When you are a vicar, and you’re preaching every week, as I was in Oxford, you come to dread the gospel readings for the summer in year B! If you hadn’t realised, Advent 2011 to Advent 2012 is year B! And here we are! The lectionary wends its way through John’s gospel, reaching a point in July and August where for five consecutive weeks the gospel is from John chapter 6 on the theme of Jesus’ declaration I am the bread of life’! Can the clergy stop you from going to sleep?!
This year the vicar is escaping, and fortunately we have a different preacher for each of the next few Sundays! So I’m looking forward to hearing what others also have to say!
Feeding the people was a highly significant event and we need to reflect seriously on what Jesus is saying to us in it. In John’s gospel Jesus begins his ministry with turning water into wine, demonstrating not only his power over creation but God’s will that we should live with abundance ~ and the best! And we were certainly given an experience of just that on Friday evening! Here again in our gospel this morning the people are without what they need, they do not have food and neither do the disciples have the wherewithal to feed the crowd. Indeed, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” Philip tells Jesus.
Then, another of Jesus’ disciples, Andrew, brings forward a boy and his now famous two fish and five barley loaves. And the multitude are fed. Fed abundantly, fed with more than enough, more than they can consume.
Whatever happened ~ and we shall never know what actually transpired, probably something way beyond our limited imaginations, whatever happened, it is the meaning of the miracle story that matters to us here and now. This event happens close to the time of Passover.
The people will have bee reflecting on that momentous event, the Exodus, which released them from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. But it was a journey which took a lifetime ~ forty years in the wilderness, the traditional span of a man’s adult life, and where they did indeed experience a life-threatening lack of food, as many did in Jesus’ own day.
As God’s people leaving Egypt begin to experience the struggle of the desert, they complain to Moses who cries out to God on their behalf. And manna from heaven descends to the ground day by day.
Highly significant in the giving of this manna is that it was given day by day. The people must go out early each morning to gather what they need for this day. It could not be hoarded, could not be gathered for tomorrow. If there was an attempt to store this manna, it would simply be rotten by the next day. But God was faithful, day by day. The people must learn to trust God for all that they need.
Roman Frister was an Israeli journalist born in Poland in 1928, his autobiography published in the year 2000, hit the main news. He writes about his experience of the holocaust and how he survived. The book he wrote, called The Cap’, the quite literal price of a life’ in the concentration camp, is both a gripping and a highly disturbing story.
It was far more than simply bread that one needed to survive. An incredible and intricately worked out social machinery bore down on and crushed all but those with the utmost iron will to live.
At roll call in the early morning, those without caps were summarily shot on the spot. One night Frister’s cap was stolen, he must steal himself in order to survive. Of all his actions, this is obviously the one which haunts him most.
Roman Frister lived. He was a bright, energetic, enterprising boy of 11, hungry for life, ready and wanting to give himself to life, when Poland was invaded in 1939. Somehow, no matter he saw his mother clubbed to death in front of him, no matter he saw his father slowly die of typhus, Frister’s hunger for life never dimmed. And perhaps it was these very memories which steeled his will further. He was also extraordinarily lucky’. But certainly it was his very hunger for life, which in the end, kept him alive, enabled him to survive.
The crowds were following Jesus with ever more earnestness. They were the crowds who have been fed on the hillside – and they want more bread. They want never to be hungry again. Responding to them, Jesus declares to the crowd that it is he himself, who is the Bread of Life’, the living bread from heaven. It is those who will follow him, follow him in all that it means, receive from him something more, much more than simply physical bread,
it is they who will experience abundant life.
The new born baby will not survive on milk alone.Without the experience of the warmth of human contact the baby will die. We are creatures who need to feel our connection with others, know that our life has meaning; that our life matters; that we, exactly each one of us, has a purpose and place in this world. We, like the baby, will not thrive without this knowledge of our belonging.
The love and affirmation he had received from his parents enabled Roman Frister to take hold of his undoubted gifting and survive in circumstances, where certainly I, and probably most of us, would not. It is the assurance that our life matters, matters to God, matters in this world – matters even on the darkest day, it is this assurance that Jesus, who also suffered fiercely at the hands of fearful men,it is this assurance which Jesus offers us in himself, when he invites us to share the Bread of his life,invites us to join him at table – as we shall shortly do.
It is this knowledge of our preciousness to God in all that we are, that needs to shape our thinking and our being.
Roman Frister was not brought up as a religious Jew, indeed, he declares himself to be an atheist. Not surprising perhaps, given what he went through. And yet, I found his book to be full of a deep spirituality. He is searching for truth. Truth which as Jesus declared, truth which sets us free. Frister stole, knowing that his actions would spell death for his victim. And for this he sits in judgement on himself – hoping fervently that there is no God in heaven who will come to sit in judgement on him too.
Is this who God is? A terrifying remote judge?
We are in reality our own judges. We bring judgement on ourselves.* * The vicar observes that these statements could have further explication
Jesus the Bread of Life, has not come to bring us to judgement, rather he suffers for the suffering we inflict on others, he suffers with us – and forgives us. For God his Father made us exactly as we are, knows us through and through, remembers our every need, and in joy and in pain, is always waiting to meet us with abounding love. We are offered the Bread of Life that our lives might be full! Fulfilled! Jesus the Jew does not sit in judgement on Roman Frister. Rather, he extends to him – and to us, the possibility of new life.
And week by week, as we come to receive the body and blood of Christ – we are assured of our belonging, of forgiveness, that God’s will for us is fulness of life. Amen.