The parable of the perishing bread

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

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Today's gospel (John 6: 22-29) unfolds for us a further scene from the sixth chapter of the gospel of Saint John. The 5,000 have been fed, Jesus has walked upon the lake, and now He is pursued by a crowd who commandeer a fleet of boats to carry them across the sea of Galilee. Finding Jesus on the other side, they question Him, but rather than satisfying their curiosity, Jesus questions their motives in pursuing Him. Finally, comes one last exchange:

What must we do, to be doing the works of God? they ask Him.

This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent, the Lord replies.

 

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Yesterday, I asked my children: what is more dangerous: hostility to religion or fake religion? With prescience beyond their years, they all answered unanimously: fake religion. A fact is greater than the Lord Mayor, as one old adage goes. But so too is a lie. When the Lord Mayor gets the facts wrong, he will simply look a fool. When the Lord Mayor has lies told against him, he has been delivered into the hands of his enemies. And if we're looking for an example of fake religion, we need only look at this first paragraph of today's gospel.

The first thing that strikes the reader is how extraordinarily careful the crowd have been in their observations. They noticed that there had only been one boat and that Jesus had not entered it with his disciples. Weighing up their observations, they themselves climb into boats and cross the lake to Capernaum. One can imagine some of these people wrung their hands long and hard about this mission. Perhaps they even organised committees to discuss the feasibility of crossing the lake on the boats and working parties to hire vessels and organise passenger lists. Others may have been keen to ensure that the best people got the best boats, as is befitting, and, of course, that the boats departed in the right order so that the right kind of people could arrive first to speak to Jesus. The first group must have believed Jesus would commend them for their industry: what did Jesus say on the mount: something about blessed are the trip planners, wasn’t it? The second group probably thought that Jesus would commend them for their right sense of things: blessed are the makers of order - surely.

And this is why, when they questioned Jesus upon their arrival, they must have been shocked to hear Jesus’ dismissal of their self-acclaimed sincerity:

Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

Since all these would-be followers have venal minds, perhaps they thought Jesus was referring to the feeding of the 5,000. And so He was, but not only to that. For His rebuke continues:

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.

Now, man does not live by bread alone. Steal a man's loaf and he might go hungry. Steal a man's self-esteem, trespass on his sensibilities, or confront his unconscious needs and you might earn yourself an enemy, even a vicious one. Perhaps it would have helped here if Jesus had given us the parable of the bread that perishes. Let us imagine it for Him:

A woman baked two loaves of bread. One was wrapped in a cloth and placed in a cupboard and the other sat on the side where she was preparing a meal. Now, this woman was called away suddenly by a family tragedy and left her village for a few days. When she came back, the two loaves had spoiled: the one wrapped up in the cupboard still looked like bread but had turned as hard as stone, while the one that was left on the side had gone a lurid bluey-green and was growing little whiskers of mould.

And, having told this parable, Jesus might have asked His listeners:

Which one of these two loaves should the woman eat?

One of them still has the form of bread. Indeed, it looks like a perfect loaf. But it is dry and desiccated, unyielding to the touch, it's crustiness turned into a procrustean shell. It is ready for fossilisation and certainly could not provide any nourishing life.

If we turn now to the bread with bluey-green mould, it does not look as attractive as the wrapped loaf, but nobody could deny that there is life there: life in all its lurid colours, growth even, and with a faint, comforting smell. The sight of the first loaf would fill a baker with pride, at least until he laid his hand on its unforgiving surface. The sight of the second loaf would make a hungry man salivate and fill his gut until he felt the inevitable nausea the bread produces. But is there a single reader or listener of this blog that would not go hungry faced with these two loaves?

Here is why we cannot live on fake religion. In the end, it becomes inedible.

Jesus of course can turn both these loaves into the bread of life. Stale bread can be doused in water and heated in an oven to recover its freshness. Mouldy bread will yield its most offensive parts to a sharp knife and be only a little the worse for it. Let those who read or listen understand.

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But, the bread cannot save itself. In the final scene from the gospel extract read today, the people who have been admonished for their fake following of the Lord finally ask the honest question we noted above:

What must we do, to be doing the works of God?

And Jesus’ answer is worth a world of thought:

This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent, the Lord replies.

The Lord who promises judgement on those who mistreat the least of His little ones here places the emphasis not on works but on a supernatural faith in Him and in His mission. In other words, our first work is to recognise and confess the work of God, to glorify His action and its sufficiency, and not our own.

We are now so accustomed to making excuses for unbelief, surrounded as we are by its poisonous presence, that this passage should bring us up short. Could it be that we too are guilty of unbelief of a kind? The people who landed on the shore and received this rebuke from Jesus had gone to extraordinary trouble and perhaps even expense. And yet, it was not enough. Jesus wasn't interested in their service. There was literally nothing they could do for Him to advance the Kingdom because their hearts were still set on the kingdom of this world and all its works, pomps, and perishing bread.

Some bring to Jesus their finery and mistake it for faith. Some bring to Jesus their labour and mistake it for love. The lies they tell themselves are greater than all their finery and labour combined.

This is the work of God, Jesus tells them, that you believe in Him whom He has sent. Thereafter can all the bread that perishes be recovered and saved for the service of the Lord.