17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 4:1-6; John 6:1-15

A few weeks ago, 
my wife and I were driving 
through the hills around Harper’s Ferry,
listening to National Public Radio,
as college professors tend to do.
They were reporting on the on-going conflict
between Ethiopia and Eritrea,
which has been raging for eight months
and has led to severe and widespread famine.

As our car made its way 
along the winding road,
the radio station kept fading out,
lost in a wave of static,
and another radio station kept fading in.
This was one of those evangelical religious stations
that college professors tend not to listen to.
The signal was buried in static,
and hard to make out,
but after a minute or so
I realized that this station was discussing 
the story of Jesus’ feeding of the multitude,
the story that we have just heard in today’s Gospel reading.
As we wove our ways through the hills,
the two stories wove their way around each other:
at one moment reports of war and famine 
in a distant part of the world,
in the next moment the ancient tale
of Jesus feeding the hungry multitude,
stories bouncing back and forth 
in a dialogue between conflict and communion,
between hunger and plenty.

What gets said in such a dialogue?
What does the story of Jesus’ feeding of the multitudes
have to say to a world of war and famine?
Certainly it speaks a word of rebuke 
to the story of the world’s sin,
the story of the way that the world all too often operates.
It presents a striking contrast to the violence and hunger
that is found not only in distant foreign lands
but right here in our own city,
where most years we average close to a murder a day,
and one in four residents lives in a “food desert,”
without ready access to places to purchase healthy food.
And to such physical violence and hunger we must add
the spiritual violence of various forms 
of factionalism and discrimination and racism—
the refusal to see the image of God 
present in those who are different—
and the spiritual hunger of those who are fed a steady diet
of empty aspirations for fame or wealth or physical sensation
all the while starving for the bread of life
that only God can give
and only faith can receive.

Everything about the feeding of the multitudes
stands as a rebuke to these realities that afflict our world.
The story of the feeding of the multitudes
is the story of human beings caught up
in the goodness of God
and receiving abundantly from that goodness.
It is a story that interrupts 
the world’s story of hunger and violence,
a story that pierces through 
the static of sin,
the static of the world’s business as usual,
and says to us that something else is possible,
that something else is even now making itself present
through the power of God taken flesh in Jesus Christ.

And yet, so often 
we can only dimly perceive this new reality;
it hovers at the edge of our awareness 
like ghostly voices on the airwaves,
obscured by the world’s static
and only discernible if we play close attention.
And even when we see it,
we often misperceive it.
The gospel-writer John concludes this story 
of divine abundance made present in Jesus 
with the statement:
“Since Jesus knew that they were going to come 
and carry him off to make him king,
he withdrew again to the mountain alone.”
The multitude saw 
the power of Jesus to satisfy hungers,
but could not see that this was a power
different from that of earthly kings.
As Jesus will later say to Pontius Pilate,
“My kingdom does not belong to this world,”
and when the multitude in Jerusalem hears this
they will say, “Crucify him…
We have no king but Caesar.”

The power of God to defeat the world’s violence,
to feed the world’s hunger,
takes flesh in the one who is rejected and crucified.
And God wills this to be so 
because God knows how we are drawn to worldly power.
We believe that violence will end
once we have a ruler who can crush our enemies.
We believe that our hungers will cease
once we have a leader 
who can get the economy humming along.
But Jesus has no armies, no police force, 
no Federal Reserve, no Internal Revenue Service;
he has only five barley loaves and two fish
and the power of crucified love.
But for those with ears to hear,
ears that can discern it through the static of the world,
this is the true story of peace and abundance.

This is what it means to live the life of faith.
It is to see in the sharing of gifts 
in our Eucharistic celebration
the abundant banquet that God offers us 
in Jesus’ body and blood.
It is to see in our small efforts to feed the hungry 
in our Loaves and Fishes ministry
a sign of God’s abundance breaking through
the static of the world’s violence and hunger.
These actions might seem like small things—
as small as five barley loaves and two fish—
but if Christ takes them into his hands
to offer them to the Father,
they can become the seeds of God’s kingdom sown in us.

The story of that kingdom is being told in countless way,
interrupting the story of the world’s sin.
Listen for it.
Don’t let the world’s static obscure it.
And may God have mercy on us all.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

For most of this year,
our Gospel reading is taken from the Gospel of Mark,
but today we begin what we might call
the lectionary's “Johannine digression.”
For today and for the next four Sundays following,
our Gospel reading is taken from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel,
the so-called “Bread of Life Discourse.”
It is in this section of his Gospel that John,
who does not recount Jesus’ words
over the bread and wine at the Last Supper,
shows us Jesus speaking of himself
as the true bread that has come down from heaven
and in whom we abide by eating his Eucharistic flesh.

John prefaces this “Bread of Life Discourse” with a miracle story
that is found in all four of the Gospels:
the familiar story of Jesus feeding the multitude
with five loaves and two fish.
John underscores the Eucharistic echoes of this miracle,
by telling us that it occurs at Passover time —
the same time when Jesus will eat
his final meal with his disciples one year later —
and he describes the actions of Jesus in the same terms
used by the other Gospel writers at the Last Supper:
Jesus takes the loaves, gives thanks, and distributes them.
In feeding the multitude,
Jesus foreshadows what he will do at the Last Supper,
and what he does for us every time we gather at his altar.

In preaching on this text, St. John Chrysostom,
who lived in the last half of the 4th century,
raised an interesting question:
why doesn’t Jesus simply create food out of thin air?
Why bother to multiply the food that was there,
rather than simply make new food from nothing?
After all, barley loaves and pickled fish
were pretty simple, lowbrow food —
a young boy's lunch;
maybe the first-century equivalent
of saltines and canned sardines —
and Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh,
through whom the universe was created from nothing,
could surely have conjured up something more exciting,
something more elegant,
something that would be a special treat
for the multitude that had followed him across the sea of Galilee.
So why does he choose not to throw out that simple peasant food
and create from nothing a great feast of the finest delicacies?

According to Chrysostom, it is because he wished to use
“the creation itself as a groundwork for his marvels”
(Homily 42 on the Gospel of John).
Rather than create something anew,
Jesus takes what is already at hand,
and transforms it by multiplying it,
so as to feed a multitude.

It seems to me that in wishing to use creation
as the groundwork for his miracle
Jesus is pointing out two things to us.

First, creation itself is already miraculous.
John Chrysostom’s contemporary, St. Augustine,
in preaching on this same passage,
noted how odd it is
that the multitude marvels
at the multiplication of the loaves and fishes,
but takes no notice of the miraculous fact
of God’s on-going and continuous activity in the world.
He says, “Governing the entire universe is a greater miracle
than feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread,
yet no one marvels at it.
People marvel at the feeding of the five thousand
not because this miracle is greater,
but because it is out of the ordinary”
(Homilies on the Gospel of John 24, 1.6.7).
Jesus works miracles not to convince us
that God can, on occasion, do extraordinary things,
but to awaken us to the fact
that God does extraordinary things all the time.
This is why in John’s Gospel
the miracles are always referred to as “signs.”
Like a sign, they point away from themselves to something else:
the constant extraordinary action of God
in what we think of as the most ordinary events of life.

Second, the way God works in the world
is not by discarding the ordinary realities of creation
and substituting for them something new and different,
but by taking what is already at hand and transforming it.
If God’s creation and preservation of the world is itself a miracle,
as Augustine said,
then God does not need something “better” to work with
in order to save us.
Just as Christ uses the simple loaves of barley
to feed the multitude,
so too he can use the simple substance of our lives
to make his kingdom present.
We might look at our lives and ask, like Andrew in today’s Gospel,
“what good is this for so many?’
but it is good enough if Christ takes it and blesses it.
An adage of traditional Catholic theology
is that “grace perfects and does not destroy nature.”
This means that becoming a new creation in Christ
does not involve the destruction of who we are
but rather is our perfecting and transformation
into who we truly are in God’s eyes,
the miraculous beings whom God has loved into existence.

So as we continue to reflect on this story
of the miraculous feeding of the multitude,
let us pray that we grow ever more attentive
to the miraculous ways in which God feeds us everyday,
the way in which God feeds our bodies
with the food that comes from the earth,
and the way in which God feeds our souls with Christ,
the bread who has come down from heaven.
Let the miracle of the Eucharist awaken us to the ways in which
God uses the daily bread of our lives
and transforms and perfects it to become the bread of angels.

Don’t miss the miracle that you live everyday,
because it is this everyday life
that Christ will take into his hands,
and bless,
and multiply to feed a multitude.