Gathering up the fragments that remain

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

****

Today’s gospel (John 6: 1-15) is one of those miracles that has not an individual focus but a collective one, and which applies less to the individual and more to the Church itself. Jesus crosses the sea of Galilee where He is followed by a large crowd and repairs to a mountain side. A crucial detail appears here: it is close to the Passover feast. So, we know that while the miracle to come concerns food, it does not concern food purely for the purposes of nourishment. For the Passover is a meal that is not a meal; the Passover is a sacrifice for sin which protects the Jews from punishment, even as they memorialise their hasty departure from slavery by taking their lamb’s supper standing. Jesus questions Philip about how they could feed the people, well knowing what He planned to do. And then begins the wondrous miracle: not the miracle of making people share what they had, although we cannot exclude this from the events of that day, but the miracle of feeding 5,000 people from only five barley loaves and two fish. Only the Son of God can perform such a wonder: to feed such a huge crowd and even provide enough for leftovers. And then comes this strange denouement: the people wish to take Jesus and make him king, but Jesus withdraws again to the mountain by Himself. There are so many layers to this story that it is almost overwhelming. The lessons we can draw from it apply to God, to the Church, and to our existence in this material world.

To God first of all. For what Jesus does here is to work a miracle which recalls the feeding of the people of Israel after their departure from Egypt. Then, the people are fed with quail and manna; not manna alone which is a bread of heaven, but manna and quail - the flesh of the quail a symbol of the reality that the manna itself symbolises. Indeed, the manna and the quail taken together are themselves a type of the way in which God would feed His people in the new covenant. Giving the blind their sight and making the lame walk evoke memories of the prophets of the Old Testament. Feeding a crowd numbering in their thousands not only rivals the actions of Moses but engages with Israel’s very own sense of itself. Whoever fed the Jews like this but God alone?

If we take this miracle on another level, we find in it now not only a realisation of the type anticipated by the feeding of the Israelites in the desert but also a foreshadowing of the feeding of Jesus’ disciples down the ages. All the gospels recount this miracle, but St Mark tells us that the men sat down specifically in groups. In other words, they did not sit down randomly as individuals. Amongst this vast crowd, there was a kind of subsidiarity; it was not a case of individuals versus the collective, but of persons who could sit down with a sense of togetherness on a human scale. It is as if eating in a vast crowd is like eating alone, but eating in a group helps work that other miracle of togetherness and unity. As Saint Augustine says, the bread is made from many grains of wheat that are crushed and bound together, and the wine comes from many grapes that are likewise crushed and mingled together. The Eucharist is not only a sign of the real presence of Jesus, but of the effects that this real presence brings about in the members of the Church, now bound to Him and to each other. The fish here evokes the same relationship to bread as the quail did for the manna. This bread is not truly bread but flesh as Jesus will explain later in this chapter of the gospel of John.

While we mention Jesus’ explanation of the Eucharist, it is worthwhile noting the dramatic commentary that this later teaching gives on what is the symbol of unity. Unity is sometimes treated as some mystical or magical effect. But having shown this extraordinary sign of the sacrament of unity to come in the feeding of the 5,000, what does Jesus do? He expounds His doctrine to His listeners to the point where many of them walk away from Him. They cannot take it. He shows them the path of unity, and they break themselves upon its rock. This idea of eating His flesh is too strange. Let us go further and put this scene in our own day: what would our contemporaries have said if they heard this teaching? We can quite imagine. This Eucharistic doctrine is a like some weird cannibalism. It is primitive and backward looking. Indeed, how lacking in inclusivity it is, given that those who are gluten free will have to go without it. And what about the vegetarians? How can Jesus be so rigid? How can He be so materialistic? But above all, why does Jesus refuse to find a common path forward? Why does Jesus not accompany those who walk away? What happened to the Good Shepherd who goes in search of His sheep? In reality, all unity is bound indissolubly to truth and goodness. And when truth and goodness are rejected, it is not the work of God to compromise truth and goodness – to accommodate it to something less than itself - in the rebuilding of that unity. Of course the Good Shepherd will go in search of the lost sheep, but: Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.

And finally, we come to the lessons of this miracle for our lives in the material world. For like the miracle where Jesus made mud and put it on the blind man's eyes or used his spittle as He touched the mouth of a dumb man, so this miracle mobilises the stuff of this world to provide a channel for the grace of God. This action evokes a truth that is wholly denied today and which concerns the material limits of human living. For centuries, individualism has taught us that we alone define the moral limits of our actions. More recently, our culture now formats us in such a way that every reality, no matter how wayward or perverse, is available to us if we choose it. We have become like fallen angels, surpassing the heavy material carcasses that we call bodies, falling into a kind of psychological illness that divorces us from material ourselves. We have lost our senses, to use the title of one book by Amadeo Cencini. We have disappeared into abstractions through our communication technologies. Our friends have become bytes of data and popularity has become a matter of social media influence. We no longer buy things but services. We have deskilled ourselves, and very often can only dream of the accomplishments that others now perform on television shows.

What is all this got to do with the feeding of the 5,000? Only that this miracle is an invitation to reconnect with the logic of the gospel which requires incarnation: that spiritual lives and spiritual practices not remain merely abstract and fanciful but themselves take flesh and gather us together. This is a logic that centuries of Christian piety understood instinctively, as millions of impoverished worshippers gave their last coins to build the glorious shrines of Christendom, like Mary pouring expensive oil on the feet of Jesus.

And here now is the call for us: to take the impoverished fragments of our attention and our hearts and come together to offer them to the Lord in a humble, common prayer: O Mary, teach us always to say yes and thank you to the Lord every moment of our lives.