John 6:1-21
Proper
12/ Ordinary time 17, Year B
It’s often overlooked that
three of the most important interests in Jesus’ ministry were education, health
care and food security.[1]
And the last of these three is never seen more clearly than in the many feeding
stories of the Gospels.
The first thing
that is important to know about the feeding stories is how significant they
were in the Gospels. The feeding is the only miracle that is shared in all four
Gospels, and two of them may have told the story twice. Both John and Mark have
two feeding stories each. 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 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 with little interesting
messages to us.
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 do that? Possibly because 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 in 20 c.e. at the edge of the Sea of Galilee (and recall that Jesus’
ministry was probably somewhere 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.
Additionally,
between the time of its founding and the time 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 a generation tiny Israel grew to have three major cities (these two
plus Jerusalem), two of which were populated mainly by outsiders, and all demanding
resources from the surrounding farms and villages. Their growth put difficult demands
on the food supply in the region and contributed to an upswing in hunger around
them. This trend was in turn exacerbated by the 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 they
grew the more they had to pay in tribute to the powerful urban centers. Farmers
could lower the amount of tax they paid by not growing as many crops, but that
would also lower the amount of food they had for their own personal
consumption. So, they lost either way. Biblical scholar Obery Hendricks,
describes the economic life of first century farmer 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.[2]
When food
production for the average resident of Galilee went down, it did two things.
First it simply lowered the amount of fruits, vegetables, and grains that could
be consumed 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 and the food that was grown 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, under the prevailing belief that they
could make enough in export sales to the north to eventually pay them back. 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, which
drove their prices downward. Second--partly because of the recession and partly
because of the US Federal Reserve tightening credit--the interest on their
loans went up. In other words, while the costs for their loans was going up, their
income with which to pay on them was going down. Poor countries fell into an economic
abyss from which they have still not quite recovered. To keep them paying on
their loans, the wealthy and powerful countries, and the multilateral banks
that they control (like the World Bank and the IMF), forced them to make draconian,
belt tightening, cuts in things like health care, education and price supports
for the poor that many people of faith and conscience today believe 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 starvation. 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.
Today this same
philosophy—that cutting services to pay off loans will somehow result in
growth—is being imposed on state and local governments in the US and the poorer
countries of southern Europe. The belief is that if you can just fire enough
people and cut enough salaries, pensions and benefits, then it will
miraculously lift the economy and promote business and trade. In the long, long
term, perhaps, but in the short run the reverse happens. In the Third World
cuts, it took over twenty years of brutal human suffering before the economies
began to claw their way back. When people’s incomes and salaries are cut, they
begin paying less in income taxes and sales taxes and the government’s deficit goes
up, resulting in calls for more and more rounds of cuts. It was and is a
downward spiral that almost always ends badly. Like in the poor countries
stricken by this policy in the eighties and nineties, the massive state firings
has been the biggest drag on our economy and the major force keeping us on the
verge of recession. And in Europe the horrific cuts in social services and
livelihoods has driven countries like Greece into such poverty that it will
take generations before they ever claw their ways back.[3]
Though our contemporary
examples are different, they are in many ways similar to the demands imposed on
small farmers in ancient Israel by Herod Antipas and large land owners.
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.[4]
Some in fact moved back onto their own farms as indebted workers, but many 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 had taken place
through him.
Another seemingly
innocuous comment from John is that all of this took place near the Passover.
Why did he think that was important to mention here? Part of it was possibly 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 Moses was
also the one who defied government powers (Pharaoh) and liberated an entire nation
of slaves. Passover is the festival that commemorates that liberation, making
it the most politically charged event of the year. And John wanted make sure
that we realized that.
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)”[5]
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.
Here is where
the story gets very interesting (I bet you thought it was interesting already).
When the crowd comes up the hill toward Jesus and his disciples, 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 did it anyway to see what Philip would say (v. 6). And Philip comes up
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 followed Jesus--had that kind of
money laying around. Even if Judas had not been skimming 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 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). 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 coins in his day, and the
rapid escalation in prices.[6]
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. Philip’s answer makes it clear that he doesn’t think
so. He thinks that they can’t buy that much bread, no matter where the bakery is.
Before Jesus
could say anything, Andrew, Peter’s brother—also sounding exasperated and
futile—says, “Well, we have a boy here who has some fish and bread.” It’s not
altogether 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
)[7]
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 because
only the very poor and the very desperate would lower themselves to taste this
tasteless bread. Translated into more clear English, he’s saying something
like, “We’ve got bubkes here, zilch. Nothing.
Our resources are tiny. The economy has gone to Hades, and just to illustrate
that for you, look at what we got to make a meal out of: a little kid with a
couple of fish and some really, really, smelly barley, which taste awful and
I’m not going there.”
Then Jesus does
an odd thing. 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 gazillion preachers 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 couldn’t
have been trying to do some symbolism to tens of thousands of people of an
event that had not even happened yet. Almost every Bible scholar on the planet
(with the possible exception of my cat, but her credentials are a little weak)
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.
So, now what was Jesus thinking? If the account can
be accepted, he was looking out onto a sea of faces, all poor and almost all
hungry. They represented the wide swath of the 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
can be accepted, but by any accounting it was an incredible number of people.
Look again at
the four acts described before the actual feeding itself: he “took,” “gave
thanks,”[8]
“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 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 rich people take 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, and welcomes everyone to the table.[9] What he's telling them is that all of you here are at a banquet. All of you are very important, and something very special is about to happen.
Jesus is doing
two things. First he is embodying the majestic vision of the “messianic banquet”
of the Hebrew prophets, who were in turn envisioning the Jubilee, when all of
God’s creation that has been broken and disfigured by human corruption and
greed, would be returned back to the order of harmony and justice that God had
originally intended. The prophets believed that in the days of God’s final
dispensation, a celebration of oneness and equality would break out all over
the land, and it would be symbolized by the one thing that most common 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. This expansive, sharing,
welcoming message 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 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 those sinners (which, we should remember, included
people who were sick, contagious, old, non-Jews, immigrants, criminals, slaves,
and women). They were invited to enter in and become a part of the true end for
humanity, the kingdom (or better “realm”) of God. An important link to the Last
Supper is that in this, not only was he pointing backward to this feeding story, but he was also pointing forward to the coming eschatological
banquet. He would say at the supper, “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
not just symbolically being the new
realm of God embodied on earth, he is also modeling
a way to create it. He told his followers, “The Kingdom of God is within you,”
and the meal on a mountain is what it looks like. Notice how he does that. 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 framing this
is that what happened in the feeding stories was much less “magical” than they
sound in the preaching of most sermons, but far more “miraculous.”
It’s very likely
that what happened was something like this: Jesus took the little boy and he
set him in front of the crowd and said, “Hey, hey, all of you. Listen up. Look
up here, 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 Realm of God that I’ve been talking to you so much
about. I’m going to put this little kid out in front here—with his frankly pretty
dismal 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. 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 when it comes 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 when the disciples gathered up the scraps they found twelve baskets full of leftovers and snacks.
Goodness. Now that would be
a miracle!
[1] The list is probably
slightly exaggerated, but close enough to make the point.
[2] Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the
True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted
(Doubleday, 2006) p.
[3] It would take far too much
space to develop this theme, but it is essentially true that until relatively
recently (the Reagan/Thatcher administrations), it was considered basic “Econ
101” that you spend money during a recession because the economy needs more
money and you paid it back during boom times because then the economy has more money. The idea of cutting spending
when the economy is in recession and desperately needs money to survive is a
relatively new notion and somewhat like bleeding a hemophiliac and expecting it
to make him get well.
[4] See Amy Jill-Levine,
“Visions of Kingdoms” The Oxford History
of the Biblical World, Ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press:
1998), p. 364.
[5] “Jesus Doesn’t Use IVR!”, Homiletics, vol. 18, no. 4, July 2006,
pp. 41-46.
[6] The Denarius (from the Latin dēnī, “containing ten”) was a silver
coin originally minted as the value of ten asses. However, during the reign of
Caesar Augustus (63 bce –14 ce), it had steadily declined in value
to where, by the time of the ministry of Jesus, it had shrunk to nearly half
its original size and purchasing value in asses. Unsurprisingly, in Israel all
of the people forced to work on the massive government jobs were paid the same
salaries decade after decade, even as the value of the currency was falling.
Other references to denarii in the Gospels: Matthew 20:1-2; John 6:5-7; John
6:5-7; Luke 10:33-35; and John 12:4-6. http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear/s3272.html.
[7] In fact, the Louw/Nida Greek-English Lexicon translates it as a
fish “Tidbit.”
[8] Actually the synoptics say
“blessed” (eulogēsen) and John’s Gospel says “gave thanks” (eucharistēsas), but the difference is not great enough for our purposes here to
quibble.
[9] In the words of John Dominic
Crossan, “Long before he was the ‘host,’ he was the hostess.” The Historical Jesus: The Life of a
Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 404.
