The Fourth Sunday of Lent
John 6:1-14
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I.
Today’s gospel reading for the Fourth Sunday in Lent is from John 6:1-14, 15. (I have added verse 15 to the lection.)
“After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tibe′ri-as. 2 And a multitude followed him, because they saw the signs which he did on those who were diseased. 3 Jesus went up on the mountain, and there sat down with his disciples. 4 Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand. 5 Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a multitude was coming to him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘How are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?’ 6 This he said to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. 7 Philip answered him, ‘Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.’ 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 ‘There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they among so many?’ 10 Jesus said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was much grass in the place; so the men sat down, in number about five thousand. 11 Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12 And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.’ 13 So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten. 14 When the people saw the sign which he had done, they said, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!’
15 Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”
There are five things to notice about this passage.
First, by Our Lord’s own lips it is meant to be a test. Jesus is testing His disciples, the multitude, and, by including this episode in his Gospel, John is testing all of his readers down through the centuries.
What is your response to this story of a miraculous feeding?
The Bible is full of stories of miracle feedings and food. The most famous example is the manna that the Israelites ate in the wilderness. (See Exodus 16.) But there is also the much earlier example from the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2:16 reads:
“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden.’”
The trees of Genesis are just as miraculous as manna in the wilderness or the Feeding of the Five Thousand. After all, man did nothing, yet here is this food, freely provided to him by God.
The second thing to notice about this story is that the “Passover is at hand.” The Feeding of the Five Thousand is portrayed as a most unusual seder.
The first Passover occurred the night before the Exodus, which is the third thing to notice about this story: Jesus is cast as a new Moses who will lead His people on a second Exodus. Those people need to be fed. This story is meant as proof that they will be fed, just as they have always been fed in the past: from the hand of God.
The fourth thing to point is that the crowds respond to the miracle by declaring Jesus to be the “the prophet who is to come into the world!” This cements the identification of Jesus with Moses. Moses himself prophesized the coming one day of a prophet like him, in Deuteronomy 18:15:
“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren—him you shall heed.”
Finally, the fifth thing to notice is that the people respond to the miracle with violent intent, ready to use force (if they could) to make Jesus their king.
The sinner’s initial response to Jesus is always violent, either to make Him king or to murder Him. Jesus is indeed the king, but He is king on His own terms.
II.
This miracle, like all the miracles in the Bible, is dismissed by the so-called enlightened or rational mind.
Reasonable men do not believe this event took place. They will admit that there may have been a multitude. A man named Jesus may have been speaking to this multitude. A lad may have had five barley loaves and two fish. Philip may have said, “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” Five thousand may have been present and Jesus may have made them all sit down.
Jesus may have even found some ingenious way to feed them all but the one thing He did not do was take five loaves and two fishes and feed a crowd of 5,000 such that there were twelve baskets left over from the same five loaves and two fishes.
It is irrational to say the thing was a miracle. A magic trick, maybe, and such hucksterism is precisely why the rabbis described Jesus as a magician from Egypt and an idolator when they wrote down the cultural memories of their encounters with Him centuries later in the Talmud.1
It’s worth keeping in mind that the Talmud, the principle holy book of Rabbinic Judaism, is a much later text, which is to say it is much younger, than the New Testament.
The Talmud in its final form is actually closer chronologically to the Koran than it is to the Old Testament.
To be sure the Talmud has source material that is contemporaneous and even older than the New Testament (as well as material from much later), but the New Testament reached its final form by the end of the first century A.D., whereas the Talmud did not reach its final form until nearly 500 years later.2
I offer you this digression to challenge your assumptions on which is the older religion. A fuller discussion of the development of the oral vs. the written Torah is for another time, but the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand is part of the contest I have been describing in recent sermons for the soul of Judaism.
What Judaism is, what it means, and what it will become, are very much up for grabs, both when Jesus performed this miracle and when John set down an authoritative account of it on paper a few decades later.
Given that reasonable men cannot accept this Feeding of the Five Thousand for what John says it is — a miracle — how are we supposed to find God in this story? What can it tell us as we seek to center ourselves in the lotus-scented and womb-like bosom of the universal sacred? (Looking at you, Richard Rohr.)
Well, for one thing, rational men can admit there is a chance the story happened exactly as John said it did.
Reasonable men are always ready to admit they may have missed something. This does not mean that they accept the miracle, only that they are honest enough to acknowledge the limits of their science.
Based on the things we know about the laws of nature and the uniformity of space and time there is no reason to suppose that this multiplication of bread and fish was in any way probable then, or is likely to be repeated now, or in the future.
Still, it would be, well, irrational for anyone to rule out such an anomaly as statistically impossible. After all, nothing is 100%. An anomaly like this does not prove a miracle happened, it only proves we have reached the limit of our knowledge. We reserve judgment. We do not (yet) know what happened.
Next, the rational man (or woman) might try to “re-mythologize” the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, acknowledging, with Shakespeare’s Hamlet that:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
We need to set aside these rationalist, masculinist, white supremacist, Father-God archetypes and embrace the Sacred Feminine.
A story like this allows us to do precisely that, which is to say, re-engage with mystery. (And, as everybody knows, all mystery begins in, and springs forth from, the womb.)
This is certainly a reasonable way to handle John’s story of miraculous feeding.
It adopts a position of humility before this great artifact of human culture, the Bible, which is the testimony of one chosen race’s striving after meaning, of its encounter with the Unknown, and a recognition that there is something for everyone in this universal book.
It allows for the activity of time, which is another way of saying chance. “A million monkeys, banging on a million typewriters….”
Since the rational man knows he cannot be in all places at once — since he will never devise by his science an instrument capable of observing and measuring all in all — it is certainly reasonable for him to allow that such an event as this feeding might have occurred.
Such a man (or woman) is pleased with himself for allowing mystery its rightful place.
And who knows? Perhaps some as-yet undiscovered bell jar will turn up one day soon in a Palestinian wadi containing the missing fragments and the documentary evidence that will explain, once and for all, how Jesus did it.
Until we know for sure, let’s all enjoy the thrill of doubt!
III.
It might help us to gain some perspective if we turn now to the participants in the story — those who were actually fed by Jesus that day — to examine what they thought of the experience.
As it turns out, these 5,000 men were not so unlike us. It may surprise us, but it is worth remembering that the men of old were, in fact, men. They had intelligence and rational faculties.
C. S. Lewis says somewhere in his own writings on miracles that the men of the ancient world knew full well that human bodies tended to sink in water when they tried to walk on it, and so, when Scripture records Jesus walking on water (as John does, in the verses immediately following today’s reading) the one thing we must not ascribe to the ancients is some kind of invincible ignorance of how the world works. It turns out that they were well aware.
Faced with the inexplicable the men in the crowd did what all men do when backed into a corner or when they find themselves alone late at night, terrified of the dark: they rationalized.
They did this in two ways. First, they declared that Jesus was the prophet, an “expert” in all things divine. They might not understand how he multiplied the loaves and fishes, but they know what they saw (and what they ate), and that what they experienced together beat all the odds.
Chance (or fortune) shone with favor that particular Passover. Surely, they had just witnessed a master at work.
Declaring Jesus the prophet-expert led naturally to the second thing they did. They tried to make Him their king.
They were used to kings. Kings made sense to them. They were used to being ruled. Submission was something they had already experienced.
Jesus is setting Himself up as the new Moses, to lead them on a second Exodus, and all they prove themselves worthy of is slavery.
In their frantic efforts to make sense of irrational circumstances men cede their freedom and independence to anyone with perceived authority. In other words, to anyone who can (or claims he can) make sense of the situation.
We saw this during the pandemic, when we collectively rationalized our fears and allowed a few experts to rule us. Unlike Jesus, these men were only too glad to play the king.
Both ways of rationalizing this miracle — first, by making Jesus the expert in all things divine, and second by trying to force Him into ruling them — meant they didn’t have to acknowledge the meaning of the miracle at all.
All the man returning home to his wife after this miracle meal can possibly say to her is, “Honey, you won’t believe what just happened to me.”
Several hours later, after she’s reminded him that the local Pharisees certainly do not think Jesus is the prophet and that “talk of violence and of making someone a king” will get him thrown in a Roman prison for insurrection, he manages to get her to admit that somehow, and, at the very least, something unique happened to him that was, well, quite meaningful.
He’s just not sure what that meaning is or if he’ll ever really know what it meant. He’s face-to-face with the mystery again. He’s home alone in the universe (or multiverse, as the case may be).
His wife tries to sooth him, but she’ll never understand what happened to him that day either. After all, she wasn’t there. This wasn’t her experience to have. And even if one day she has her own miraculous encounter with Jesus (or another divine avatar, or better yet, maybe a Christa) she can’t be sure he’ll understand what happened to her either.
They each have their own perspective and no more. Still, what’s important nowadays is that people see themselves reflected in god’s image, and if his wife finally finds a god who bears her image, then they’ll both have found something that somehow has meaning for them.
IV.
All of this is, of course, a caricature of the rubbish that passes for religion and spirituality now, as well as back in Jesus’ day.
But the Feeding of the Five Thousand is not a caricature and it was twelve baskets full of barley bread that they picked up afterwards, not rubbish.
Symbolically, it was enough to feed the reconstituted Twelve Tribes of Israel as they make their way out from bondage once again. A new Exodus for a new people of God: the Church.
God deals in originals, man only in copies.
What that means is that the key to meaning in this or any of Jesus’ miracles is not what we make of it, but what God intends it to be.
Think of it this way.
When we receive Holy Communion, we do not destroy Christ on the cross all over again, nor do we eat his flesh and drink His blood in an original way. We do it in an analogous way. There is a likeness between Jesus’ body and the bread we eat and His blood and the wine that we drink because Jesus told us there is. “This is My body. This is My blood.”
The meaning of Holy Communion is already fully understood by God. That’s because He decided what it would mean. That means we don’t have to assign meaning to it from our own perspectives. We need only to receive the meaning Jesus has given it and be thankful.
God makes His meanings known to us through supernatural revelation.
The creation and the Bible are supernatural revelations of God’s meaning. They are His messages to us.
Often, these messages come in the form of meals.
In the creation story, God told us what creation meant. He told us it was good and that we may eat freely of all but one of the trees of the garden.
God means to sustain us — and never just in a natural way — but always in a supernatural way.
The night before the Exodus, God again commanded a meal to be prepared. He told the Israelites to slaughter a lamb. He gave meaning to that slaughter. He said that His Angel of Death would pass over the doors that had been marked with the blood of that lamb.
The fruits of the Garden were the sacraments of our first parents’ creation. Passover is the sacrament of our redemption from their fall and our sins.
In both cases God determined their meaning before all worlds began and has shared their meaning with us, in full.
There is no sacred mystery here. Profound, yes. Not understood or beyond understanding, no.
It is the same with the Feeding of the Five Thousand. We accept the miracle. We receive its meaning with thanksgiving.
That meaning is determined by the revelatory events that come after: Christ’s passion, His death on the cross for our salvation, and His resurrection from the dead.
John tells us this was a Passover meal, so the meaning of this miracle is understood and becomes explicit in every meal: God supernaturally provides for His redeemed people.
V.
What we Christians are supposed to do in our daily interactions with others is nothing more than what Jesus did when He fed the five thousand: confront them with their sins and show them their need for redemption.
Wait, this is a fairytale about nice Jesus feeding lots of hungry people! Can’t we just start a food pantry?
No, this was a miracle, set during the Passover feast, which commemorates the time God confronted the Egyptians with their sins and killed all their firstborn, both man and beast, as a punishment.
Oh. You’re right. So, I need to tell people they are sinners and are facing punishment for their sins?
You need to tell them they are blind and cannot see what you want to show them and deaf and cannot hear what you want to tell them.
How will that work?
The Holy Spirit. You read about a miracle today. Jesus took five barley loaves and two fishes and fed five thousand people with them — and there was plenty left over.
So?
So, God might open the eyes and unstop the ears of the people He puts in your life.
That would be a miracle.
It certainly would be.
God told Adam and Eve that if they ate the forbidden fruit they would die. We’ve been a race of dead men ever since.
What we’re asked to do as Christians seems impossible. We’re asked to raise the dead.
We’re asked to confront people and to remind them that they are responsible before God for their deafness, for their blindness, and for their sins — even though they were born that way.
We’re asked to tell them straight up that they are creatures of God, to stop denying it, and to start acting like it.
We’re asked to show them that they already know all of this, because all nature and the Bible in every hotel room nightstand that they never read reveals this to them, and yet still they spend their days denying it.
We have to explain to them that they have broken God’s moral laws and that they need to stop justifying their sins.
And finally, we need to get them to see what their sins and self-justification have done to the world.
Babies murdered in the womb or left in freezers. Children castrated. Women displacing men and the home forsaken. Women banking their eggs for the sperm of men they will never meet. Men quietly quitting or committing suicide. Low testosterone. Obesity. Marriage redefined, and, increasingly, put off altogether. The marriage bed defiled by pornography. The old, and the sick, and the depressed euthanized. Churches burned to the ground in formerly Christian countries. Human chattels trafficked across lawless borderlands. Judges refusing to punish criminals. Diversity trumping merit. Prisoners of conscience jailed in America.
Telling people all this will not make you popular. (At least, I have never found that it made me popular.)
But it might make you a party to a miracle, and I have witnessed a few conversions in my day.
“Jesus said to Philip, ‘How are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?’ This he said to test him, for he himself knew what he would do.”
How will the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, and the dead be raised? I am asking you, Christian man, Christian woman.
Are you going to share the gospel with these lost souls or not? Are you willing to have a confrontation? Or will you retreat and hide behind your perspective, too afraid to come out from under the shadow of “your truth” to confront someone (or yourself) with the truth?
I am not saying you need to pick a fight. After all, it is violent men who want to seize Jesus and make Him king, but there is no need to make Him what He already is.
Choose your words carefully, but not too carefully. The gospel needs to have some sting, otherwise its grace cannot penetrate.
Jesus is testing you. He already knows what He will do. Amen.
Questions for reflection and discussion:
1. Jesus uses the Feeding of the Five Thousand to ____________ His disciples.
2. What biblical feast is “at hand”?
3. The crowd responds to the miracle by declaring Jesus to be the ____________ and they try violently to make Him ____________.
4. The one thing rational men will not admit about this story is that a ____________ actually took place.
5. The ____________ is actually closer chronologically in its final form to the Koran than it is to the Old Testament.
6. Rational men can admit there is a ____________ the story happened exactly as John said it did.
7. Rational men (and women) can also try to “____________” the story.
8. What do people do when they are faced with the inexplicable?
9. Give two examples of rationalization from the crowd.
10. Explain how perspective allows us to rationalize a mystery.
11. God makes His meanings known to us through supernatural ____________.
12. The gospel needs to have some sting, otherwise its ____________ cannot penetrate.
Parents and Grandparents, you are responsible to apply God’s Word to your children’s lives. Here is some help. Young Children – draw a picture about something you hear during the sermon. Explain your picture(s) to your parents or the minister after church. Older Children – Do one or both of the following: 1) Count how many times the word miracle is mentioned. 2) Discuss with your parents about a time when something didn’t make sense to you. How did you make sense of it? Ask the same of your parents.
(1) test; (2) Passover; (3) prophet/king; (4) miracle; (5) Talmud; (6) chance; (7) re-mythologize; (8) they try to rationalize the irrational; (9) they declared Jesus to be a divine “expert” and they tried to make Him into something they could understand: their king; (10) it allows us to claim something as having meaning “just for me”; (11) revelation; (12) grace
See: Peter Schäfer, 2009, Jesus in the Talmud, Princeton, N.J. ; Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press.
See: The Babylonian Talmud - Jewish History, accessed March 9, 2024, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2652565/jewish/The-Babylonian-Talmud.htm.
The Rubbish That Passes for Religion