Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

Tenth Sunday after Trinity: Exodus 16.2-4, 9-15 and John 6.24-35

Our Gospel reading this Sunday (John 6.24-35) gives us the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand. The context is this. Galilee was a hotbed of rebellion against Roman rule. There had been an uprising in 6 CE sparked by a tax census (this is the census that gets mentioned in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus, albeit badly handled in translation: Luke’s point isn’t that this was the census that displaced Joseph and Mary, but that this was the most famous—or, notorious—census; and it was the most famous because of the rebellion it sparked). There will be another uprising in 46 CE and yet another in 66 CE, but at this point, in the early 30s, a crowd of men are chasing Jesus around the Galilean countryside with the intent of making him the focal point of an uprising. There are five thousand of them, plus women and children; but the unnumbered women and children aren’t an afterthought: the point is this, that five thousand men is roughly the size of a Roman army legion. They are coming to Jesus and saying, ‘Look, we have a legion at your disposal: lead us!’ [1] Jesus responds by instructing them to organise themselves into groups of between 50 and 100—that is, the size of a ‘century’ of soldiers led by a centurion (‘At last! Now we are getting somewhere!’)—but then, instead of handing out weapons, he hands out bread and fish.

When it becomes clear that the crowd still intends to make him their king by force, Jesus slips away. They don’t realise until the next day, when eventually—and confused as to how this had happened—they find him once more on the other side of the lake. ‘How did you get here?’ they ask.

And Jesus engages them in a wide-ranging conversation. A conversation about what it is they truly desire, and how deep that longing goes. A conversation about work, and how or even whether God can be encountered in everyday life or revealed through our everyday actions. A conversation about wisdom, someone in the crowd quoting from the Wisdom of Solomon (a Jewish text translated into Greek in Egypt; Wisdom chapter 16, which speaks of divine judgement and mercy, of God’s word as nourishment and healing, and of God leading mortals down to the gates of Hades and back again).

And in this conversation, Jesus calls them—and us—to believe in him: that is, to be with Jesus, in order to become like Jesus, and do the things that Jesus did (this is what distinguishes disciples from the crowds) [2].

In that conversation, Jesus claims to be the bread—the sustenance—of God that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’

Many in the crowd will decide that this is not what they are looking for, will go back to their homes and wait for someone else to come along. But some will take Jesus at his word, as God’s daily provision for their deepest desires, to live in harmony with God, with themselves, and with their fellow human beings.

Jo and I have just spent a week camping with some fourteen thousand other people—including two thousand children and another two thousand teenagers—at a festival of worship and hearing from God. And we have heard testimony from around the country of how hungry the younger generations—children, youth and young adults—are for God. 95% of them aren’t in our churches. Their hunger is, in part, because they are starving, because they haven’t been fed, spiritually, by the generation that raised them. But we have heard, and even seen with our own eyes, stories of children and teenagers asking their parents to bring them to church (that is to say, bringing their parents with them). We have heard stories of young adults having dreams about Jesus and turning up at churches saying, ‘Tell me about this Jesus I have been dreaming about!’ At St Nic’s we have welcomed children and prepared them to receive communion, because they are hungry for Jesus, who feeds us with his very self in word and in sacrament. And my expectation is that we will see more of this, over the months to come; and that we need to be ready.

This weekend we have seen violence on the streets of our city. People without hope, whose fear is exploited, who feel that they need to project a show of strength to hide how scared they are. People offered scapegoats and a society to rail against. These people, many though not all of them young, are hungry too. We can turn their anger back against them and perpetuate division; or we can love them and pray for them, pray that they might meet Jesus, and that we might have opportunity to introduce him to them.

And if you are hungry for the bread of life today, come, take, eat. There is more than enough to share.

 

[1] With thanks to Bishop Ruth Bushyager for highlighting this, in her bible readings on Mark’s Gospel, at the New Wine 2024 festival.

[2] John Mark Comer writes about this well in ‘Practicing the Way’ (SPCK 2024).