Readings:
2 Kings 4:42-44;
Psalm 145:10-19;
Ephesians 3:14-24;
John 6:1-21

Collect:
Gracious God,
your Son Jesus Christ fed the hungry with the bread of life
and the word of your kingdom.
Renew your people with your heavenly grace,
and in all our weaknesses sustain us by your true and living bread,
even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Reflection

John’s gospel tells a wonderful story of Jesus feeding 5,000. These 5,000 are identified as men and the detail of how many women and children is not included, so some take this to mean 5,000 families. Whatever the number, there are so many people that the disciples guess the cost of feeding them all would be six months’ wages of a labourer. Crucial to the story is that there is not a lot available to eat – five barley loaves and two (presumably dry) fish. 

I have struggled with the credibility of this story. We still tell it, however, when it appears in the lectionary, but as with so many miracle stories, my world is a world of ready food at the supermarket, where shortages are seldom an issue, except at Christmas or the week before lockdown when people seem to lose their minds, or the world in which the NHS and the medical and support staff witness miracles of care and healing every day, taken for granted only by those who are not beneficiaries. 

Reading other stories from the time, however, the miracle is not the story on which people will have focussed. Lots of people performed miracles of various sorts. The shock here is that Jesus walks away. They want to make him king. An apparently never-ending supply of food – who wouldn’t? Anyone who had worried about where the next meal will come from can understand this. But the supplier of food for today is not the Word to whom the gospel is introducing us. 

There is a hint as to whom we are being introduced when Jesus instructs the followers to gather up the fragments. I wonder what image comes to your mind at the phrase “gather up the fragments”? Do you imagine the people holding out the left-overs in their hands to be collected? Or do you imagine detritus lying around on the ground, collected by one of those enormous sucker-upperers used to clean up after too messy a party in Leicester Square? The gospel does not say, but the image is one of excess. When Jesus touches it, there is not only enough, there is more than enough.

And the people love it – loved it then and love it now. Show us excess and we’ll have it every time. Whether it’s buying much more than we need, or proving that we have the resources (financial and physical) to blast ourselves into space, we’ll do it, and we’ll want more. We just love excess. But this story of excess has a twist. The other three gospels (in which this story also appears) have the disciples give the food to the people. Not here. In John’s gospel, Jesus himself feeds the people, it is he who provides excessively from hopelessly inadequate resources. Only now do we realize what it means for Jesus to be “the bread of life”. There is a literal provision of life being proclaimed here. We call this incarnation. Jesus is the one who provides life. Jesus is also the one who is the life of the world. And all this, from next to nothing. The gospel reminds us that excess belongs to God, and the excess of Jesus provides life, life in all its fulness, for all.

Barry Lotz