The following sermon was preached at saint benedict’s table on Sunday August 5, 2018. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Our gospel text opens in the middle of a scene in which a crowd is looking for Jesus. Not having been able to find him, they return to Capernaum to look for him there.
When they finally find Jesus, he tells them that he knows they have been looking for him “not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” (v26) This is in reference to the story we read last week where Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish.
A few weeks ago at Theology by the Glass we were discussing the influence that music can have on us and one of the songs we talked about was “Signs” by Five Man Electrical Band. The chorus to that song begins, “Signs, signs everywhere a sign,” and that’s an apt description of the events that lead up to tonight’s gospel reading.
At the beginning of chapter six, we are told that, “A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick.” Tonight’s passage is less than halfway through the chapter and already Jesus has healed people, walked on water, and fed a huge crowd. Signs, signs, everywhere a sign.
Just one of these signs would have been more than enough to make me want to follow Jesus around wondering, “what’s he going to do next?” But Jesus says that the people have been looking for him not because they “saw signs, but because [they] ate [their] fill of the loaves.”
The people, it seems, have bread on the brain.
If you go to Hildegard’s Bakery for bread, and I highly recommend that you do, you may find yourself in a conversation about the many different varieties of bread available. You can’t just walk up to the counter and say “I’d like some bread please,” you have to specify what kind of bread you want. Do you prefer something more dense or airy? Flavoured or plain? Sour dough? Pan bread? Maybe a pizza?
This week I picked up a fabulous sour dough which is my personal favourite and, “whatever is shaped best to fit into the slots of a toaster,” for Mike. Both were delicious.
Next time I go back, I’ll try something different. I love talking to the staff and learning more about bread.
And I hope you all enjoy talking about bread as much as I do, because the lectionary currently has us in a multi-week cycle of Gospel readings called the “Bread of Life” discourses. It can be a nightmare for a preacher – six weeks of finding something original to say about bread. It can be a bit of a nightmare for a congregation. Six weeks of listening to their preacher try to find something original to say about bread.
But of all the miraculous things that Jesus did in this chapter of John’s gospel alone, it was bread that inspired the people to follow him. Bread that was created through a miracle. Bread that was so abundant that everyone was able to eat as much as they wanted.
And, as my friend and fellow pastor Jodi pointed out earlier today, if we have to overemphasize anything in this day and age, “let it be that the whole world is a feast.” I couldn’t agree more.
The people in our story participated in a feast. They had eaten their fill, but that full feeling won’t last forever, they will get hungry again. And they know it. And they are beginning to wonder, if Jesus could transform a small amount of food into a feast, then maybe he could do it again. And again. Maybe they would never have to be hungry again.
And maybe they would no longer have to be subject to an empire that controls their food supply.
Paul Fromberg explains that, “In Jesus’ world the empire was in control of all access to food. The empire used that control to keep people in line. The only people who had access to this power were cultural elites who had control of all the resources including food. Most of the people living on the land, who are the people that Jesus is teaching this day, suffered from a perpetual lack of food. Hunger was the way that most of the people experienced the crushing power of the empire. It’s also one of the many reasons that so many people suffered from sickness. Inadequate nutrition obviously caused epidemics among the people. Which is one of the reasons why so much of the Bible’s imagery about God’s kingdom is about a banquet with plenty to eat. So the people who gathered to hear Jesus teach [in last week’s story] were hungry and they lived under the threat of starvation and sickness and Jesus just bypasses the power of the empire to give them food and make them whole.”
But most of this vision of a new way of doing things still exists mainly in Jesus’ mind. The people who are standing right in front of him haven’t had a couple thousand years to think through the implications of these stories. They have never participated in the Eucharist. They are hearing and experiencing these things for the first time. They may have been able to connect some of the dots between Jesus’ ability to bypass the laws of the empire and the natural world in order to allow them to eat their fill, but they assume that this means that Jesus is an ideal candidate, not to eradicate the earthy political structures, but to simply replace the current rulers of those structures.
They are looking to Jesus as someone who can satisfy their physical hunger and possibly also their political aspirations.
After Jesus multiplied the loaves, we are told that, “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is come into the world.” (v.14) Then they planned to take Jesus by force and make him their king, but Jesus slips away before they can do so.
Which is why they were looking for him at the beginning of tonight’s reading. He’d given them the slip. But now that they have found him, Jesus uses strong language to try and help them realize that, while he may be the one they are looking for, he has no intention of becoming their earthly king.
NT Wright says, “At first, Jesus’ warning seems churlish. He has done something remarkable; they are excited and come to him wanting more; and he all but rebukes them for having the wrong motivation. What else could you expect from them? But underneath the warning of verses 26 and 27 is the recognition that after the feeding in the wilderness they were only a moment away from making him king (v.15) – and they would have meant him to be a king like other kings, a strong this-worldly figure who would lead them in their strong this-worldly agendas. Jesus is indeed king, but the type and manner of his kingship will be very different from what the crowds expected or wanted…” (N.T. Wright, John for Everyone, 79)
Having been found by the people he was trying to avoid, Jesus is confronted with an urgent need to define his terms. He’s using the word “king” to describe himself, but he is a very different kind of king than what the people are expecting. He is using the word “bread,” but he is not using it in a way they have ever heard it used before.
Initially, the crowd has two main frames of reference for the word “bread.” The kind of bread they have recently been served by Jesus, the kind of bread they eat on a regular basis and the bread they know about from the stories of their ancestors, the bread that came down from heaven and fed the Israelites in the wilderness, manna. Both are types of bread that are used to satisfy physical hunger.
Jesus is essentially saying “Look, I don’t want to talk to you about the kind of bread we ate the other day, and I don’t want to talk to you about the kind of bread your ancestors ate in the past, I want to talk to you about an entirely different kind of bread.”
Jesus has their attention and while they don’t fully understand what he is talking about, they are interested in getting some of this new kind of bread, and so they ask how they can acquire it and how much this new special bread will cost.
They are still assuming an earthly system where they will have to give something, in order to get something. They want to reduce what Jesus is talking about to a simple formula, but Jesus won’t let them. Instead, he rejects their request for a transactional exchange and replaces it with an invitation to believe. There is only one thing they have to do if they want this new bread, believe.
Jesus describes this new bread by saying, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world,” a description which inspires the people to say, “Sir, give us this bread always.” (v.33-34)
Soon, as Jesus continues to explain what he means many will begin to question him, many will doubt, many will decide they don’t want this bread after all, but those are stories for the next couple of weeks.
For now, the people are hungry for more. More bread to feed their bellies and, now that they know that such a thing may be possible, the bread of life as well.
I worked for years in a number of charities that focussed on feeding people who are poor and the most common question I would receive when sharing about my work with church folks was, “Well it’s all well and good that you’re feeding their bodies, but are you feeding their souls?” The implication was always that souls were infinitely more important than bodies. That telling people about Jesus was infinitely more important than giving them bread. I can imagine those church people saying something similar to Jesus, “Well, feeding us with that bread and that fish was nice enough, but what are you going to do for our souls?”
It’s a shift from the way that first crowd of people approached the subject, and it’s a shift from the way Jesus approached the subject as well. In this particular gospel passage Jesus is indeed focussing on the bread of life because its important for the people to know about it, not because he doesn’t value the importance of bread for the body. He’s already clearly demonstrated that feeding people’s bodies is important to him. It’s not an either or situation.
But in my church experience it was often made to seem as it is was. Feed people’s bodies? Eh, that’s OK. Feed people’s souls? Well that’s the only work that truly matters.
That’s a shift, but there is also another shift that has happened that makes our world different than the one described in the gospels: we have a very different relationship to bread. Any kind of bread. At least here in North America, it is no longer the staple of our diets that it once was. The symbolism has shifted.
Paul Fromberg, who I quoted earlier, is an Anglican priest in San Francisco and he told me a story about a time when he was serving communion, and one of the first people he approached was someone he didn’t recognise, someone who was new to the church. As Paul approached him with the bread, the young man got a panicked look in his eyes, held out his hands to refuse the bread and said, “I don’t do carbs.”
Needless to say, Paul was stunned. In all his years of serving communion, he had never had anyone respond in that manner.
For many people, bread has shifted from a daily staple in a healthy diet, to a food to eat as a treat or a guilty pleasure, or, for people with celiac or gluten allergies, a food to be avoided entirely if they don’t want to get sick.
For many people, bread is now something to be avoided – either by choice or necessity. It is no longer a universal symbol of a basic food staple that gives everyone life in the way that it once was.
Some of us may need to cut bread out of our diets entirely, but we can still look to these passages to understand that if we want to live, we have to eat. Maybe not bread, but we have to eat something.
You can’t ignore your body and focus solely on your spirit. And we can’t expect people who are poor to do that either. If a person is hungry they need food, and no one should ever be hungry.
We also need the bread of life, Jesus, to sustain our spirits, and that is an important and valuable thing.
We need to value both and keep both in mind, if we place more emphasis on one and ignore the other; we are missing something fundamentally important.
Which is why I love the way, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, we place an emphasis on both by bringing baskets of food to share with Agape Table and the Bread of Life to share with everyone who choses to come and join us. I love seeing both of those things sharing priority of place around the table.
With Agape Table’s move to a new location we may need to re-think just what we bring to fill these baskets, but I hope we keep finding ways to remember the importance of bread for bellies and bread from heaven. Bringing something to put in those baskets each week is a small thing, it’s an example of offering our lunch like Jamie spoke about last week.
It’s a small thing, but it’s an important thing. It’s important as much, if not more, for us as for the folks at Agape Table.
Our baskets contain items that will help people, but they are also a sign. A sign of the importance of remembering and caring for our neighbours. A sign of our intention to extend the abundance of this table and the abundance of God’s love that it represents with others.
And it’s something I am grateful for.
Amen.