Back to School

What follows today is my past week of looking more deeply into two stories:  the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on the water.  Some of you will say, “Really Adam:  you’ve been a pastor for almost 20 years and you’ve never studied these stories?  Well, yes, I have, but John’s version of these two accounts is different, and rather less popular than the same stories as they are told in the other Gospels, and this week I decided to explore why.  And what I discovered is this:  two stories that challenge us to deepen our wonder about the world.  Where has the world lost its wonder for you?  A relationship that feels stuck.  An addiction that will always defeat you.  A political situation that is unsolvable.  A social problem that is too broken to fix.  Today’s story seeks to expand our wonder about God, so we can renew our wonder about the world.

The more popular accounts of these two stories appear in Matthew and Mark.  Common to all accounts of the feeding of the 5000, the “problem” is that people are hungry.  Preachers often focus on what Jesus says to the disciples; in Matthew and Mark, Jesus says to the disciples:  “You give them something to eat”—as if the problem is theirs to solve.  Out of that, preachers offer messages about generous sharing, suggesting that the disciples went around and discovered that many in the crowd, had brought along some kind of food for the journey—the sharing of the five loaves and two fish inspired others to do likewise and soon there was enough for everyone.

Likewise, when it comes to the story of Jesus walking on the water; sermons often have a similar focus on rational explanation:  Perhaps there was something about the salt content of the water that made Jesus seem to float.  Perhaps Jesus knew where the sandbars were, but Peter, who sinks, did not.

These messages are fine, but also disappointing.  Why would we take two stories that mean to deal in genuine spiritual amazement, and try to reduce them to something we can understand?  I’m not alone in this frustration.  Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says:  “I cannot tell how many times I have heard these two stories of Jesus “explained” in “naturalistic” terms, as if they are not gospel wonders but are only commonsense performances.  They are not commonsense,” Brueggemann corrects, “but rather are summonses and invitations to another world.” (Brueggemann, Delivered into Covenant, 18).

So John’s version, which I discovered this week, is different.  Contrary to the more commonly preached stories in Matthew and Mark, which might tempt preachers to make these stories easy for you, John actively resists our efforts to explain the story away.  Let’s track through the story together and I’ll show you some things I noticed.

The basic elements of the story are the same—there’s a large gathering of people following Jesus, the problem of feeding them all presents itself; and a solution comes through the discovery of two fish and five loaves that will end up feeding them all.  This story is apparently important because its one of the few stories that appears in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—hardly any other stories of Jesus do.

Here’s a first difference:  In all four accounts, the story opens with a setting near the Sea of Galilee, but John adds an additional comment:  that it is also known as the Sea of Tiberias.  Why is this included?  Tiberias, you may know, was the Roman Emperor at the time—that renaming of a body of water was a way of reminding local people of their occupiers—it’s like the annoying renaming of sports and civic venues to remind us of what we’re supposed to be buying.  John includes this note becuase he’s going to make some kind of point about the Romans.

The next thing that happens in each version of the story is that Jesus has an exchange with the disciples about the problem of feeding all these people.  In John’s version, Jesus asks the disciple Philip, “Where will we buy bread for all these people?” and Philip replies that they don’t have enough money.  Then it is acknowledged that a boy has brought along five loaves and two fish and from these, the people will be fed.  This exchange with Philip is different than in the other versions in that it tells us plainly that Jesus knows what he intends to do about feeding the people—he’s not leaving it up the disciples; also, John’s account is very clear in stating that the five loaves and two fish are indeed the source of feeding all the people, quote, “…Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to all who were seated.”  These details prevent any rational explanation for what is taking place.  There’s no sharing of food that everyone already had in their backpacks—Jesus does something amazing.

My hunch is that the other accounts, from Matthew and Mark, became more popular in the past few centuries, because they leave enough ambiguity for a rational explanation—and we like rationality.  If you want to make the argument that the two fish and five loaves inspired other people to share, there’s room for that interpretation.  But not in John.  John is going to force us to talk about the power of God.

In the next part of the story, the reference to the Romans reappears and adds to John’s argument.  The other accounts each say that in between the feeding story and the walking on the water, Jesus goes off to pray.  John’s account is different.  John says that after the amazement of the feeding story, “…Jesus realized that [the people] were about to come and take him by force to make him king, [so] he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”  John makes the unique point, that Jesus is not another Tiberias—he will not be confused with one of their earthly kings.  He will not have God’s mission reduced to that kind of earthly glory—he is at work on something that is much, much bigger.

Finally, the walking on the water.  John keeps it simple.  John’s version is shorter than the others, with no distraction about the faith and doubt of Peter, or the idea that anyone else might walk on the water.   The waters are rough, the disciples are scared, Jesus is the one who comes, the waters are calmed, and the boat is guided to shore.  Jesus is the one who brings calm and joy.

The kneejerk reaction of most modern readers is to be uncomfortable with the miracle.  Of course we are.  But wouldn’t any genuine miracle have been just as shocking in the ancient world as it is today?  If John wanted the story to be easy to accept, I imagine he would have told it another way.  But he wants to tell a story different enough to shake us out of our usual assumptions about how the world works, and point us to the world as God sees it—a world of wonder.

John probably doesn’t care whether or not you can accept that Jesus worked a miracle, but he certainly wants us to take a break from our rationalizing and there’s a reason for that:  we need wonder in life.  I don’t care if you’re all in on believing that Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 people or walked on water, what does matter is that we have the ability to imagine a better world—a life that is more hopeful and joyful than our rationality often allows for—where things can be better than you suspected they might be if you’re willing to take a leap.

This is how we’re supposed to relate to God, and to one another.  Not by trying to reduce God’s stories to something we can understand and explain, but by allowing God’s stories to be expansive in our lives, increasing our sense of what is plausible and possible, deepening us spiritually and convincing us that our lives are more sacred than we imagined they were.  This is what it means to invite Jesus into the boat of our spiritual lives.

This kind of expansive relationship with God, allows us an expansive relationship with each other too.  When people are hungry, will we get stuck in Philip’s immediate concern about grocery prices at the nearest store, or will we ask big questions about why there is so much hunger out there, and what needs to change.  Mother Teresa’s worldwide movement of Missionaries for Charity began in 1946 with 13 members who decided to do something about masses of hungry people.  Habitat for Humanity began when Millard and Linda Fuller had a vision to make some small impact in the problem of affordable housing.  Acts of wonder such as those don’t come from people who look for the smallest and simplest explanations for God’s work in the world.  We can either be immobilized by the world’s challenges, because rationality tells us they are too big to change, or we can be drawn into wonder, and become people who create change.

So John tells a story about Jesus.  In this story he finds himself at the seaside with a huge crowd of people.  They are hungry and Jesus feeds them.  For hearers of the story it doesn’t really matter if their hunger was for bread or fish, or for something else in their lives, a story of healing and redemption, but he feeds them.  He refuses for God to be reduced to another Tiberias, another greedy tyrant who feeds them for a moment in exchange for their loyalty; his vision is much greater than that—so he breaks away from them before they can explain his message away.  He doesn’t want an official position in the government—he wants to go away and pray.  And by the time his disciples see him later, calming the storm on the seas, they realize that he wants to calm the storms in their lives and in their hearts, and they receive him into their boat.