This week's Gospel reading, along with those for four of the next five Sundays (on Sunday, 15 August the Solemnity of the Assumption supersedes the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time; the Gospel for the celebration of Our Lady's Assumption is taken from Luke), is from the Gospel According to Saint John. Despite being taken from a different Gospel, not even from one of his fellow Synoptics (Matthew & Luke), our reading for today is a sort of continuation of our readings from Mark from the previous two Sundays.
In last week's Gospel passage, after crossing the Sea of Galilee for some peace and quiet only to find that the crowds had to beat him to his intended destination, Jesus, seeing they were like sheep without a shepherd, taught them. According to the inspired author of Mark, he taught for so long that it grew late and the people were hungry. In Mark's Gospel, this is when the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 occurs. Instead of sticking with the Gospel According to Saint Mark, which is the shortest of the four canonical Gospels, during Year B of the Sunday lectionary, the Church switches to Saint John's Gospel for five weeks. Again, this will be disrupted this year by the Solemnity of the Assumption.
Not only are all five Gospel readings from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Sundays in Ordinary Time during Year B of the Sunday lectionary taken from John's Gospel, but each is also taken from the sixth chapter of that Gospel. The portion of the sixth chapter covered on these Sundays is known as Jesus's "Bread of Life discourse." The striking thing about this discourse is the nature of the language placed on Jesus's lips- but his shocking words come will be heard in subsequent weeks.
Unlike last week's relatively low-key passage from Mark, today's Gospel tells about a miracle and a rather spectacular one at that!
Interestingly, our reading from John's Gospel mentions that the Jewish feast of Passover was near. Of course, Passover is the major Jewish Feast. Passover celebrates the liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Passover is about freedom. Today's Gospel is about freedom, which is primarily not freedom from but freedom for.
The inspired author lets us in on an important secret. The secret is that Jesus knows what he is going to do but nonetheless asks Philip what can be done to feed the multitude. It is clear that, as in our passage last week from Mark's Gospel, Jesus, his disciples, and the crowd are in a deserted place. There is nothing nearby. Even if they were near to a town not only could they not afford the quantity of food needed but there would likely not have been enough available for purchase to feed that number of people. Despite this, Jesus still tells them to offer the people something to eat. In short, he asks them to do the impossible.
It is Andrew who notes that a member of the crowd, a boy, has five barley loaves and two fishes. He recognizes that it falls far short of the food needed to feed everyone. It may be significant that 5+2=7. In Biblical numerology, seven is the number of balance and perfection. At this, Jesus instructs the disciples to have the people recline. Then the food was distributed. After everyone ate their fill, at Jesus's instruction, what was leftover was gathered up. What was gathered filled twelve baskets. Like seven, 12 is a biblically significant number- the number of Jacob's (named by God Israel) sons and, hence, the number of the tribes of Israel.
Being freely given, nobody was compelled to eat the food. What led people to eat the food was their hunger. John's Gospel uses the feeding of the multitude as a way to bring into bold relief their (and by extension, our) existential hunger. Wasn't it just this that led the people in last week's Gospel to beat Jesus and his disciples to the deserted place on the other side of the Sea of Galilee as well as their attentive listening to Jesus's teaching, which lasted for a long time?
But what Jesus does is not bread and circuses. This is indicated by his refusal to be acknowledged as king by these people. Rather, he left them and went up the mountain by himself. By so doing, he freed not only himself but the crowd. Jesus does not coerce or manipulate, even by his miracles. He gives. What he gives is nothing less than his very self, body, blood, soul, and divinity, as we like to say.
Because it is given, what Jesus offers us cannot be earned. Our relationship with God through Christ is not an economy of exchange, a quid pro quo. The divine economy is a gift economy, an economy of grace. As a gift, it is simply offered. When truly given and received, a gift does not carry an expectation of reciprocity. In fact, the felt need to reciprocate ruins a well-given gift because it is not a gift that is really received. Gifts are freely offered and freely received. Gifts are gratuitous, like the abundance of food Jesus gave the crowd and the abundance we receive at the Lord's Table.
No comments:
Post a Comment