John 6:1-21
Proper 12/ Ordinary time 17, Year B
I. Background
The first thing that is
important to know about the feeding stories is how significant they were for Jesus
and the early church. The feedings are the only miracles that are shared in all
four Gospels, and two of them, John and Mark, have either a second feeding story
or a second version of the same story. So, either (a) both of them thought the
story was so important that they wanted to share it twice (which would attest
to its significance to the early church) or (b) Jesus did more feeding than
most of us had assumed (which would attest to its significance in the ministry
of Jesus). Either possibility testifies to its importance.
John’s version of the story is
laden with political symbolism, some of which is apparent to “normal” readers
(whatever that means), and some are not. I’ll point out a few of the most
important, but John starts right at the very beginning dropping interesting
clues.
Notice, for example, that he
begins with Jesus getting off of a boat at the Sea of Galilee. All of the four gospels
agree on this. But only John adds that it was also known as the Sea of “Tiberias.”
Why did he add that? One reason is that Tiberias was one of the most hated and
politically volatile cities in Palestine, and he wants the reader to take note
of that. It had been in existence for only a few short years. It was built by
Herod Antipas at the edge of the Sea of Galilee in the year 20 c.e. (and recall that Jesus’ ministry
was around 30 c.e.). It was built
to facilitate trade with the gentiles who populated the opposite side of the
Sea. What made it a hated name and avoided by many locals was that it was built
upon a local Jewish graveyard and was therefore considered unclean to observant Jews. Only people from outside
of Israel (and sellouts within Israel) would ever dare living there.
Second, in the short time between
its founding and the life of Jesus, it grew rapidly to become the largest city
in Israel, surpassing even Sepphoris, which Antipas had rebuilt from ruins and
enlarged just a few years earlier. This meant that in less than one generation,
tiny Israel grew to have three major cities (these two plus Jerusalem), two of
which were populated mainly by outsiders, and all demanding a steady supply of food
from the surrounding farms and villages. Their rapid growth put difficult demands
on the normal harvests in the region and contributed to an upswing in hunger around
them. This was also exacerbated by pro-city economic policies of Antipas, which
forced rural farmers to either give up some of their produce to feed the cities
or pay a tribute on what they did not give. So, the more crops they grew, the
more they had to pay in tribute to the powerful urban centers. They could lower
the tax by lowering their production, but they’d still have to pay a percentage
to the state, and then they’d have even less left over with which to feed their
families. So, they lost either way. Biblical scholar Obery Hendricks, describes
the economic life of first century farmers this way:
Most
peasant farmers had land holdings of less than six acres, of which on average
only 1.5 acres was available for cultivation, hardly enough to support a
family. That is, if they were fortunate enough to have saved their farms from
outright seizure by the Romans, or from dispossession for tax default, or from
the machinations of the Herodians and their cronies who, it is estimated, owned
one-half to two-thirds of the land in Galilee. To make ends meet, most farmers
either had to hire themselves out for wages to supplement their meager crops,
or go into debt, which was usually a worse alternative. Tenant farmers and
share-croppers often fared even worse, ending up in prison or enslaved by their
creditors.
When food production for the
average resident of Galilee was exported to the cities, it did two things.
First, it simply lowered the amount of fruits, vegetables, and grains that were
available to be consumed by the farmers and made the region grow incrementally
more hungry. Second, and more interestingly, when such large percentages of
grains were taken out of system, it made the prices of the remaining grains go
up. It’s the simple law of “supply and demand”: when there is more of something
the price goes down and when there is less of something it goes up. So, there
was less food to go around to eat and the food that was grown began to cost
more to purchase for the non-farm families who didn’t have direct access to it
themselves.
In many ways this is a story
that could be told of many poor farmers in the world today. Following the
global economic “reforms” of the 1970s and ‘80s, much of the farming in poor
and developing countries of the global south was forcefully reoriented from
production for local consumption to production for exports. In some instances
they were pushed to sell larger and larger portions of their wheat or other
grains to middle people or the government which would then export it to the
wealthy (usually northern) countries. In some instances they would cease food
production altogether and instead grow cash crops like hemp, or cotton, or
coffee. In this activity, many people made (and still make) a lot of money, but
the same two principles that exacerbated hunger in ancient Israel held true here
as well: taking food off of the market meant that there was less of it, and
what remained went up in price for low-income non-farmers. So, over all, while some
people benefitted from globalization and the rise of the global “free” market,
by and large the poor farmers of the world became more poor.
When the ancient farmers of
Israel were unable to pay the food tax, they did have access to a convenient
loan program from the large wealthy land owners to tide them over—but the
interest rates were often as high as fifty to sixty percent! With this precarious
combination of fees and loans, whenever there was a bad harvest either from
drought or unseasonable rains, many farmers would simply lose everything and
have to sell their animals, or their farms, and finally their bodies as slaves to their creditors.
High rates of interest were one of the key tools used for creating poverty and
debt slavery in the ancient world.
This too has a contemporary
parallel. Leaders of poor and developing countries in the global south took out
huge loans in the 1970s from banks in the north, under the advice that they would
make enough in export sales back to the north again to eventually pay back the
loans and become “First World” countries. However, in the eighties, two things came
together at the same time that destroyed that possibility. First, the wealthy
countries of the global north fell into a recession and cut back on purchases
of the products that the poor countries were trying to sell to raise money to
pay back the loans. And that drove the prices of their products downward,
severely cutting back on their ability make payments on the loans. Second (partly
because of the recession and partly because of the US Federal Reserve tightening
credit), the interest on their loans went up. So, while the costs for their loans (the interest) was
going up, their income with which to
pay on them was going down. Poor countries fell into an economic abyss from
which many have still not quite recovered. Latin America called the eighties
the “Lost Decade,” but the nineties were nothing to write home about. To keep the
countries paying on their loans, the wealthy and powerful countries, and the
multi-lateral banks that they controlled (like the World Bank and the IMF), forced
them into draconian, belt tightening, austerity programs that cut things like health
care, education and price supports for the poor. It caused so much suffering that
many people of faith and conscience believed them to be a modern version of
slavery. Tens of millions of people lost their jobs and their livelihoods (not
to mention all of the merchants and services around them who no longer had
customers), driving unimaginable numbers of people into hunger, poverty and in
many cases outright starvation. All of which is ominously reminiscent of the
time of Nehemiah, when debts grew so large that people had to sell their
children to pay them. To pay our creditors, they said, “we are forcing our sons
and daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have been ravished; we
are powerless, and our fields and vineyards now belong to others.” In Mexico, and
Central America, millions of those who fled north to the US in the nineties did
so in part as a response to the economic cutbacks imposed upon their countries
that devastated their local communities.
In the US following the
2007-9 recession this same philosophy was used to cripple state economies in
order to “save” them. The ideology that cutting salaries, pensions, benefits,
social services and jobs to pay off loans would somehow result in growth was imposed
on state and local governments in the US and also the poorer countries of
southern Europe. The belief was that if
you can just fire enough people and cut enough salaries, pensions and benefits,
and cause enough suffering and hunger and misery, then it will miraculously
lift the economy and promote business and trade. Today, many, perhaps most,
economists believe that one of the reasons why our recession lasted as long as
it did and rebounded as poorly as it did was because of the state and local
governments took this path off cutting, rather than stimulating, their way to
“growth.”
This policy is not totally
wrong in the long, long, long, long, long, term, perhaps, but in the short term
(twenty to thirty years) the reverse has nearly always happened. In the
developing world cuts of the eighties, it took more than twenty years of brutal,
painful human suffering before the economies began to claw their way back to
some semblance of economic health. The problem with this ideology is that when
people’s incomes and salaries are cut, they pay less in income and sales taxes
and the government’s income actually goes down (not up) and its deficit increases,
resulting in the “need” for more and more rounds of cuts. It was and is a
downward spiral that almost always ends badly. Like the US states, the poor
countries stricken by this policy in the eighties and nineties (and countries
like Greece today), were forced into massive cuts and firings and that policy
has been a major drag on the global economy its recovery from the recession. In
Europe the horrific cuts in social services and livelihoods drove Greece into
such poverty that it will take generations before they reach anything roughly
resembling economic and social health.
The demands for cuts in personnel and social spending made to Greece by the
European Union in July 2015 were so extreme that even the usually bloodless number
crunchers in the IMF protested that they would cripple the Greek economy and make
their debts unpayable (and their people suffer) for over thirty years before
they could be paid back.
While the details of these contemporary
examples are different than those of first century Palestine, they are in many ways
similar. The demands imposed on poor farmers by Herod and wealthy land owners and
those imposed on poor nations by creditors and wealthy nations, both have a
familiar ring to them.
II.
All of this background is
tied closely to the feeding story and is related to why the author of the
Gospel of John wanted you to know that this took place close to the hated city
of Tiberias. Have you ever wondered why it was that so often when Jesus was in
the country side he was swarmed by great crowds of people? Where did they come
from? When he is in the towns, you may not see them by the thousands, but there
are still hoards flocking after him. Even allowing for some exaggeration from
the Gospel writers, it still is an interesting phenomenon. Where did they come
from? These stories were for the most part in the middle of the day. Don’t they
have jobs?
The answer is “no.” These
were people who were driven off of their land by poverty and hunger and
oppression by their rulers. They often were not able to pay the demanded
tribute and feed themselves at the same time and got desperately into debt and
finally lost their farms.
Some in fact moved back onto the farms they once owned as indebted workers;
many others just became homeless, beggars, prostitutes, thieves, and day
laborers. When they heard of Jesus, teaching, healing and feeding in the region
or neighborhood they flocked to see him. And when he got out of the boat at the
beginning of our story, and the crowds saw him, they clamored for him, wanting
to see or experience some of the healing signs that they had heard were taking place
through him.
Another seemingly innocuous comment
from John is that all of this took place near the Passover. There is nothing in
the story as it stands that otherwise refers to, or relates to, the Passover,
so why did he think it was important to mention that here? Part of it was likely
because he wants the reader to think of
Jesus as a new Moses, who you will recall also delivered bread (manna) from a
mountain (Exod. 16:4, cf. John 6:31-33). But it is also likely that John once again wants us to feel
the politically charged atmosphere surrounding this event. In a fairly
consistent way, whenever John makes note of an event being close to a Jewish festival, he has
Jesus present some kind of controversial teaching that subverts and undermines
a traditional teaching that is held by the religious authorities, and the
result is often a confrontation with those authorities (cf. 1:13ff; 7:2ff;
10:22ff; 12:1ff)”
While in this instance the religious authorities do not show up until after the feeding story, the provocative,
confrontational nature of the feeding is nonetheless clear here as well.
III.
Here is where the story begins
to get interesting (I bet you thought it was interesting already). When Jesus and
his disciples cross over the Sea of Tiberius, and settle down on a high hill to
rest, he sees a large crowd running up the hill toward them. He leans over to
Philip and asks, “Where can we go to buy enough bread to feed these people?” John
says that he already knew the answer to that question when he asked it, but he asked
it anyway to see what Philip would say (v. 6).
It might be helpful to point
out here that—at least in the hands of John, the gospel writer—these conversations
with the disciples are understood to be conversations also with the church. John
preserves them or crafts them and broadens them, in ways that let them speak to
the critical issues of his own church community, and not just to one individual
on the side of a lake in ancient Israel. So, when we overhear these exchanges
thousands of years later, we too should feel ourselves being asked the same
questions asked of Philip and the others, “where are we going to get the food
to feed these people?”
Philip answers him with the
straightforward economic reality: No place. Nowhere. It’s impossible. To feed
these people, he says, would take six months of wages, and nobody—certainly not
the rag tag crowd that were following Jesus—had that kind of money lying around.
Even if Judas had not been skimming off donations from the till,
they still couldn’t do it. Six months wages (or eight or ten, depending on the
various translations) are actually just guesses. In the Greek it says two
hundred denarii. A denarius was a Roman coin equal to about one day’s wage for
a desperately poor common laborer. Philip is saying it would take two hundred days’
worth of work to feed these people (though the value of money at the time was
falling because the size of the work force was growing). His precision is
interesting. Why not be more general as numbers often are in the Bible? My
hunch is that in addition to just simply saying that this is a big chunk of
change, it is likely that Philip is also expressing his exasperation about the
outrageousness of the decline in the value of money in his day, and the rapid
escalation in prices.
He is probably making a statement about the impossibility of buying food to
live on in an age of stagnating wages and inflationary prices. And if that is
what he was doing, he was certainly correct.
As an aside, I also find it
interesting that Jesus asked the “where” question, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” But Philip only
hears a “how much” question: “How much will it cost to buy bread for these
people to eat?” Jesus’ question assumes that they will buy bread, and can
buy bread, but Philip’s answer makes it clear that he disagrees. He thinks they
can’t buy that much bread, no matter where the late-night bakery is located. Philip
is talking in simple economic terms but Jesus is talking about something larger.
Before Jesus could say
anything, Andrew, Peter’s brother—also sounding exasperated and futile—says, “Well,
we got this boy here, who has some fish and bread.” It’s not clear in English,
but his choice of words indicates that he also thinks this is a lost cause. The
words for “boy” (paidárion) and
“fish” (opsarion )
are diminutive, that is, a “small
boy” and a “small amount of fish.”
Also, the use of the term “barley” loaves has a negative connotation to it because
only the very poor and the very desperate would lower themselves to tasting this
tasteless bread. Barley was what you fed to farm animals. Translated into more
clear English, he’s saying something like, “We got bubkes here, zilch, nada.
Our resources are zero, the economy has gone to Hades, and just to make that perfectly
clear, look at what we’ve got for a meal: a little kid with a couple of fish
and some really, really, smelly barley, which tastes awful, and I’m not going
there.” (Maybe not a word-for-word translation, but you get the point.)
Jesus responds to this in a
very odd way, but before we get to it, let me say what Jesus did not do. He did not offer communion. That is, when he took the loaves, broke them,
gave thanks, and gave them…, he was not imitating some form of pre-communion,
even though the Gospel writers, writing many years later, certainly had that in
mind, and even though approximately 487.09 gazillion preachers (more or less)
have later said he did. Whatever else he was thinking of up there on the
mountain, it is all but one hundred percent certain that Jesus did not have the
Celebration of Holy Eucharist on his mind while he was breaking bread and
handing it out to hungry people. If he did, what would have been the point? The
crowd that gathered there on that day would have had no idea what he was
talking about. He could not have been trying to do some symbolism to tens of
thousands of strangers of an event that had not even happened yet. Almost every
Bible scholar on the planet (with the possible exception of my pet squirrel,
but his credentials are a little thin) believes that the Gospel writers
retrofitted that theology back into the actions of Jesus later because that was
what they were thinking about, not
Jesus.
IV.
So, with that out of the way,
what did Jesus do? If the account can
be accepted (and of course, that always carries some degree of conjecture), he
was looking out onto a sea of faces, all poor and almost all hungry. They
represented a wide swath of the economic and social bottom of Israelite society
of the day. They were probably far more than 5,000 people, because in those
days they only counted men, not women and not children. So a good guess would
be at least ten thousand, perhaps as many as twenty. Again, this is if the crowd estimates of John and the
others can be accepted, but by any accounting this was an incredible number of
people.
Look again at the four acts
described before the actual feeding: he “took,” “gave thanks,”
“broke,” and “gave.” While these probably are not images that prophesy upcoming Holy Communion, they are images that hearken back to
traditional Hebrew gestures of a gracious host welcoming guests to his banquet
table (except that Jesus’ guest list was a bit larger than that of most of us).
Think about the first two
words, “took” and “blessed.” These are welcoming acts, and in a typical first
century Jewish family, these are the acts of hosting. They bring you into the family. The last two, “broke” and
“gave” are acts of serving and they
are acts done usually by a slave (or worse: a wife). Notice too that before
Jesus either welcomes or serves, he has everyone in the crowd “recline” (anepeson), which is the posture one
takes in a banquet, not an ordinary meal. To recline means that the host has to
lean down to serve you. It is also the posture that Jesus takes later in his
last supper, when he also serves. In doing this, Jesus, in a subtle, almost
radical, way has symbolically taken on the role of both master and slave,
husband and wife, teacher and student, and welcomes everyone to the table.
When he does that, the participants almost certainly realized that something
very special was about to happen.
So far, he is doing two
things. First he is embodying the majestic vision of the “messianic banquet” of
the Hebrew prophets. And they, in turn, were envisioning the “Jubilee,” that great
age, heralded in Leviticus 25, when all of God’s creation, which has been
broken and disfigured by human corruption and greed, will be returned back to
the harmony and justice that God had originally intended. In the Jubilee, the
days of God’s final dispensation, a celebration of oneness and equality will break
out all over the land, and it will be symbolized by the one thing that almost
all poor people lacked: food. There will be a great and glorious banquet on the
mountain tops, which will be attended by all who can walk or crawl (and some
who can do neither).
On this mountain
the Lord of hosts will make for
all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged
wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of
well-aged wines strained clear.
— Isaiah 25:6
Most significant for a
Christian interpretation of this act is that throughout his ministry, Jesus
many times—here included—acted as though he was embodying the vision of the banquet. He acted it out in his
behaviors with others and embodied
its salvific meaning. His expansive, sharing, welcoming style had in fact
garnered for him a reputation as a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax
collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19). It was considered a criticism by his
enemies, but to his supporters it was actually a beacon of what God intended
for the earth. He “welcomes sinners and eats
with them” (Luke 15:1–2) and in so doing he becomes
God’s magisterial welcome mat to sinners (which, we should remember, included
people who were sick, contagious, old, non-Jews, immigrants, criminals, slaves,
and women) to enter in and become a part of the true end for humanity, the
“kingdom” of God.
An important link to the events
of the Last Supper is that in that meal, not only was he pointing backward to this feeding story, but he
was also pointing forward to the
coming eschatological banquet. He said, “I will never again drink of this fruit
of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom”
(Matt. 26:29; Mark 14:25; Luke 22:18; cf. Luke 22:28–30).
Second, Jesus is also not
just symbolically being the new realm
of God embodied on earth, but he is also modeling
a way to create it. If your community is beginning to feel the long, slow rise of
hunger in America, then Jesus’ modeling of a way to address it may speak to you.
He once told his followers, “The Kingdom (or realm) of God is within you,” and
here is what that Realm looks like. Watch his actions: He holds up the little
boy and distributes his paltry offering in front of everyone, and suddenly
there is an abundance of food. One way of putting it is to say that what
happened in the various feeding stories was much less “magical” than they sound
in the preaching of most sermons, but far more “miraculous.”
V.
It’s very likely that what
happened was something like this: Jesus took the little boy and set him in
front of the crowd and said, “Hey, hey, all of you. Listen up. Look up here,
focus, focus. Okay. Now I know that
all of you are very poor. All of you have felt like you have been caught up in
the economic crash that drove up the prices of food and drove down your income.
We all know that. And all of you are afraid that you don’t have enough even to
survive on your own and you’re afraid to spend anything. Now, I’m not going to
give you some long lecture about Keynesian economics and how major financial
powers need to step in and invest and spend and loan until the smaller folks can
get their faith and trust and security back. Rome may get around to something
like that one of these days, but who knows.
“Until then, we’re going to
try something else; something that might be a model for the government and
might work out better for you in the long run; something that might actually bring
in the Kingdom that I’ve been talking so much about. We may not have enough food
to go around individually, but in the aggregate, we can fix this problem. I’m going
to put this little kid out in front here—with his frankly dismal little offering—for
all of you to look at. He’s saying he is offering to give us everything he’s
got, and I want you to see that. And then I’m going to break up his smelly bread
and give thanks to God for it, and then start distributing it to all of you,
and then you will…well, I don’t know. I hope I know what you’re going to do,
but let’s see what happens after that. Alright? Got it? Don’t let me down. So now
bow your heads I’m going to pray” and he starts praying.
And then, I think, as the
bits and pieces of food are handed down the aisle, one person starts to think
to himself, “Y’ know, the wife did make me this sandwich and packed me this thermos
of coffee, and I probably don’t need all of it, so I’ll break it in half and
pass it down with the barley as it comes handed down the aisle to me.” And then
the next guy says, “Well, I do have this banana that I forgot to check at the
gate when I came in, and I don’t need all of it,” so he breaks it in half and
passes it down. And then there’s the guy who picked up the box of Oreos at the
Seven Eleven that morning on the way out of town to the rally. And the one who
won the turkey at the meat raffle at the Grange meeting last night. And the one
who remembers he still has a piece of that fruit cake left over from the office
party a couple of years ago that never went bad. And so on, all down the line,
until all the loaves and fishes had been passed around and the disciples
gathered up the scraps and found twelve
baskets full of leftovers and snacks.
Goodness. Now that would be
a miracle!
