Sign Weaving (John 6:1 - 21)

Biblical Storyteller:  After this . . .

Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . You know what drives me crazy?  Other than the Roman Empire, that is . . . What drives me crazy is how you chop up a perfectly good piece of literature these days.  When I wrote the thing—yes, it is I, the disciple that Jesus loved—when I wrote the thing, I wrote it to be read straight through, or at least in larger chunks than this.  And so I wouldn’t have to tell people what the this was that this comes after.  But today, with your awful habit of coming to church once a week whether you need it our not, and reading from something you call a lectionary, books and letters that were meant to make a coherent whole get chopped into bite-sized chunks like so much gefilte fish.  And I won’t even mention the scattering of my gospel, crum-like, throughout the reading cycle.  I mean, how disrespectful can you get?  If you just had to stick to a three-year cycle, why couldn’t Mark have been the odd man out?  Or better, Luke?  Those Gentiles wouldn't know the difference anyway . . .

*sigh*. So what comes before this episode is long teaching of Jesus in which he accuses his audience—Jewish religious authorities such as scribes and Pharisees and the like—of not loving God, which is a cold, bold thing to do to a bunch of holy men.  And let me tell you, they were not happy about it.  They were already chomping at the bit to silence him, if not one way, then the other . . . And at the end of his teaching, he brings Moses into the picture, claiming that he wrote about Jesus, but since none of his oh-so-august audience understood that, they must not believe in Moses, who is only the first and greatest of the prophets . . .

So, you see what I did here, don’t you?  I took the end of Jesus’ speech, where he mentions Moses, and followed it up with a story about bread in the wilderness . . . pretty neat, if I do say so myself . . . I’m drawing a comparison between this bread, and that mana in the wilderness episode, to be  sure you don’t miss the connection between Jesus of Nazareth and Moses of Egypt (and points North).  Go ahead, read . . .

Biblical Storyteller:  You mean "tell the story." 

 

After all that, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick.

Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.
 
When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.”
 
One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”
 
Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.
 
When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.
 
When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”  When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

That’s our Jesus . . . He’d do anything to avoid earthly power, up to and including going up on a mountain.  Which he does twice in quick succession.  Again like you-know-who, who went up to the mountain and came back down with some commandments, some rules for gentle living.  Which were ok for their time, and certainly do still apply—though I'm not sure courthouse walls are the best place to put ‘em—but those were different times, and besides.  Jesus said that he’d come not to abolish the law, exactly, but fulfill it.  And as far as I’m concerned, Jesus said it  and I believe it.  Maybe that’s why I’m the disciple he loved . . .

Anyway. Mountains are pretty special places.  Besides being closer to God, the air seems rarefied, more pure, somehow.  Maybe that’s why so many cool things happen on them. People are always getting epiphanies, revelations, messages from the Almighty of one sort or the other.  Abraham received a command to sacrifice his son, his only son, on a mountain and Moses got those ten commandments.   Elijah met God on a mountain, and the disciples saw Moses and him on one.  And so it's not really a big surprise or anything that Jesus spent a lot of time on a mountain.

But there’s a something I’m trying to point out here.  All those examples, the people receive something from God on the mountains . . . visions, revelations, commandments . . . Mountain tops are places where the Lord communicates with folks, where God gives them something.  And when Jesus goes up into mountains, he does too.  He gives a whole sermon on a mount . . . he communicates that vision of him replacing Moses and Elijah there . . . and now here he is, giving the people their daily bread on another mountain.  And what I want to point out is that if God gives stuff to God’s people in the high places, and Jesus does the same, then what does that say about him?

It’s like I told you before:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”  Jesus was—is—a divine being, we call him Son of God, because like a Son, he  inherited all his authority and power.  And so he could heal Jairus’ daughter and make the hemorrhaging woman clean.  He could rebuke the elements like recalcitrant children and bring them peace.  And he could bring grace—in the form of nutritious bread and fish—to hungry people.  And make no mistake about it, what Jesus gave on that mountain was grace, nothing but.  Everything we have is due to the grace of God, we get all things from the Lord.  So we can add one more authority, one more ability to our laundry list: he had authority over life and the law, over the chaos of creation, over the spirit world, and now he had the authority to confer the grace of the Lord.  Surely, he was Son of God most high.

You know, over the years I've been amused at all the stuff written about how Jesus did the signs—what you call miracles—that he did.  It's like in this day and age of rocket ships and hair dryers, there can’t be anything supernatural going on.  So all kinds of theories have been floated—everything from supernovae to swamp gas—to explain what he did as so-called natural phenomena.  And this feeding of the 5,000 is no exception: there are some who staunchly defend it as a true miracle, that he used supernatural powers to multiply the loaves and fish like, well, like Moses did with those locusts and frogs.  Others have tried to de-bunk it, saying that Jesus’ example softened the hearts of all those present, and they brought out all the food they’d squirreled away and the multitudes were fed.

Well, I was there, and I’m here to tell you . . . I have no idea how he did it.  I wrote it just as I saw it: “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.”  And that's it, that’s all I saw.  No puff of smoke as loaves appeared out of thin air, no rustling of cloaks as people grudgingly fished bread out of their underwear.  Jesus took the loaves and fish, handed them out, and there was enough.  Period.

And I kinda like the mystery of it all, you know?  Was it a miracle or guilty consciouses? Magic or smoke and mirrors?   It’s mysterious, as it should be, like God’s own self.  And the thing is . . . it doesn’t matter!  The answer to “did he or didn’t he” is he did, no matter how it came about.  Jesus distributed the loaves and fish and there was as much as they wanted.  And actually, there was more, twelve basket loads left over.  Like with the water and the wine, this grace was abundant, ebullient, overflowing.  Unlike that manna-in-the-wilderness trick pulled by Moses, where there was just enough.  Just sayin’ . . .

Biblical Storyteller:  When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.
 
The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified.

But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.

 

This really happened, you know . . . I know a lot of people say we were disoriented in the fog, that we were near the shore, and he was walking along the shore, but that’s not the way it happened . . . It was dark, the sea was rough, and suddenly, there he was: walking—no, almost gliding, across the sea toward us.  And I admit it: it scared the living daylight savings out of us, me included: we thought he was a spirit, the shade of some drowned fisherman, come to haul us down to a watery grave.

 
Ok, I know it sounds dramatic, but that’s the frame of mind we were all in, there in the wind and darkness.  We were all primed to believe the worst.  Then we heard those words: “It is I,” and we were no longer afraid.  And it's a funny thing about those three words—actually, two in the Greek in which I wrote it—at the time, the other disciples and I thought nothing of it, it was just Jesus identifying himself.  But since then, a lot has been made of its similarity to what God told Moses at the burning bush: “I am,” God’s self-disclosures, meant to say that God is all of being, or undefinable, or whichever theory you like.  And the thinking goes that this was Jesus’ disclosure of his divine nature, and that might have been so.  Surely, you can translate my Greek that way,  but that’s not the way I meant it.  Here we were, scared to death, shaking in our boat--hah!—and it was meant to reassure us:  “It’s me.  Don’t be afraid.”  That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Looking back on that episode, I think the real shame was how we didn’t recognize Jesus when he walked across the sea.  You might say we never did recognize him: not when he turned the water into wine nor when he fed those five-thousand souls.  We didn't know him when he raised up ol’ Lazarus or when he told that paralyzed guy to take up his mat and walk. We certainly didn’t know him when we walked the Palestinian roads, laughing at some stupid joke Peter told, like how many Phrygians does it take to stable a donkey.  In spite of all the hints, all the speeches, all the signs, we didn’t know who he was until it was too late.

He’s still around, you know . . . He’s still here, waiting to be recognized . . . Just like he told us, back in the day, he is in me, he is in you.  He’s in the mainstreamed beggars you pass on the street and the gang-bangers down in Over the Rhine.  He’s in bakers and bankers and depressed home-makers, in dope-smokers and over-paid CEOs.  And yet I sometimes think that in spite of all that, in spite of all the years to digest and cogitation on what Jesus clearly said, people are no better at seeing it today than we were back then.

That’s the good news, of course: that he is among us, in Spirit and in flesh . . . Just as he promised, his Holy Spirit is blowing in the world, and where it works we cannot predict, but we can see the results, all around us, if we but look.