Share your Lunch!

28 July 2024

Ephesians 3.14-21

John 6.1-21

When we were kids, I remember Mum sending me and my older sister off to school every morning with a packed lunchbox. Usually sandwiches, with whatever we had asked for by way of filling. In my case that usually meant my go-to fave - tomato sandwiches! What Mum didn’t know - or, maybe she did? - was that that was just the start of the lunchtime economy at Wilson Park Primary School. Once lunchboxes got open, and my mates Robbie Gamble and Michael Stanley and I saw what we had all got, that was when the trading began - Michael Stanley usually had Vegemite, and what's more, his mum let him have white bread! So we shared - and of course we all had enough.

Which of course brings us to the Gospel reading and the great miracle of the crowd that all gets enough to eat. The crowds, in the Gospel stories, are always ordinary people, people who have nothing - who paradoxically all through the Bible are the ones best able to experience the miracle of God’s generosity. In fact, Galilee in the first century was a subsistence economy, for all but the well-to-do one or two percent an economy of hand-to-mouth. Today’s story is a miracle of enoughness in the midst of a culture of scarcity. 

Following the lectionary, we have swapped over this Sunday from Mark’s Gospel to John - in fact, our Gospel reading last week from Mark chapter 6 neatly skipped over the feeding of the 5000 so that we could read it this week from the Fourth Gospel and hear, well, a theological reflection on what it means. The Fourth Gospel - written a generation later than St Mark’s original version teaches us that the miracle of enoughness is a sign that reveals who Jesus himself is - the bread of life come down from heaven.

 

But as we read this week about the miracle of the loaves and fishes - and in John’s Gospel we get the added detail that this was one little boy’s lunch - I can’t help feeling it’s all a bit unlikely. Because five small loaves and two fish simply aren’t going to feed a crowd, no matter how imaginative the caterers are. And it’s also not the way things work in today’s world. Which means that on a human level, it really matters how we read this story.  

As I sat down this week to prepare a sermon I reflected on the reality of hunger in today’s world. Did you know it’s actually a technical word, famine? For famine to be declared by the World Health Organisation it means that in a region, on average, more than a certain number of children and adults are dying of hunger every day. So it refers to food shortages that are acute, and a level of starvation that is affecting a population and causing people to die, and that is entrenched, not just temporary. And I thought firstly about Gaza where 2½ million people are living in famine. And Mayanmar where a million people, mostly Rohingya, are enduring famine. And South Sudan where famine is affecting 7½ million. And what connects all three of these tragic circumstances is that each of these famines have been created by deliberate human activity, by war. In total, famine is affecting 18 different regions in the world today, in 2024. In each of these places it doesn’t matter how much people pray – women, men and children dies because they don’t have enough to eat, or clean water to drink, or basic medicines or security from predatory militias. So on one level it actually seems a bit shocking to base our faith on stories like this in which Jesus casually multiplies a little boy’s lunch. That’s not the way it works, not in the first century and not in the 21st century. We dare not trivialize the brutal fact of hunger.

And so there’s the temptation to rationalise a bit, in preaching this story, and without denying the general miraculousness of the event to wonder whether perhaps the real miracle might not have been the opening of hearts and the opening of lunchboxes that – in the real, adult world – all too often stay shut when we know we’ve got a bit in reserve - a bit in the pantry or a bit in the bank that – when it comes down to it – we’d rather save for ourselves than give to someone who really should have been a bit better prepared. Who really shouldn't have been unemployed, or homeless, or mentally ill. 

Could the real miracle of the loaves and fish have been the renovation of the human heart? When you think about it, that’s certainly the sort of miracle we desperately need today. The sort of water into wine miracle in which the hardness of human hearts is dissolved. That’d be a miracle worth having. And so we get preachers’ versions of this story in which one little boy pulls out his lunchbox and hands it up the front to Jesus – and then one or two other kids “remember” they’ve got their lunchboxes as well, and even a couple of grown-ups shamefacedly pull out the sandwiches they’ve been saving for later. And it ripples through the crowd and turns out there is enough for everybody, after all. That’d be a good sort of miracle, and the very best thing about it is that it’s a miracle that we’re all invited to be a part of. And that’s an OK interpretation of the miracle of enoughness. Are we really thinking of the needs of others or mostly just of our own?

Well but there’s more to it than that. The Fourth Gospel, in particular, doesn’t let us get away with domesticating Jesus, or explaining or rationalising away what seems irrational or improbable. All the gospel writers, it must be said, seem perfectly happy to believe that the miracles of Jesus were just that – miracles – and perhaps we, reading these stories with minds formed by twenty first century science and scepticism – perhaps we just need to learn to rest with the ambiguity of the story. Certainly we need to notice that the miraculous feeding stories in the Gospels are packed full of symbolism and echoes of much older stories from the Hebrew scriptures, like the miracle of manna in the desert after the escape from Egypt, or perhaps the story of Elisha’s miraculous multiplication of barley loaves in the Book of Kings. Stories that for Jewish people listening to the Gospel in the first century would automatically get them asking – does Jesus mean the same thing for us as the ancient stories of our faith? – that we are a people Yahweh can’t forget, that Yahweh provides for and loves? And for we 21st century people, they point us to something deeper that’s going on. The Fourth Gospel calls them ‘signs’, meaning that each of Jesus’ miracles has a sort of deep meaning that points us to who Jesus is. So, for example, straight after the story of the loaves and fish when Jesus comes walking across the pitch-black surface of the Sea of Galilee at night, we’re not just meant to be impressed, we’re meant to be reminded of the One who hovers over the heaving waters at the dawn of Creation, the One who holds back the death-dealing waters of the Red Sea. In the one who reassures his terrified disciples with the words, ‘It is I’ we see the presence of the One who speaks out of the burning bush to tell Moses his personal name: ‘I AM’.

As we keep reading through chapter six over the next couple of weeks, the Fourth Gospel is going to keep talking about bread, with Jesus telling us, ‘I am the bread of life’; and so we begin to get the point that the bread that Jesus miraculously provides in today’s story is also a sign that stands for the true bread of Jesus’ own body – the bread that we break and share in the miracle of the Eucharist. Not only is the miracle something impossible in the ordinary world that becomes possible because of who Jesus is, it also shows us the deep meaning of Jesus as the one who embodies the character of God – the character of being given in love – the character of being broken and poured out as the gift of life itself.

The Fourth Gospel takes stories from the remembered tradition about Jesus and uses them in ways that help us understand what Jesus means. It uses stories about everyday necessities like bread and fish, water and wine and oil and light as a way of repeating, over and over again, the basic claim that it’s in Jesus that we can find our deepest needs. That God’s gracious provision for our deepest needs comes to its fullest expression in Jesus.

Children, next time you’re out in the desert with a whole lot of hungry people, share your lunch. Your soggy tomato and your dried-up Vegemite sandwiches will taste all the better for breaking them in half and sharing them with the hungry person sitting next to you. That’s an OK lesson to get from all this. You want to be God’s people, learn to be like the one who tells us he is bread for breaking and sharing. That’s how you find out who God is. That’s how you find out who you are.  

Just be kind.

Amen