An exegesis of the feeding of the five thousand in John's Gospel

Sermon delivered July 29, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.

You may have noticed that we’ve made a little shift this morning in our Gospel reading. For the past seven weeks, we’ve been hearing texts from the Gospel of Mark, but today we switch to the Gospel of John. For the next five weeks, we will read sequentially through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John. (If you want a preview of coming attractions, you might go home and read through all of John 6, which really is one continuous unit, even though we’ll only read short excerpts from it each week in the lectionary.)

So why the switch to John? Well, we’re starting with the story of the feeding of the five thousand today, which is where we had arrived in Mark’s Gospel last week, but the lectionary skipped over that story in Mark and gave it to us this week in John. I suspect the framers of the lectionary preferred John’s version because the story is more robust theologically in John. The feeding of the five thousand and the discourse that follows it about Jesus as the bread of life are at the heart of the message of John’s Gospel.

So what is that message? In order to understand what the author of the Gospel of John is trying to tell us about Jesus, we need to try to hear the story from the perspective of the first-century Jewish Christians who preserved it.

To our modern Western ears, the most striking aspect of this story is probably the “supernatural” element in it, the physical impossibility of five thousand men eating their fill from only five loaves of bread and two fish. I have often heard Christians say that the fact that Jesus performed miracles like the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water distinguishes him from other religious figures and is “proof” that he was God and not just a wise teacher or prophet.

The problem with this argument is that the early Jewish Christian communities who wrote and preserved this story would not have viewed the performance of miracles as evidence that someone was divine. Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and other prophets of the Hebrew tradition all are said to have done things that we modern Westerners would consider “miracles,” and yet Jewish tradition never claimed that they were God. Favored by God and acting on God’s behalf, yes, but not God himself in the flesh, as later Christian tradition came to claim about Jesus.

Miracle stories were common in Jesus’s time about all sorts of religious figures, and miracle stories as such would not have set Jesus apart as any more special than the next holy man. What set him apart was the fact that his followers believed he was the Messiah, the prophet chosen by God to redeem and restore the kingdom of Israel. That is what the author of John’s Gospel is telling us in this story, not that “Jesus must be God because he can break the laws of physics.”

What would have been most striking to the first tellers and hearers of this story would not have been its supernatural elements, but the theological claims it made about Jesus. First-century Jewish Christian hearers of this story would immediately recognize echoes of other sacred stories they knew well: the story of God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, the bread from heaven; or the story of the widow who shared her last handful of meal and oil with the prophet Elijah and it miraculously lasted until the end of the drought (1 Kings 17:1-16); or the story of the prophet Elisha instructing a servant to share twenty barley loaves and some fresh ears of grain with one hundred men. Though the servant asks, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” somehow they all eat and are filled and yet have some left over (2 Kings 4:42-44).

At the same time as they recognized the similarities to those stories, the first hearers of this story also would have been struck by how much greater the scale was in this story: though Elisha fed one hundred men with twenty barley loaves, Jesus fed five thousand men with only five barley loaves. They would have understood immediately the author’s intent: to convince the hearer that Jesus was even greater than the most highly revered miracle workers and prophets in Israel’s history.

The first hearers of this story also would have noted its setting, near the time of the Jewish religious festival of Passover. Although this story appears in all four Gospels, John is the only one that mentions that detail. For the author of the Gospel of John, Passover is extremely important to the theological claim he is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb.

Passover was the season of the year when messianic expectation and hope was the strongest: it was believed that the Messiah would come during Passover. Jesus’s actions of blessing the bread, breaking it and then distributing it echo the actions of the host at a Passover meal, and gathering up the leftover fragments was also common at the end of a Passover meal. By telling us that Jesus served as host of a miraculous Passover-like meal, the author of John’s Gospel is calling to mind a banquet of abundance like the messianic banquet foretold by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 25:6), thus depicting Jesus as the Messiah. The reaction of the crowd acknowledges this claim: “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14), they say after participating in this meal. But John shows us right away that Jesus will not be the kind of Messiah the people were expecting: a king who would overthrow the Roman political powers who were occupying the land of Israel at that time. Instead, Jesus withdraws to the mountain by himself when he realizes that the people want to make him king (John 6:15). As he will say to Pilate before his execution, Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

The claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb will not be made fully until the end of John’s Gospel, with Jesus’s death, but there are allusions to it in the second half of chapter 6, when Jesus begins talking about himself as the bread of life, but we’ll look at that more carefully in a few weeks.

Finally, I believe that in addition to making theological claims about Jesus’s identity, stories about Jesus’s miracles also offer us a message about how we are to live our lives in faith. The story of the feeding of the five thousand invites us to trust in God’s ability to, as the saying goes, “Make a way where there is no way,” and also calls us to move beyond responding to immediate needs to creating spaces for community.

Since the Gospels do not tell us that the crowds that Jesus fed were starving or unable to buy their own food, it seems that the message in this story is not as simple as “feed people when they are hungry or in need,” because we don’t know for sure that these people were hungry or in need. That fact, to me, makes it all the more significant that Jesus chooses to feed them all, and together. In doing so, Jesus broke down barriers in a culture where, under normal circumstances, your place in society determined who you were allowed to eat with. Some of the other versions of this story tell us that disciples assume that it would be reasonable to send the people back to town to take care of their own needs, but Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.

The deeper miracle in the feeding of the five thousand, I would suggest, was not the fact that people were fed, but that they ate together, and in doing so were offered a living glimpse of the kingdom of God: a community where society’s divisions are broken down and God’s love is more than enough to meet everyone’s needs. So the message for us, I think, is that as those who seek to follow Christ, we are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to offer this world a similar glimpse of that kingdom where faith in God’s abundance frees us for a loving embrace of all.