THE BREAD OF LIFE
Last week’s Gospel, you will remember, was St John’s version of that most famous of miracles, the Feeding of the Five Thousand. John tells us what happened, but he doesn’t leave it at that because John is never satisfied with giving us just a bare narrative of events. And so, as so often in his Gospel, the story of the feeding becomes the basis for an extended passage bringing out the deeper significance of what Jesus has done.
This week’s Gospel passage, following on from last week’s, gives us just the first section of what is really a sort of meditation, or sermon, on the theme of bread. This sixth chapter of St John’s Gospel is a long one, and the different sections of this meditation will supply our Gospel readings for the next four weeks!
Jesus can see that the people are impressed by what has happened, but he wants them to see more deeply, to go beyond the surface meaning of events. To put it crudely, they seem, in Jesus, to have found a plentiful source of bread they don’t have to pay for, and Jesus knows that that is why they are now keen to see him again: it’s not because you’re interested in my gospel message, he tells them, “but because you ate your fill of the loaves”.
Indeed the people give the game away when they say, later on, “Give us this bread always”. And that reminds us very much of the woman at the well in John chapter 4. Jesus, you will recall, has offered her “living water”, water that will quench her thirst for ever, but she still thinks he is talking about ordinary water and so she says enthusiastically, “Give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water from the well”.
But Jesus wants the crowd to understand that (in the words he used to Satan earlier on), “we do not live by bread alone”. He tells them not to work for “the food that perishes”, but “for the food that endures for eternal life”. That leads into a discussion about what kind of “work” Jesus is talking about, and here again it becomes clear that he doesn't mean work in the normal straightforward sense of a task that we perform. No: “this is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent”. So it is Jesus himself who is the food that “endures for eternal life”. Or to put it another way, Jesus does not just deliver a message, he himself is the message.
And then, after this rather complex, not to say confused, discussion, full of misunderstandings and what you might almost call word-games, Jesus cuts through all the talk and comes straight out with what he means:
I am the bread of life.
In other words, it is Jesus himself who strengthens us, who sustains us; he is our staple food. So we've moved from a literal understanding of bread to the person of Jesus as the “true and living bread”. Bread in a much deeper sense, bread in a spiritual sense.
But we need to be careful here. It would be easy to conclude from all this that what really matters to Jesus is our spiritual needs, our spiritual hunger, and not our physical needs, our bodily hunger.
So we need to remind ourselves that the starting point was ordinary straightforward hunger, empty stomachs. The crowd had followed Jesus out into a remote place, they had listened to him, spellbound, all day; but now it was getting late, they were starting to feel very hungry and they were a very long way from the shops.
At which point, Jesus, the great teacher of spiritual wisdom, might have said, “well, I’m sorry about that, but it’s not my problem, because my job is preaching the gospel”. But no, he takes their very fleshly, bodily needs seriously and does something very practical to satisfy them.
Quite often, Christians get into debates about whether it’s more important for the Church to work on meeting people’s physical needs (by tackling poverty, for example) or to concentrate on preaching the gospel. Which is more important: evangelism or practical service?
Quite often, the Church has been content to concentrate on its spiritual role and has not seen the relief of need as being so central to its mission. Quite often too, the powers-that-be have been quite content to see the Church keep to spiritual matters; the last thing they want is for the Church to start meddling in secular matters like poverty and injustice.
But I think St John’s account of the feeding of the 5000 makes it clear that, in this debate about spiritual needs versus physical needs, the answer is that it’s emphatically not a question of either/or but both/and. It may well be, of course, that some Christians, as individuals, feel themselves more called to practical forms of service, and others more to evangelism, but the point is that the Church as a whole must major on both.
And so I’m always particularly impressed by churches that demonstrate an equally strong commitment to meeting people’s spiritual needs and their bodily needs.
I think, for example of John Wesley and the whole Methodist tradition, which has had such a strong evangelistic emphasis, combined with a very strong social witness. There is no sense that one is more important than the other.
Or you might think of the Salvation Army where saving people’s souls goes hand in hand with feeding the hungry in a down-to-earth, practical way which puts many other churches to shame.
I think also of what I saw of the Church in Rwanda. It’s a church with a strong emphasis on preaching the gospel, but at the same time it’s deeply involved in development projects to help lift people out of poverty. I was struck by the fact that the training of priests aims not only to teach them theology, but also to run development projects.
In the end, though, I think what we need to do is to get away from thinking in terms of a sort of duality between physical things and spiritual things. I think that if you’d asked Jesus whether it was more important to deal with people’s physical needs or their spiritual needs, he wouldn’t have understood what you were talking about.
Because Jesus saw people as whole individuals. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to put their physical needs and their spiritual needs into different categories; and it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to him to say that one was more important than the other.
This dualism between the physical and the spiritual is a typical modern heresy; we have split people up into separate parts rather than seeing them as a whole as Jesus did. Jesus came to save the whole person, human beings in their totality, not just part of them.
And the Kingdom that Jesus came to bring in is the realm of wholeness, the place where all things come together. The place where we find satisfaction for all our true needs, the place where we are no longer split up into warring parts, but where body, mind and spirit are perfectly at one.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy
2 August 2009, Proper 13, Year B
Gospel: John 6.24-35
