Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sunday Homilies
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Did Jesus really feed five thousand men with five barley loves and two fish? I can answer that question definitively—it doesn’t matter.
Today’s gospel reading is taken from the gospel of John. From week to week, we’ve been merrily reading along in the gospel of Saint Mark…until now. Why? You may remember that in last week’s gospel, Jesus fed the crowd with his teaching. If we had continued along with Mark, we’d have a simple narration of the multiplication of the loaves. Instead, we have the much more nuanced reading from Saint John because, as usual, John focuses more on the meaning of an event rather than its details. John’s mystical gospel should never be thought of in terms of modern, scientific history.
I’m certain that something happened on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. All four gospels record the event. Some scholars suggest that, when the bread and fish were distributed, people who had brought food with them took it out and began sharing it with others. In that case, it was a miracle of compassion and generosity. But, as I said a moment ago, it doesn’t matter.
The reason it doesn’t matter lies in the nature, structure, and purpose of John’s gospel itself. It was written a full generation—nearly fifty years—after the events it describes. Since John’s was the last gospel written, he had not only the death and resurrection of Christ but also the other three gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—as source material, as well as the experience of the early Christian Church. The gospel in general, and this passage in particular, was written to help his contemporary Christians understand the dept of meaning behind their faith tradition.
There are two major themes hidden in this narrative that we should explore to understand John’s purpose better. And, yes, we’ll need to look at some more Greek words. Before he gets into the themes he wants cover, John tells his readers what they’re about to see. “A large crowd followed [Jesus] because they saw the signs he was performing.” Notice that John calls Jesus’s works signs. We’ve seen from Mark’s gospel that what we call “performing a miracle” in Greek was rendered by ποιησει δυναμις (poiēsei dynamis), literally “doing powerful deeds.” That phrase appears nowhere in John’s gospel. Instead of powerful deeds, he calls them “signs.” A sign points to something else. Here, the event points to the identity of Jesus and the coming of the Reign of God.
First, the identity of Jesus. “Jesus went up the mountain and there he sat down with his disciples.” As usual, Jesus going up the mountain is a clear allusion to Moses going up Mount Sinai. John shows us that Jesus is fulfilling the mission of Moses and the prophets. The gospel uses phrases reminiscent of a passage from the book of Numbers where Moses, after leaving Sinai, prays, “Where can I get meat to feed all these people?” [Numbers 11:13] and “If all the fish in the sea were caught for them, would they have enough?” [Numbers 11:22]. The people were looking for the coming of a mighty prophet. In the book of Deuteronomy [18:18], God says to Moses, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kinsmen, and I will put my words into his mouth; he shall tell them all that I command him.” John is telling us that, in Jesus, this promise is being fulfilled.
But there’s another indication that John sees in Jesus the fulfillment of God’s promise. The Israelites believed that the prophet like Moses that God promised had already come in the person of Elijah. And, since Elijah was taken up to heaven alive in a flaming chariot, they believed that he would come again to herald the coming Messianic age. There’s a place set for him at every Passover meal even today. But, before he was taken up to heaven, Elijah bestowed his prophetic spirit on his successor, the prophet Elisha. It’s Elisha we heard from this morning in our first reading. There, we see Elisha feeding a hundred people with twenty barley loaves. Of all the evangelists, only John calls the bread in today’s gospel “barley loaves”—evidently showing us that Jesus is in the line of prophets from Moses to Elijah to Elisha.
The multiplication of loaves carries us over into the second great theme of today’s gospel passage. It prefigures the eucharist. Only John describes the time of the event as the Passover. Like the other evangelists, John uses specifically eucharistic terminology to describe Jesus’s actions. In every case—the multiplication of the loaves, the Last Supper, the disciples at Emmaus, and in Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians—four words are used. Jesus “took,” “blessed,” “broke,” and “gave” the bread. But, as usual, John departs a little bit from the norm. He uses the same word as the other evangelists for “he took,” but instead of using the word for “he blessed”—ευλογησας (eulogēsas)—he uses the word for “he gave thanks”—ευχαριστησς (eucharistēsas)—the very word we use for eucharist.
But wait! There’s more! John leaves out entirely the word for “he broke.” Isn’t breaking the bread the important part? To find the answer, we have to look at another word (in English this time)—the word “fragments.” In Greek, as in English, fragments are the result when something is fractured. The phrase “to gather the fragments” is used here and in the earliest Christian liturgies to refer to collecting the fragments of the fractured eucharistic bread.
Finally, John describes Jesus’s actions around the fourth word—“he gave”—a little differently, as well. In the other gospels, Jesus gave the bread to the disciples to distribute. Here, Jesus does the distribution to the people himself.
Evidently John is drawing a direct line between this event and the eucharist of the early Christian Church. For John, this is the eucharist. John has left the institution of the eucharist out of the Last Supper entirely. The link he forges here is between eucharistic worship and service to one another. Jesus feeds the bodies of the hungry crowd with loaves as he feeds the souls of his faithful with the eucharist. The two are inseparable. Paul makes the same point when he describes the institution of the eucharist to the self-centered Corinthians. Broken and fragmented as they may be, they are still gathered together to be one body, one spirit in Christ.
In a very little while, once again, we’ll hear how Jesus took, blessed, broke, and gave his body to us and for us as a sign of his love. Yet, it’s more than a sign, and more than a gift. To us, it’s both a summons and a challenge to follow his example. The words “Do this in memory of me” are from Saint Paul and are not to be found in the gospels. However, they are most certainly implied. The commission given to the Church to celebrate the eucharistic liturgy is not all there is. It’s a commission to feed and care for one another. This is eucharist because we are eucharist.