17th Sunday Year B
See Commentary on John 6:1-15
Homily 1 - 2003
This episode of John’s Gospel is the beginning of a section configured around four major Jewish feasts: the weekly Sabbath, and the annual feasts of Passover in March/April, Tabernacles in October and Dedication (or Hanukkah) in early December.
The Jewish people believed that as they remembered and celebrated the past events of their history, the God who saved their ancestors in the past was present with them in the now and continuing his saving work in their midst (much as we believe about our sacraments).
By this time of their history [as the Gospel was being written some decades after Jesus’ death], the members of John’s community had been expelled from the synagogues, and certainly from the temple, and were therefore debarred, too, from celebrating the feasts with their families and friends.
The segregation hurt deeply because they loved their God from whose saving activity they felt they were being excluded. These celebrations had meant so much to them. Most of them missed, and probably hankered after, the solemnity of the temple: the incense, the elaborate vestments, the gold, the wonderful singing of the Levites, etc., that had been such a precious part of their faith experience. Their own little weekly gatherings to hear the teaching of the Apostles and to break the bread seemed so unpretentious by comparison.
John’s response is to show that in fact they are missing out on nothing, that, in fact, the past events that the other Jews were celebrating were only shadows cast backwards (as it were) by the incredibly more wonderful person and acts of Jesus. It was the other Jews who were in fact missing out, not the ostracized little band of faithful followers of Jesus. Their Jesus was the fulfillment and bearer of the fullness of the salvation that the other Jews were still mistakenly waiting for.
John’s tactic in this section of his Gospel is to identify the Jewish feast, to recount a significant event in the life of Jesus and to use the event as a framework on which to base his teaching.
In today’s episode, he identifies the Jews’ feast of Passover. At Passover, the Jews remembered, among other things, how God had fed the hungry people escaping from Egypt with the manna, the bread from heaven. As the Jews celebrated the feast every year, they believed, rightly, (and still believe today) that the God who saved his people then was still present with them and saving them now.
Against this backdrop of Passover, John recounts Jesus’ feeding of the hungry crowd out in the wilderness on the other side of the lake. As the chapter continues over the next four Sundays, he will use the event to make the point that the real bread of life is Jesus himself, really present to his little community of disciples.
What do we make of all this as we gather each Sunday twenty centuries later? We believe that Jesus himself is present and active among us. He touches and nourishes our spirit by the message he has shared with us, stirring our deepest desires and strengthening our hopes. He nourishes us with his own life, his risen, irrepressible life, as we associate our minds and wills with his in our offering of ourselves in trust to the same God of Jesus who raised even the crucified Christ to life.
With Jesus we thank our God who "makes all things work together for the good of those who love him". This Jesus, present among us in almost scandalous simplicity and absence of fanfare, we do not see and hear and touch (as did his contemporaries), but we do take into ourselves as we eat and are nourished spiritually by his human body sacramentally present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
It is interesting to note the crowd’s reactions to the involvement of Jesus: “This really is the prophet who is to come into the world." “They were about to come and take him by force and make him king.” They thought they were responding well - but they missed the point. They were measuring Jesus by their own categories, in light of their own experience, seeing him, among other things, as the answer/fulfillment of their hopes and desires. What is wrong with that? Simply: they were not open to the uniqueness of this person, the mystery of this Jesus who immeasurably surpassed their narrow, limiting definitions. They were taming him, boxing him in!
Their kind of response is pretty inevitable, perhaps. We do that with everyone and everything. We categorise them and miss the uniqueness, the mystery, the wonder. I look out the window at a bed of daffodils, and say to myself, “The daffodils are out. Aren’t they lovely” - and carry on with my work. A little child, on the other hand, can go up to one and stand entranced before it – wrapped in the beauty, the uniqueness, the “mystery/transcendence” of it.
As I think of the crowd’s domesticating assessment of Jesus, I am reminded of some American evangelists’ image of Jesus. He is their Jesus, made to their image - and I feel angry. But then, don’t I speak to you of my Jesus? Jesus made in my image, or at least the embodiment of my hopes and expectations? That, indeed, is the reality!
Back to the daffodil! What if I am colourblind? I might still be entranced by the colour as I see it – it is not, then, the accuracy of my vision that matters, but the fact that something has led me beyond the colour to the uniqueness, the wonder of the daffodil.
I have to move beyond my vision/assessment of Jesus and be open to his utter uniqueness, the mystery of his person - beyond my capacity to describe, to capture, to understand. In some ways, the accuracy of my perception and my description recede into the background, and may not matter all that much. Hopefully, they may become more accurate in time - by osmosis, as it were!
With regard to yourselves lined up before me Sunday after Sunday. I can only hope that my reflecting on Jesus attracts you, rather than repel you, or leave you cold. But even if it attracts, that is not enough. You, too, have to stand before the mystery and allow him to touch you – beyond words, beyond images, beyond feelings. An encounter in darkness, really - indescribable, but real. It is the contemplative stance – not all that different from the gaze of the child holding the daffodil.
Until you do that, indeed, until I do that, we are little better than the Jewish crowds in today’s Gospel incident. Our categories and descriptions might be different, but, however enthusiastic or otherwise we may feel, we are still looking at ourselves and our own projections. We are missing the unrepeatable truth, the mystery of the unique person Jesus. We need to recover the capacity to be contemplatives, that we somehow lost as we grew beyond childhood.
Homily 2 - 2006
The people were celebrating Passover. Passover was an annual celebration, a bit like our Anzac Day when we hark back to the glories of a former time.
Passover was the time when Jews remembered how Moses, many centuries before, had led their oppressed, leaderless ancestors through the sea into the wild Sinai peninsula, and eventually to their freedom in the Promised Land. They celebrated how Moses, when they were without sufficient water, had provided water – water from a rock! without sufficient food, had provided the manna - a food that materialised from nowhere each evening - what they had come to call Bread from Heaven.
They celebrated how Moses had formed them into an organised people. He had given them a vision of what God was like and what life in community could be. Before Moses died, he had promised that God would one day once more raise up a prophet like himself.
In today’s story John explicitly made the point that the time of year was Passover. The time would serve to give meaning to what he believed Jesus was doing. As had happened to the Hebrew people, under Moses, Jesus and the disciples had crossed the sea – though this time by boat - to a wild, uncultivated wilderness area.
In last week’s Gospel Mark had commented that the people were oppressed and leaderless. He said that they were like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus had set himself to teach them – to teach them what God was like, and what life in community could be like - opening them to a vision well beyond what Moses had ever imagined possible.
Then Jesus gave them a foretaste of what he was talking about, an insight into what life could be like if people would only trust God and God’s values, and live accordingly: Beyond all probability he fed them, he satisfied their hunger with food that materialised from nowhere.
Some of those present got the point – surely this was the new Moses who would form and lead them – the prophet like Moses who was to come into the world. They wanted to declare him there and then their leader, to make him their king. They got it half right: while Jesus was not interested in assuming political leadership, he was interested in teaching what society could be like, if people would take God seriously and live accordingly.
That is what we celebrate each time we gather for Eucharist. John wanted his readers to connect their Eucharists with what Jesus had done out there in the wilderness. John echoed the language that we use at Eucharist: Jesus took the loaves, he gave thanks, he gave them out to all...
Generally as a society we don’t live Jesus’ way. We hardly even get to stage one: we don’t really believe that God loves people, that God is the source of their life and of their dignity – of everyone’s dignity: Jew or Arab, Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, employer, employed, unemployed or unemployable.
As a society we don’t see life as always pure gift from God, and not ours to do with as we like. So often we respond to the sin of the world sinfully, to violence violently, in injustice unjustly. We close our eyes to people in need - from unborn children in the womb, to old people outliving their usefulness, to those seeking asylum from oppression or seeking liberation from hunger. And so, not surprisingly, our newspapers and TV screens keep listing an endless barrage of bad news. That’s not the whole story, however.
Some of us do try to take God seriously, to take ourselves and others seriously. The power we do have (and that we can use without injustice) is the power of our conviction and our own witness, the attractiveness of our own lives, the attraction of truth and integrity, our readiness to take responsibility, to be active in our community, even on occasion to be leaders, to be community leaders.
The vision that animated Jesus animates us, too. A different world is possible – but not without its price.
Homily 3 - 2009
The Gospel today said that the crowds followed Jesus impressed by the signs he gave by curing the sick. At the end of the passage, after he had fed the 5000, we heard something similar: seeing this sign that he had given, they said: This really is the prophet who is to come into the world. In fact, they wanted to make him king, to claim his as theirs, to be counted on his side, to be special. It wasn't the response that Jesus wanted: he escaped back to the hills by himself.
Perhaps, they thought that with him as king, all would be well for them - they would be free. But, if that were all, it would just be business as usual, except that, instead of being on the bottom of the pile, they would be on top.
Jesus' curing the sick, and feeding the hungry, were just signs - signs pointing to something else, something immeasurably more important. Jesus was on about wholeness. He wanted society – culture – to be truly life-giving. He wanted people really to live. That was easier said than done; easier to dream than to accomplish.
Society, culture – secular culture, and, so often, religious culture, (the world – as John's Gospel so often calls it) - is not really life-giving. But its effect is so powerful, we're so much part of it, we're so familiar with it, that we often don't realise it. We don't know what really being alive is like. Sometimes, we are so scared to face our emptiness, our radical dissatisfaction, that we automatically distract ourselves. We believe the myths that the next promotion, a better paid job, a bigger house, a more exotic holiday, a more interesting partner, a better-looking body, would make the difference. Sometimes, we don't really believe it, but we become so addicted to our substitutes that we don't dare to let go.
To get back to today's Gospel. If Jesus' healing the sick, his feeding the hungry, weren't really what he was on about, why did he do them? To make things more pertinent: Sometimes we ask God for things, and sometimes God seems to answer our prayers. If giving us the things we ask for is not really what God is about, why does God do it?
There might be two answers to that. Perhaps, only by getting what we want, do we come to realise it's not what we really want – our hearts remain unsatisfied. To realise that is not a bad spot to be: It may lead us to ask ourselves What do we really want?
Surprisingly, God's not giving us what we want can sometimes have a similar effect: it may encourage us to get in touch with our deepest heart desires. After all, we can only start from where we are; so, if we want something, by all means ask God – and keep asking.
A second reason why Jesus worked what the Gospel called signs may have been to stir people to ask the question: Who is this? Now, sometimes people asked, and came up with the superficial answer: This is the prophet; this might be the king we have been waiting for.
But, for some, it got them to go deeper. Remember the incident right at the start of John's Gospel, down by the Jordan, just after Jesus' baptism. Two disciples of the Baptist followed Jesus.... Jesus asked: What do you want? They answered: Where do you live? He said: Come and see. And the Gospel added: They went and stayed with him the rest of that day.
In fact, they continued to stay with him, and, in the process, they came to know him, to experience his love, to share his vision, and, in time, to be mightily changed. Jesus' hope was that, through his signs, people might learn to stay with him, to believe in him (as next week's Gospel will put it), to entrust themselves to him, eventually, to discover what they really wanted, and to find themselves empowered to go for it.
He wants the same for us.
Homily 4 - 2015
John’s Gospel sees today’s story as a sign, as pointing to something otherwise beyond our comprehension. John wants to draw us more deeply into the mystery that is Jesus. I think that the story is making a similar point to the parable of the one hundred-fold harvest. God is a God of enough, indeed, of extraordinary abundance; and Jesus is the human revelation of that God. Over the next two Sundays we shall hear of Jesus as the Bread of Life, of nourishing life, of eternal life now, and of future resurrection.
This is the one story told by all four evangelists. And they all add the seemingly superfluous comment that they picked up the pieces left over, and filled twelve baskets with the scraps. What is that about? I wonder if that was what Pope Francis was writing about in his recent Encyclical on Care for our Common Home. As he spoke of the ways that we humans fail to respect our world and its environment, he wrote, we know that approximately a third of all food produced is discarded, and “whenever food is thrown out it is as if it were stolen from the table of the poor”.
Pope Francis connects very closely issues to do with lack of care for our world with the equally scandalous lack of care for the poor. If we who live in the developed world followed the demands of justice, without exploiting, damaging or wasting the world’s natural resources, and if we approached others as fellow creatures of our benevolent God and brothers and sisters of each other with equal rights to the world’s bounty, there would be enough to feed everyone and to assure an adequate standard of living.
Powerful voices in the developed and developing worlds call for strict measures of population control, especially in the world’s poorest nations, and specifically in Africa. I was reading an interesting comment the other day that went like this, There are many ways that we could start reducing our numbers. Some of them, such as forced sterilization or abortion, are immoral. Some are unjust, such as mandatory birth control measures inflicted by the wealthy against the poor of the Earth. But there are methods that would achieve a reduction of human numbers and provide a better environment for all while respecting human dignity. Educating women and liberating the most dismally poor from their plight are two of the most effective methods of population control.
Pope Francis admits the number and complexity of issues contributing to our present despoliation of our world. Political and economic reforms, while necessary, will not be enough, in fact, will hardly be considered, without what he calls a human and ecological conversion. It is fascinating to notice the number of TV programs devoted to the latest recipes, while at the same time the Western world is trying to cope with an epidemic of obesity. Why are we so obsessed with eating and drinking?
The issue is one of justice, given that so many of the world’s population are in fact starving. As disciples of Jesus we cannot but be concerned. Individual persons must convert. But realistically, individuals are not likely to convert without an accompanying conversion of the culture as well.
Over the next couple of weeks the Gospel will insist that Jesus is the true Bread of Life, the one who can truly fill the cultural and personal emptiness that we in the West are seeking to fill with everything else but the sense of meaning and fulness of life that he has to offer. How might we come to realise that? Pope Francis in his Encyclical goes so far as to suggest, Christian spirituality … encourages a prophetic and contemplative lifestyle, one capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption.
Contemplative lifestyle… Are we up to it?
Homily 5 - 2018
Jesus fed five thousand men, we are told. We are not told how many women there were, and certainly not how many children running round. How come so many men? To have been free to wander around like that, they must have been unemployed or underemployed – so unpaid, so living, however precariously, right on the breadline or under it. And likewise their dependents, the women and children. At least, they probably had homes, that would have been in the family for generations, but were probably getting more and more overcrowded as younger brothers and their families had to move in with brothers already there.
No wonder Jesus asked the question of his disciples, “Where can we buy some bread for these people to eat?” The Gospel commented that it was a loaded question, and Philip fell for the bait – giving the economic-rationalist answer, “We can’t afford it. Besides, even if we could, we could not find enough” [or words to that effect]. Andrew’s contribution did not help much either, “There is a small boy here with five bread rolls and a tin of sardines – but that won’t go far even among us”.
What is going on? I wonder was Jesus making the point that economic rationalism never helps much when it comes to addressing real human needs? Economic rationalist answers usually come from comfortable specialists who are not personally facing real human need, never have, and are not likely to in the future.
Was Jesus’ answer any better? He fed them once, says the Gospel – and spectacularly. But what would they do the next day, and the day after that? What would happen with the twelve baskets of scraps, for that matter?
If economic rationalism does not have the answer to human need, what does? What is Jesus’ answer? Jesus worked miracles; but miracles were not his answer to the world’s human needs. Though they were often a compassionate response to people’s here and now needs, they had another long-term and wider-reaching purpose. More significantly, miracles challenged people to take him seriously, to listen to what he taught about relating to each other responsibly and constructively as fellow human beings, and to reflect.
Perhaps it all starts with our facing the question, Do we want to help each other, honestly? Even if it means a fairly radical change of attitude? Even if a change of attitude leads us into the unfamiliar? Until we have answered this question adequately, we hardly qualify as disciples of Jesus.
Take the question of refugees. Do we want to help them, to welcome them? Particularly if their skin is a different colour? if they do not yet speak English well, or at all? Even if some of them, with their post-traumatic stress, do not always behave as we expect? Even if adjusting to their presence costs us something in the short term? Why do we seem more prepared to spend unlimited amounts of money frantically keeping them out and inhumanely detaining those who have entered, than helping them settle here peaceably and constructively? Would our world be better off if nations decided to apply sanctions against those nations that supplied arms and munitions to warring nations?
Good practical answers to all these questions may be more complex than any simple yes or no. There is need to reflect carefully, to search together to find fitting solutions. Then, and only then, might the economic rationalists have something useful to contribute. But the basic issue remains: Do we want to help people?
Jesus is very much concerned about how we face basic issues like this. When we pray “Give us this day our daily bread”, is our sense of “us” limited to our narrow selfish horizons, or does it reach out especially to include the hungry and the oppressed? Does our prayer that “Your will be done on earth…” involve radically widening our hearts, enough to live as brothers and sisters on earth, as Jesus instructed us?
Homily 6-2021
I have to be careful with today’s Gospel passage. I have heard it so many times that I nearly know it by heart. And there lies the problem. Its familiarity means that it is too easy for me to not really hear it at all any more. And that is a pity. St John wrote about the incident because he had discovered for himself that genuinely trusting himself in a truly personal way to Jesus and to Jesus’ way of life was a sure way to coming to experience what he called “life in his name”.
There is much in today’s incident that can speak to us of Jesus and his way of life. I want to reflect on one of them, that is perhaps easy to overlook. John wrote: “Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and gave them out to all who were sitting ready.” He “gave thanks”. Whom did he thank? Was it the young boy? In case we are not sure, we can cast our minds forward to Jesus’ actions at his last supper [that Fr George will recall at the consecration of today’s Mass]. There we have: “On the night he was betrayed, he himself took bread, and giving you thanks, he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples..”. Then he added, “This is my body which will be given up for you”.
So he “thanked” God. And he thanked God even “on the night he was betrayed”, even while he saw in the bread broken to be shared his own body soon to be similarly broken.
“He thanked God”. What for? My answer to that is: “God’s love for the world”. He must have been acutely sensitive to the presence of the loving God always and everywhere; and I suspect he deepened that constant awareness, even in the most taxing circumstances, by repeating it often.
I am convinced that coming to experience “life in Jesus’ name” will be a factor of how genuinely I train myself to be aware of God’s loving presence in the constant unfolding of my life, and to thank God deliberately, as Jesus did, until eventually it becomes second nature.