by CCW | 30 March 2025 10:00
The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle found in all four gospels but our text about gathering up the fragments is unique to John. The whole of chapter six in his Gospel is sometimes called ‘the Bread of Life discourse’. It is, I think, quite a powerful theological argument about the essential doctrine of Christ as God and man and as Saviour and Lord and highlights the struggles that belong to grasping the meaning of the Incarnation. John provides an extended discourse on Jesus as “the Bread of Life” that belongs to his life with and from the Father and with us through the sacrament without which, he says, “you have no life in you.”
He points to the sacramental logic where bread and wine signify his flesh and blood. “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” For “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” That abiding is our participation in his eternal life and in our being raised up into the divine life at the last day. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” Yet this is, as many of the disciples say, “a hard saying,” and “many,” John tells us, “drew back and no longer went about with him.” This prompts Jesus to ask the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter grasps the essential teaching of the entire chapter. “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.” This is Peter’s confession as given by John.
The chapter ends with an explicit reference to the betrayal of Christ, thus pointing us to the radical meaning of his going up to Jerusalem that we heard on Quinquagesima Sunday and to the image of Jerusalem as above and free, the mother of us all, as the symbol of our life as the children of promise, as we heard in the epistle reading from Galatians this morning. There is more to this Gospel than a picnic in the park with Jesus.
These readings provide us with a rich feast in the wilderness journey of Lent. They gather together and concentrate for us the themes of wilderness and paradise that belong to the first four Sundays in Lent. Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” on the First Sunday in Lent; the Canaanite woman comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon and meets Jesus half-way, in the wilderness, it seems, on the Second Sunday in Lent; and on the Third Sunday in Lent we have a graphic depiction of the desolating wilderness of our souls in our despair of the absolute goodness of God in whom we are meant to find our blessedness in hearing the word of God and keeping it. John in chapter six makes explicit reference to the word wilderness by recalling the Exodus when “our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness”; the other gospels simply say “in a lonely place.” Yet in all the gospels there is the sense of paradise in the wilderness, a transformation of wilderness into paradise, we might say, and so, too, for the previous Sundays in Lent. Paradise is always there; it is we who have exiled ourselves from it.
What is paradise on the First Sunday except the words of Jesus that counter the deceptions of the tempter, the devil, or Satan? What is paradise on the Second Sunday except the insight of the Canaanite woman about “the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table,” words that occasion Christ’s wonder and saving grace of healing? What is paradise on the Third Sunday except the finger grace of Christ which signals “that the kingdom of God hath come upon you,” emphasized in the original ending about “Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it”? What is paradise here today except the feeding of so many out of so little, but even more in the idea of the “gathering up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”? That sense of gathering extends to everything that we have seen in these Lenten Sundays.
In conjunction with the epistle, the gathering is equally the gathering together of images from the Hebrew Scriptures that speak to our life in Christ. Jerusalem is the symbol of the heavenly city, the community of our redemption and joy, a rejoicing in what is more than what belongs to the uncertainties of human experience. “The desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband.” Another image of God providing more out of the wilderness of human experience of suffering and insufficiency. In the accounts of the feeding in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the disciples point out the problem of the lack of provisions for the crowd, suggesting that they should be sent away to find food for themselves. In each of those accounts, Jesus, rather provocatively, tells the disciples, “you give them something to eat.” In each case, and as with John, too, this prompts the explicit recognition of our lack or insufficiency, “only five barley-loaves and two small fishes.” As Andrew emphasizes “what are they among so many?”
John alone presents Jesus as proving or testing the disciples about who and what he is doing explicitly which belongs to the whole thrust of the chapter. It makes known what God and God alone provides for us in the face of our awareness of the human condition, an awareness that is really about recalling us to God as the end and source of all life. This is the great comfort and relief of this mid-Lenten Sunday which is known, because of these readings, by various terms such as Mothering Sunday in reference to the Epistle, Laetare Sunday in reference to the traditional introit from Isaiah about rejoicing, or Refreshment Sunday in reference to the Gospel feeding of the multitude. None of these popular terms make any sense without the traditional readings. They belong to a kind of folk wisdom that has grasped the meaning of the readings in some sense or another.
The theme of the wilderness of human emptiness transformed into the paradise of plenty is not about a return to Eden. It is profoundly about paradise as signalling our home or end in God as something in which we participate now through the spiritual journey of Lent., itself an image of our whole life to and with God. In other words, these readings all point us to Passiontide and propel us into the drama of Holy Week and to the spectacle of the Cross; in short, to the sacrifice of Christ as the necessary means of our restoration to the truth of our humanity as found in the truth of God.
That is the radical meaning of the “gathering up of the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” Such is redemption and in that activity is the greater wonder of the grace which seeks our perfection and end in God. We are, as Thomas Aquinas puts it, “ordered to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of our reason.” But it does not negate our desire and reason but perfects it through what is revealed and made known by revelation. “It was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known by divine revelation.”
Nothing is to be lost but gathered to the true end and purpose of our creation which is God himself in whom alone we have life, eternal life, as John emphasizes in this chapter, eternal life in which we participate now through the sacramental provisions that God makes for us. This is our freedom and our joy which can only deepen our sense of wonder at what God makes known to us about ourselves and himself.
These readings look backwards and forwards, backwards to creation and the fall and the promises of God seen in the promised son, Issac, and forwards to the events of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But even more than such motions of backwards and forwards there is the greater movement of the gathering of all things to God: a gathering that belongs to the unity of all things in God who is both beginning and end and in whom all things find their perfection and truth. That is, I think, the real comfort and purpose of the Fourth Sunday in Lent.
We are recalled to Jerusalem, to the heavenly city of God’s mothering love through the motions of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. His words are the words of spiritual life here and now and forever. They sustain us in the journey of our lives as lived in the body of Christ, the Church. What is taken up from the feast in the wilderness is more than enough to sustain us. Twelve baskets of crumbs as it were are gathered up, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, on the one hand, and one for each of the twelve apostles of the Apostolic and Catholic Church, on the other hand. A total gathering of all things to God, “that nothing be lost,” nothing be lost that belongs to the truth and purpose of creation and our humanity.
Fr. David Curry
Lent 4, 2025
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