Sermons

Christ the King

Sunday 25th November at 8am

Maureen Williams
Readings: John 6: 5-14

The feeding of the five thousand is perhaps the most famous of all Jesus' miracles and the only one recorded in all four Gospels. It is a story that will be very familiar to you, so what can be said about it that you have not already heard many times before.

For me, it was by reading the account in Matthew's gospel that I came to understand something new about the context for this story - its background of profound bereavement for Jesus after the death of his cousin, John the Baptist, at the hands of Herod. Knowing these circumstances, it is easy to understand why Jesus needed to get away from the crowds to mourn his cousin's death and also to pray. We often read that Jesus 'withdrew to lonely places and prayed'. (eg:Luke5:16) This time it was to Lake Galilee, an important place in Jesus' life and ministry. It was on or near the lake that Jesus called his first disciples, stilled the storm, fed the five thousand and, after his resurrection, met again with his disciples. It was where he went to get away from it all.

We all need space. There will be times in all our lives when we need to be quiet and alone with God. It was on his own in the wilderness that Jesus dealt with his deepest temptations and many times sought a quiet place to be with God. He also sought solitude to be with his friends, both for their sake and his own. Like Jesus, we may find both situations difficult to organise because other people want our time and attention, sometimes demanding our emotional energy when we feel at our most stressed and most in need of help ourselves. Yet the more desperately we ourselves need time and space, the greater the gift when, instead, as Jesus did here, we give away our time and space to others. Jesus' solitude was short-lived, given up to respond to people's need for food.

In v35 Jesus declares that he 'is the bread of life.' The Jews at that time believed that the messianic age would see the return of the bread from heaven.(2 Baruch 29:8) Now, as God had fed the Israelites with manna in the wilderness many centuries before, by feeding the people in this desert place, Jesus is making a statement about who he is, a sign of what he has come to do. The feeding of the five thousand looks back to Moses and to the Passover. It also looks forward to the Last Supper, to the Church ever since that day, to the Communion service and our deeper hunger when we too are fed and nourished by Jesus in the wilderness of our lives and given hope for the coming of his kingdom.

Three aspects of the story may have surprised his followers then and challenge us now. The first is the surprise of what Jesus accepts - that he needs only the smallest of resources, uses only what is available and what is offered. However small our offering, it is more than enough for God to use and multiply. This is true of all our resources, including faith. Jesus told his disciples that they needed faith only the size of a mustard seed for great things to be achieved.

Jesus accepts what people around him are able to give. Philip is the practical one. With some quick mental arithmetic, he reckons that they would need the best part of a year's wages to give everyone even a snack. We are told specifically that Jesus wanted to stretch his faith. Andrew is the action man, but his faith is small. He finds a boy with enough food for one, but what is that? The boy gives what he has, two fish and five loaves of barley bread, the food of the poor. The rational, the practical and what is freely-given. God accepts what we can give to use us and involve us in his plans.

The next surprise is what Jesus rejects. In v15, John writes that 'Jesus knew they were about to come and seize him to make him king'. This could have been the turning point in his ministry, the opportunity for Jesus to seize command and even become a military messiah. The story in Mark tells us, that excluding women and children, the five thousand who give this story its name were men in groups of hundreds and groups of fifty. One commentator on this passage questions whether this might have been troop formation - a Zealot-led rally perhaps in response to John's death, trying to co-opt Jesus to restore the kingdom to Israel. Did 'Messiah' mean to them military power and violence? If so, they would go away disappointed. Jesus was king, but not of their kind. His kingdom would neither come at this time nor by means of force. In today's troubled world are there still people who are trying to manipulate Jesus into being the Saviour they envisage?

The surprise of what Jesus accepts and what Jesus rejects: and thirdly, the surprise and the challenge of what Jesus expects - that he expects no more from us than the most ordinary things we can offer him - our ordinary personalities, abilities, possessions and relationships. He does not ask us to be what we are not, only to give what we are as fully as we can. He does not want us to hold back because we feel we have so little to offer; because we see our own meagre resources as inadequate. They are the equivalent of barley bread and fish that he can transform. I see the story as an encouragement that God can transform our little and turn it into more than enough when we take the risk of trusting him, as he takes the risk of trusting us.

A final thought. Companion is a word that comes from the Latin cum panis, 'with bread'. Jesus is the Bread of Life, the bread we share in this service of Holy Communion, the bread which feeds and nourishes us. Jesus is the opportunity for us to become 'companions' with God.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay