Trinity 8
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
One of the most moving places I’ve been to the Eucharist was in the catacombs in Rome. There, out of the glare of the blazing Italian sun, in the places where early martyrs were buried and Christians gathered to worship, time seemed to fold in on itself. Past and future became present in this holy Sacrament, as they had for countless Christians in generations before, as we remembered Christ’s passion, were given a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, and were offered the living bread that comes down from heaven.
I have celebrated or attended the Eucharist in very many different places. At a side altar with a few others on a cold winter morning. At the high altar of a great cathedral. At the shrines of saints. Around a coffin. At a wedding. By a hospital bed, a small space cleared on the bedside table alongside the sick bucket and the sippy cups. On a repurposed table in my house when we were all banned from churches. Here, day by day and Sunday by Sunday. In joy and sorrow, in celebration and thanksgiving, in penitence and grief, in the daily round of ordinary life, Christ has given himself, under the forms of bread and wine, to feed and sustain his people.
And this is what we see him doing in today’s Gospel reading. John’s Gospel doesn’t have an institution narrative: Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell us of the Last Supper and Jesus’ command to eat and drink in remembrance of him. John, instead, gives us the footwashing. Which is not to say he is less concerned about the Last Supper and the Eucharist – far from it. In fact, the whole of chapter 6, which we’ll hear over the next few weeks, is a rich meditation on the Eucharist. And it starts with Jesus taking bread, giving thanks over it (the very word is eucharisteo) and giving it to feed a multitude.
The people are hungry. They are physically hungry, their following of Jesus involving a long trek along the Sea of Galilee and up a mountain. But they are hungry for more than food: they’ve followed Jesus because of the signs they’ve seen him do in healing the sick and this kindles their hope for their own healing, and wholeness, and deliverance. And they’re hungry too for freedom. John tells us that the feeding of the 5000 takes place near the time of Passover. The story of God saving his people from slavery in Egypt and bringing them to freedom in the promised land would have been at the forefront of people’s minds as they made their preparations for the festival, remembering God’s saving acts in the past and trusting in his promises for the future. And for many in Israel at the time that included the promise of the restoration of Israel’s fortunes, the coming of a King in David’s line, and liberation from Roman occupation.
They’re hungry for all that. And in Jesus they think they might have met the one who will fill this hunger. And who can blame them? The way John tells the story there’s plenty to make them think that Jesus is the deliverer they’ve been waiting for.
They knew the story of Elisha feeding the company of 100 with only 20 barley loaves, and having food left over, which we heard as our Old Testament reading. In Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the crowd, they see that a prophet like Elisha has arisen.
But Jesus is not just a new Elisha. The Gospel writers draw on other Old Testament traditions too. For most of us, the feeding of the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, or bread from heaven, is much better known than the story of Elisha. And there are very definite echoes of that in John’s account of the feeding of the 5000, apart from the obvious parallel that a great multitude of hungry people is fed miraculously. ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ Jesus asks Philip, to test him. ‘Where am I to get the meat to feed all these people?’ Moses asks God in the wilderness. Before the feeding, when Jesus begins to reveal himself as bread of life, he goes up a mountain, just as Moses goes up a mountain to receive the Law, the spiritual manna by which the Israelites were to live in relationship with God. And the proximity to the Passover celebrations also recalls Moses, who led the people out of slavery.
And further still, as well as the new Elisha and the new Moses, Jesus is the new David. The passage from the Gospel reading this morning has Jesus getting the people to recline on green grass, before he feeds them, as John says, ‘as much as they wanted’. Here’s an echo of the twenty third Psalm, believed to have been written by David: ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures’. And again, it’s the young King David, who, fleeing from Saul, commands a priest to give him five loaves from the bread of the Presence – the twelve loaves kept as an offering in the tabernacle where God’s presence was said to dwell.
These are not accidental references or echoes. John is deliberately showing Jesus as the fulfilment of all God has promised. And the crowds that followed Jesus would have known their scriptures and their history. They are not wrong to see in him the one they have been hungering for. Contemporary Jewish literature shows the longing and the expectation of God’s people for this Messiah figure: the Second Book of Baruch, written at roughly the same time as John’s Gospel, looks forward to the coming of the Messiah: ‘and it shall come to pass at that selfsame time’, it says, ‘that the treasury of the manna shall again descend from on high, and they will eat of it in those years, because these are they who have come to the consummation of time’ (29.8).
In Jesus, the treasury of the manna is opened once more. Only this time the bread that is given for the life of the world is Christ’s flesh. The crowds are right to see in Jesus the promised Messiah. But in their desire to take him by force and make him king they show they have misunderstood the sort of king he is.
They want him to satisfy their hunger and fulfil their desires. Jesus gives them food – more than enough to satisfy their physical hunger – but as we’ll hear in coming weeks they lose their appetite when he talks about giving them his flesh to eat. What he offers will involve not a satisfaction of their desires but a reshaping of them as they find in him God’s desire for his people. They think the Messiah will come to restore Israel’s political fortunes. Jesus has come to restore the relationship with God that sin has destroyed, to bring the people to freedom and to lead them from death to life.
And he will do this through his own flesh, taken, broken, blessed and given for the life of the world. He offers himself for the world’s hunger, but in receiving him we are asked to recognise the hunger we have – hunger that we often fill with other things. For here in the Eucharist, Christ meets us in our desires by expanding them and making them more like his. As Mark Oakley, the Dean of St John’s, has written, in the Eucharist God feeds us by making us more hungry – hungry for justice, for mercy, for freedom, for healing, for God.
We are not crowds up a mountain. We are a socially-distanced – and online – few amid a pandemic. But here, as in every place where the Eucharist is offered, Christ feeds us, giving himself into our hunger and drawing us into his, so that his body, given for the life of the world is not just the sacrament we receive, but the life we offer as we leave the church to be his body in the world.