Trinity seven

Jesus said to Philip ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?

There was a young bride, a poor cook, whose husband came home one day to find her crying over the oven. ‘The dog ate the bread that I just baked’ she sobbed. ‘Never mind dear’ said the husband ‘We’ll just have to get another dog’. There is much in ordinary everyday life that we take for granted.  And I guess that bread is one of them. It’s only when there is shortage that we appreciate how important it is.

As a Palestinian Jew Jesus was brought up in a religion which understood that everyday things such as bread were in fact holy because they were appreciated as gifts from God. Food was holy.  Meals were sacred occasions. The law required that at every meal the father of the house would bless God for the food to be eaten. ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, you who bring forth bread from the earth'. And as he said that blessing he would lift up and break a loaf of bread at table and distribute it to all those present. And he would do this at every meal. The rabbis taught that a meal without a prayer was a meal that was accursed. Bread was the essential basic food. To eat bread in Hebrew meant to have a meal. The poor ate barley bread – like the five barley loaves  in the miracle story we heard as our Gospel reading. The rich ate the bread of wheat. But whether barley or wheat, bread was to be treated with respect and it was forbidden to throw even the crumbs away.

An unknown author has a simple poem in praise of bread, an appreciation of this food of life:

Be gentle when you touch bread

Let it not lie uncared for unwanted.

So often bread is taken for granted.

 

There is much beauty in bread

Beauty of sun and soil

Beauty of patient toil.

 

Wind and rain have caressed it.

Christ often blessed it

Be gentle when you touch bread.

In today’s Gospel we see Jesus taking and blessing and distributing bread. Crowds had followed him and were hungry – they needed to be fed. This story of the feeding of the crowds is the most often repeated of Jesus miracle stories. It is found in all four Gospels and is told twice in two of them. Clearly it was an important story for those early Christian communities. Probably because it shed light on their Eucharistic worship  which points to the fact that the Eucharist has been the central act of Christian worship from those very earliest communities. Our version of the story comes from St John’s Gospel. Its worth looking at it a little more closely. When you read detective stories you quickly learn that what may look like an irrelevant little detail that you could easily miss may actually be an important clue to solving the mystery. So it is with John’s Gospel – the meaning is often in the detail, and the clues to the meaning are often in the detail. So it is with the way John tells the story of the feeding of the crowds.

John takes the trouble to tell us that this incident took place at Passover time. Now this isn’t a detective story.  John isn’t trying to keep us guessing. He’s telling us something. He wants us to connect this story with the story of the Passover – the time when God liberated the People of Israel from slavery in Egypt and led them through the wilderness to the promised land. And there is one particular incident in that great epic Passover story that John wants us to concentrate upon. Of course it is the incident on the journey to the promised land where  the people find themselves in  the wilderness  without  food  and hungry - and where God provided bread or manna for them to eat. There are a number of similarities some of them very close between the way St John tells this story and the way the story of the Passover Feeding  is told in Exodus and Numbers in the Old Testament. The desert place.  The green grass.  People being told to sit down in groups.  The people grumbling. God testing them as Jesus tested Philip and of course all that was left over after everyone had eaten their fill. All of these details are to be found in both the Passover story and the story of Jesus feeding the crowd. But what does it all mean? Well at one level it is a story about Jesus and who he is in relation to God. You remember that it was God who fed the people of Israel in the wilderness it was God who sent the manna from heaven. John wants us to take the hint in this story. It is God present in Jesus who feeds his people – whether it is in a Galilean wilderness or in whatever wilderness God’s people find themselves in and at any time God in Christ is always there to strengthen and to sustain them and to feed them. And it is also a story about God answering our needs – about God feeding us. God met the needs of the people of Israel on their journey through the wilderness. So God present in Jesus fed the hunger of the crowds in the wilderness of the Golan in the Galilee. And  he will feed us on our journey.

He will meet our deepest needs and satisfy our fiercest hunger as we journey through our lives – and especially so when the journey takes us through the wilderness. A characteristic of the wilderness is the loneliness of it – there is nobody else there. Nothing to sustain one. This story says to us that if we look with the eyes of faith we will recognise that Jesus is with us and that he will feed us and strengthen us for the journey – especially through the wilderness. But we need to be careful. This story took place at Passover. And Passover speaks of sacrifice. The next time that Passover is mentioned in St John’s Gospel is the Passover when Jesus becomes the Passover Lamb who offers his life to deliver his people from the Egypt of sin and death. Passover comes to its full fruition with the death of Jesus on the cross. Where the bread of his body is broken and given in sacrifice to nourish the whole world.

This story of Jesus feeding  the people isn’t just a story to encourage us with the good news that God meets our needs. It reminds us of the need for sacrifice. As the only appropriate response to the sacrifice of Jesus. Yes, he meets our needs. He feeds us and sustains us. But he asks us to offer ourselves in return.

Some people seem to have a sort of slot machine approach to prayer. You put your request in and expect God to pay out. There is a need and we want it met. But the Passover sacrificial elements of this story serve to remind us that it is not quite as simple as that. When we want comfort in sorrow, or strength in difficulties or help in hard times or guidance in bewildering times we turn to Jesus and open our hearts to him. But when he asks us for sacrifice or offers us the cross we can so easily turn away.

We can pray for the strength to carry out our own plans and our own ideas but what about asking for the strength to accept his plans for us. We can come to this Eucharist day by day and week by week and find here that Jesus is here for us to feed us with himself as his body is broken for us. But we must also remember that we are called to respond to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice sent out into the world to live and to work to God’s praise and glory.

As St Augustine said of the bread of the Eucharist: ‘It is the mystery of yourselves that is placed upon the altar. You are the bread that is to be taken, blessed, broken and given for the life of the world’.