A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on July 28, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: John 6: 1-14
One of the best ways to get to know a new city is to participate in a treasure hunt. When I say, ‘treasure hunt,’ I’m not thinking of a bunch of pirates under Squire Trelawny setting off from the west country with shady characters like Blind Pew and scary wooden-legged eye-patch rascals like Long John Silver. Nor am I invoking long bank holiday afternoons spent on the Yorkshire Moors with a metal detector. I’m thinking of a game by which teams are given a clue for a location somewhere in the city where they can find the answer to a question, which in turn provides a clue to find the answer to the next question in a new location. In finding the locations and the answers the teams meanwhile get to know the city and each other.
I want you to think of John’s gospel as a treasure hunt. And I’d like today to look at the story of the feeding of the 5000 as a series of clues and questions that take us to the heart of the gospel. In fact, I suggest this story raises and addresses perhaps the four overarching questions we each have as we read the gospels. The story starts in an apparently simple but actually complex location. It says, ‘Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias.’ This simple sentence is giving us a lot of clues. It says there are two names for the location: a Jewish name, Galilee, and a Roman name, Tiberias, the name of the Emperor. So this is contested territory; and politics is at the heart of the story from the outset. We’re used to the term ‘Sea of Galilee’; but no one outside the New Testament ever calls it anything other than a lake. So invoking the name ‘sea’ locates the story theologically: the sea in the Bible fundamentally refers to the Red Sea, across which Moses the children of Israel to freedom. And in case we’re wavering about the reference to Moses, quickly we get a mountain, which removes any doubt, because a mountain in the Bible is definitively where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God after crossing the Red Sea. And the story’s set at Passover, the moment Moses led the people out of Egypt.
So here’s the location in relation to Rome and to Israel. And what’s the question? The first question is, ‘Who is Jesus?’ Again these verses give us the answer: Jesus is the new Moses who leads Israel across a new sea to a new mountain where it receives a new way of living that enables it to live beyond Roman occupation and fulfil all the hopes of the first Passover. But like all good treasure hunts, the answer to the first question just yields another question. Because the condition of the 5000 people in front of Jesus aptly resembles the situation of Israel under Roman occupation. These people are hungry. They’re without any visible means of support. They’re a long way from the Promised Land of milk and honey. We’ve discovered who Jesus is. The second question is now, ‘What is Jesus going to do?’
It turns out Jesus is going to make us wait for the answer to this second question. He’s not going to answer it until we realise it can’t be disentangled from the third question. The third question is, ‘What are we going to do?’ The heart of this story is working out the answers to these two questions and how those answers are inextricable from each other. What the structure of the story is telling us is that we can’t have the gospel without our response; or, in more direct terms, we can’t have Jesus without the church. So the major part of the treasure hunt is to see how Jesus asks the disciples to answer question three as he’s providing the answer to question two.
Here’s how it goes. See how Philip and Andrew represent two contrasting answers to the question of what we are to do. Philip despairs: there’s nowhere to find food and, even if there were, it would cost more than half a year’s wages. Andrew acts: quick as a flash he’s found a boy with loaves and fishes. Out of this contrast we find the beginnings of an answer to what we are to do: we’re to start with what we have, rather than lament what we lack; and we’re to bring what we have to Jesus. (Note that the community’s respurces are located in an unexpected, easily overlooked place: a child.) Then next the disciples take the food to the seated people. They must have been astonished by the fact there kept being enough food, but we’re not told about their feelings. We start with what the people have, and we go on to act on what Jesus has done. And then Jesus says, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ And so we find the rest of the answer to what disciples are to do: we’re to ensure every last crumb, every tiny fragment, is treasured and put to use.
Which takes us back to the second question. We’ve seen what we are to do: find, bring, share, gather. Find what we have, bring it to Jesus, share the results with the people, and gather up the fragments so nothing be lost. Now, what is Jesus going to do? Jesus turns scarcity into abundance. He turns five loaves and two fishes into a meal for 5000 people and twelve baskets left over. For centuries people have speculated about how such a miracle can come about and whether there could be a plausible explanation for what actually happened. But that’s not a question the story’s interested in. The questions the story’s interested in are, what does Jesus do, and what do we do. And the answers are these. Jesus takes Israel, represented by the five books of the Torah in the five loaves of bread, and takes its deep hunger, and turns it into food enough and plenty besides to feed the Gentiles too. Thus he fulfils the promise of the twelve tribes of Israel, represented by the twelve baskets left over, and he does so by being both fully human and fully divine, represented by the two fish (bearing in mind that the fish was the early symbol of Jesus because the Greek letters of the word ichthus stand for Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour). Meanwhile our job is to do what only we can do, given Jesus does what only he can do.
And that just leaves question four, which is this: ‘What happens in the end?’ We’ve seen how this micro-story of everything ends. With twelve baskets left over. Which tells us a lot of things. It tells us the wonder of Jesus is far more than we need. It tells us, through the number twelve, that there will always be a place for Israel in this story. It tells us, through the superabundance, that there’s now plenty of room for the Gentiles in this story too. It tells us that Jesus’ profound concern is for the fragments, for the broken, discarded, lost and forgotten parts of the story. It tells us that our ultimate job is to seek and find and bring back those fragments so they may be part of the story too. And it tells us that ultimately, at the very end of the story, nothing is wasted. The wonder of Jesus is way too much for our imagination and capacity, but even so nothing will be wasted: all will be gathered, and not a fragment will be lost.
So that’s the result of our treasure hunt. And after you’ve enjoyed a good treasure hunt with all the clues and locations and questions, you sit down and reflect on what you’ve discovered. Leaving aside the subtle symbols of words and numbers, our treasure hunt is telling us one thing above all: to recognise, accept and rejoice in the fact that our role in this story and Jesus’ role are different. We find, bring, distribute and gather up. Jesus does the miracle. If you reflect on your role in God’s realm, your calling as God’s missionary, I’m guessing you can identify with at least one of these four roles – find, bring, distribute and gather – maybe more. But how liberating it is to realise it’s not our job to do the miracle. How much burnout, hurt, failure, depression, despair comes from assuming it’s our job to do the miracle? The story’s saying, let Jesus do that part, in his own time, in his own way. Just concentrate on doing our job – to find, bring, distribute and gather – and be glad that we have a part in this story. There’s no church without Jesus: he’s the one who does the miracle. And there’s no Jesus without the church: we’re the ones whose job it is to find, bring, distribute and gather up.
But there’s one more clue in this treasure hunt we haven’t yet spoken about. Notice how, as he does the miracle, Jesus takes, gives thanks, and shares. Just as, in a few moments’ time, the same actions will take place among us. See how much of this story is replicated as we are sharing the Eucharist right now. We come away together across the sea as it were and gather in this place together. We identify who Jesus is, in readings and sermon. We find bread and wine, and bring it out of the crowd. Then, at the altar, we recall how Jesus took, gave thanks, broke and shared, recognising in these acts how he turns the scarcity of our lives, circumscribed by guilt and mortality, into the abundance of eternal life in companionship and joy. Then it’s back to us to distribute his glory to all, and finally to gather every last fragment. So every Eucharist is living this story of miraculous feeding, and imprinting on our souls the answer to the four questions of who Jesus is, what he does, what we do and what happens in the end – so deeply and so resonantly that those answers become our story and our song, and we play our role daily in finding, bringing, distributing and gathering up while Jesus does the miracle of turning scarcity into abundance.
Because in the end the real treasure hunt is the one in which we leave clues and questions, and God in Christ comes to find us, seeking us all over the city, transforming our earthly scarcity into heavenly abundance, filling our souls and bodies, and offering us more than enough forever.
