by CCW | 15 March 2026 10:00
Five barley-loaves and two small fishes. Not much to feed a crowd and hardly much in the way of festive delights. No mention of any simnel cake! Andrew’s question is very much to the point, yet, in what follows, so much more is made out of so little. But is that the point simply? What are we to make of this story?
The Fourth Sunday in Lent seems to mark a reprieve or at least a bit of a respite, a break, as it were, from the rigours of the Lenten discipline, especially after the challenging readings from last Sunday. Its various names highlight this apparent shift: Laetare Sunday meaning rejoice from the traditional Introit from Isaiah, Refreshment Sunday alluding to the Gospel story, Mothering Sunday in reference to the Epistle about Jerusalem as “the mother of us all,” giving rise, as some say, to the custom of visiting one’s mother or their mother church. All these terms belong to a kind of ‘folk wisdom’ that arises entirely from the readings.
Yet they belong very much to the journey and logic of Lent, to its deeper meaning and purpose. As we saw last Sunday, we are not to be left desolate and empty through the shattering of our illusions, so here we are reminded about what going up to Jerusalem really means: namely, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus in whom and with whom is the joy of human redemption, regardless of vagaries of human experience.
Fr. Crouse observed that this Sunday allows us “to catch our breath” from the Collect, ut respiramus, “that we may be relieved.” Such is “the comfort of thy grace.” In other words, this Sunday strengthens us for the journey – the true meaning of comfort – reminding us of the blessings that belong to those “whose strength is in thee, in whose heart are the pilgrim ways;/ Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well, “ as the Psalmist puts it. “They go from strength to strength,/ and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Sion”(Ps. 84. 5,6). That conjunction of the “Vale of Misery” and “Sion” or Jerusalem is very striking in terms of the Epistle and the Gospel which concentrate for us the dynamic interplay between Paradise and Wilderness.
Paradise is that Jerusalem which is above, “the heaven of heavens,” as Augustine remarks, which we can neither make for ourselves – the illusion and folly of our world in the ideology of progress and human perfectibility – nor unmake it – which is another illusion of our times in the overreach of human reason and power – since the reality of the created order is that upon which everything, including our being, depends. It is greater than ourselves and all our presumptions to power and domination. The wilderness is within us. Yet God does not leave us in the despair and hopelessness of separation and exile but makes a way back to him even through the wilderness experience of our insufficiency and lack.
That insufficiency and lack is not simply about human failings, our fallenness and sinfulness. It is also about the conditions of our finite being, the givenness of creation and the necessary limits of our being and the world.
There are, perhaps, two main take-aways from the readings: first, the radical meaning of “the sign that Jesus did” in the wilderness, and, second, the way of thinking that is required of us to understand and enter into the images in both readings. Both John and Paul show us a way of thinking and understanding the Scriptures that reveals their meaning and purpose. In so doing they counter and critique the form of technocratic and practical reason that seeks to dominate and control the natural world and human lives, on the one hand, and reveal another and higher form of thinking that transcends and gathers into unity all other forms of thinking and acting, on the other hand.
In this sense the readings belong entirely to the ultimate realization of human redemption in the sacrifice of Christ and the abundance of life that flows out of that sacrifice sacramentally and spiritually. The miraculous feeding in the wilderness is about the truth of Paradise restored, realized in the heavenly city of Jerusalem from which we are fed in the homeward journey of the soul to God. It is not simply a moral story of how sharing goods increases goods, as important as that may be, but points more radically to how God and God alone makes something good out of our nothingness; in short, out of evil. This is the deeper point that belongs to the proper realization of human limits and the radical giveness of creation as embraced in the Paradise which is always there and which cannot be of our making or unmaking. We unmake ourselves, and yet even that is limited. There is no unmaking of the fact of our being creatures.
Today’s Gospel recalls the readings of this past week in the Offices from Exodus and from John. It belongs to the so-called ‘Bread of Life Discourse’ of Chapter Six in John’s Gospel. It looks back to the story of the Passover and the events in the wilderness of Sinai that reach their climax in the giving of the Ten Commandments of the Law and the regulatory directions that follow in Exodus. Those foundational stories are transformed and raised to a higher significance. The readings from Exodus and John 6 are gathered into the understanding of the readings for today.
The Gospel is seen in the light of the Exodus: the temptation at Massah about bitter water, the provision of manna or angels’ bread, and, most significantly “putting God to the test” in the place which Moses called Massah and Meribah, recalled in the Venite as Provocation and the day of Temptation. These passages about the provisions of God in times of hardship and famine are the context for John 6 and point, in the Christian understanding, to Christ’s Crucifixion out of whose pierced body flow water and blood, symbols of the Eucharist, as the Fathers say.
“We‘ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” Joni Mitchell sang in the Hippy Anthem of the sixties, ‘Woodstock’. But there is no going back. We are more than “stardust/million-year-old carbon,” and, while we may like to think “we are golden,” it is certainly the case that we are “caught in the devil’s bargain,” an allusion to the Faustian bargain of our technocratic world that is anti-life in its pretensions to be God. Her song echoes the wisdom of the past and perhaps points to what both Paul and John are getting at in terms of our making sense of the images and language of Scripture.
Paul contrasts the sons of the bond-woman and the free-woman, Ishmael and Isaac. Isaac is the promised son through whom the blessings of God are to be bequeathed to all generations. They are both the sons of Abraham, the one through Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maid-servant, albeit at her direction owing to her apparent barrenness. Yet Sarah is to be the mother of the promised Son to Abraham. She gives birth in her old age to Isaac. That is, we might say, the ‘literal story’ but with Paul it takes on another symbolic or allegorical meaning, a significance beyond but not in negation of its literal or historical sense. It is a way of reading and thinking.
The contrast is transformed into the distinction between what is worldly and what is heavenly, between the flesh and the spirit, between the Old Covenant of the Law and the New Covenant of Grace, between the earthly Jerusalem and the heavenly, between what binds us as opposed to what frees us. We are meant for more than the pursuits and preoccupations of the earthly city. We are made for freedom. We are freed to God.
That freedom is neither of our making nor our deserving. It is not a right or an entitlement, not a human construct, something of our making. We are the heirs of Isaac, the promised son, the children of the free-woman, citizens of the heavenly city. Our freedom is in Christ. For Christ has made us free. That freedom is ours whatever the conditions and circumstances and it is given to us to live and grow into more fully. It is not a freedom from creation, from the God-given limits of the created and finite world, from our embodied being and into the brave new world of improvement and endless progress that is our modern dystopia. It is freedom found within the limits of the creation which has its truth in God and for us as God’s children in God’s world.
“Five barley loaves and two small fishes; but what are they among so many?” There is a sense of hopelessness and despair. “How can anyone feed these men with bread here in the wilderness?” as Mark puts it. What is the answer? It lies in what Christ says and does. “Make the men sit down,” he says. “And Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down.” His actions anticipate the Last Supper and the Eucharist as the means of our participation in the redemption and restoration of our humanity to its end in the Paradise of God, but only through the sacrifice of Christ. He is “the bread of life,” as John 6 makes clear. Such is the symbolic and sacramental force of this story, the deeper spiritual meaning of the events themselves, an anticipation of Passiontide and Holy Week in which we participate already. But it only works if we avoid making the mistake of taking a figurative statement literally or taking a literal expression figuratively – mistaking signs for things or things for signs; in short, a way of thinking the images.
If that were not enough, Jesus bids the disciples, “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” Such is the gathering of all things into unity in God in whom all things have their truth and meaning. Not just then and later but now and always. Twelve baskets of the fragments are gathered up – twelve baskets that signify both the twelve tribes of Israel and the Apostles of the Christian Church. A spiritual gathering in the fullest sense enough to feed and nourish us in the pilgrimage of faith. They are our refreshment and a reminder of Jerusalem, an image of the mothering love of Christ in his body the Church. They strengthen us in the pilgrimage of faith and are more than enough to sustain us and to enable us to rejoice in the goodness of God.
Fr. David Curry,
Lent IV, 2026
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