ex. 13.21). The third verse extends the Exodus to the crossing of the River Jordan under the leadership of Joshua into the promised land; “land me safe on Canaan’s side” having calmed our “anxious fears”. “Bear me through the swelling current.” In every way the wonderful imagery of this mid-18th century Welsh hymn gathers up the themes of the Exodus of Israel into the deeper meaning of the Exodus of Christ’s Passion.
The awareness of our human and finite limitations is the opening to the possibilities of our grasping the actual nature of God’s infinite mercy and grace. Jesus takes what seems to be so little and feeds so many in the wilderness. His actions are suggestive of the eucharist, the viaticum of our spiritual journey. He takes the bread, gives thanks, distributes to the disciples and they in turn to the crowd. It recalls the Exodus feeding of the Hebrews in the wilderness and the Passover as well; and all “were filled.” Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” “Give us this day our daily bread.” There is at once our longing and God’s providing, a taste of the paradise of God in the midst of the wilderness of our humanity.
But the story and the miracle doesn’t end there. For Jesus bids the disciples to “gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.” Twelve baskets are filled “with the fragments of the five barley-loaves which remained over and above unto them that had eaten.” The symbolism of twelve is part of the Exodus, part of the crossing of Jordan into the promised land, part of the character of Israel. Twelve baskets are symbolic, on the one hand, of God’s providential care for the twelve tribes of Israel, and, on the other hand, of the twelve apostles of the universal church. Out of our so little God and God alone accomplishes so much. Such is the radical meaning of God’s being with us in the pilgrimage. God provides even out of our lack. We are sustained in the journey with the bread of everlasting life, a taste of paradise in the midst of the wilderness journey.
It is not very hard to see how this Gospel story gathers up the readings of the past several Sundays in Lent. The crumbs which fall from our Master’s table which we saw in the story of the Canaanite woman are more than enough to feed us in our wilderness pilgrimage and counter the nihilism of human presumption and pride which we saw last Sunday by opening us out to the absolute and infinite grace and mercy of God. In him we find the truth of our humanity in contrast to our untruth.
This Sunday commonly called Mothering Sunday from the Epistle and Refreshment Sunday from the Gospel prepares us for our journey into the wilderness of deep Lent and to Holy Week. The point is already present. The miracle is the miracle of life itself, the miracle of God, the God who gives himself and his own life for us. In an echo of the Genesis story of Abraham and the intended sacrifice of Isaac, “God will provide himself a lamb for the sacrifice.” God provides himself. God and God alone can make something out of our so little, five barley-loaves and two small fishes but, even more, God and God alone makes something out of the empty nothingness of human sin and despair, out of our evil.
“They filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley-loaves.” This is more than enough to sustain us in the journey. “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 4, 2024