Feeding the Hungry

Texts: 2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 3: 14-21; John 6:1-21

Today we start a series of five weeks looking at just one chapter of one gospel, this chapter 6 of St John's Gospel.  It is a remarkable chapter, and many scholars have argued that it is the core of this gospel.  One writer has gone so far as to say that if you were allowed only one chapter of Scripture to have with you on a desert island or in your prison cell, choose this one!  That's not because it's a very long chapter – though that might help – but because it contains the essence of the teaching of the Christian faith.  Spend long enough reading it, pondering it, meditating on it and praying with it and you will come to know all you need to know about God.

Well, that's quite a claim, and we will be considering it in the course of the next five weeks.  But one of the difficulties with this chapter is that we cannot do it justice in anything much less than a lifetime; and certainly not in 15 minutes each week for 5 weeks.  All that we can really do is to break small bits off, chew them well, and hope to digest something of the nourishment that they provide.  And to do this with the same question in mind that should guide us all the way through this second half of our liturgical year: what does this mean for our lives of faith in our everyday world today?

As I started to think about this sermon in the context of this week two things struck me, which may or may not be related.  First, today is Social Services Sunday, on which we are encouraged to think about our social agencies and their outreach to others on behalf of our church.  There are obvious connections there with the gospel story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (if not with the walking on the water!).  The second thing that came to my mind was the launch on Tuesday by the Business Round Table of a book looking at reforming the basis of our public agencies, and particularly those operating in the social field: education, health, social welfare, etc.

The chairman of the Business Round Table was interviewed on the radio about this study on Tuesday morning, and he said some very interesting things.  The thing that most caught my ear was this: he said that if we are to improve the quality of the social services in this country we need to do two things.  The first is that we need to get real about human nature.  He said the flaw in the system we have had up to now is that we have based it on an "angelic view of human nature".  We have assumed that all persons seeking help from our social services are highly ethical, socially minded people who will only seek and accept help when we are genuinely in need, and will stop taking it as soon as we can manage without it.  But real human nature is not like that, and so we have widespread abuse of our present systems that add to their cost and give rise to widespread resentment.

The second thing, closely related to this, is that we need to look at human motivation.  The strongest motivation, he says, is self-interest: generally speaking, we will do what we judge to be in our own best interests, particularly where we believe ourselves to be genuinely in need.  However, a weaker but nevertheless competing force of motivation is altruism: sometimes, in some situations, we will set aside our own best interests for the sake of others.  Most obviously, we are more inclined to do that for our own kith and kin, or within our own circle of friends; but we are also capable of doing it for complete strangers.  Witness the extraordinary acts of bravery we hear about from time to time when a passerby has put his or her own life on the line to rescue a stranger in mortal danger.

Now, given all that, the Business Round Table study suggests, we should be seeking to design our social services to tap into human self-interest by rewarding those who make an effort to look after themselves; and to harness human altruism to provide good care for others.  And so he argues that better social services are likely to be provided by charitable agencies and the churches, because we are motivated by altruism, a desire to serve others in their best interests.  That's a nice thought, I guess, and with that nice thought in mind, I want to turn to St John's gospel.

If we were to sum up the main thrust of this gospel, I think it would be something like this St John reveals Jesus as the gift of God to the people of God to meet our deepest needs and longings.  Time after time we have references to Jesus as having come from above, having been sent by the father, and, of course, returning to the Father when the time comes.  And what has he come for?  Not to provide free medical care for the sick, although he heals people; nor to provide a free lunch for the masses, although he feeds people.  He has come from above to bring us eternal life, the life of God, through which we become children of God, like Father like son and daughter.

And I think this passage this morning shows us that we are on the wrong track if we see Jesus as some sort of miracle provider of social services.  Firstly, as we found in the reading from St Mark last week, Jesus is constantly trying to get away from the crowds of needy people; they are constantly pursuing him and, so to speak, trapping him into dealing with them.  This passage starts with Jesus crossing "to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee", but being pursued by a great crowd of people "because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick".  Jesus then went up on a mountain with his disciples, but the crowd came towards him.  Jesus is not seeking them out, they are following him.

Then St John gives us an interesting piece of information.  He tells us that "The Jewish Passover Feast was near".  What's that got to do with anything?  Well, the Passover, of course, commemorates the exodus from Egypt, the journey through the wilderness, and the entry into the Promised Land.  So what follows in St John's account can be seen to be a re-enactment of all that history by Jesus.  The miraculous feeding calls to mind the supply of manna from heaven when the people were in the wilderness.  The people are shown thereby who Jesus is, God come among them, but sadly they see only the provision of bread to satisfy their physical hunger.  Everyone has enough, as they did in the wilderness, but now there's a big difference.  When the Israelites tried to store "surplus" manna, it turned rotten and couldn't be used.  There was no surplus for a future day, and there was no surplus to feed others.  But now, with the bread that Jesus supplies there is a plenitude left over.  Something more than social services meeting present need is at work here.

Then, according to St John, the crowds wanted to make him their King, and Jesus took off.  Why is that bit there, when it's not in the parallel passages in the other gospels?  Perhaps because St John has in mind the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.  Having done something rather similar to turning the stones into bread, Jesus finds himself offered political power and he declines it.  The people have misunderstood why he has come from above; they have misunderstood his essential mission to bring us eternal life.  They see only what they can get out of him.  They are blinded by self-interest: they do not recognise in him what a life of altruism looks like.

So what of our social agencies?  Do they see their role entirely in terms of meeting immediate physical needs, or is their true mission to model the altruistic life of Christ?  Do those who work there understand themselves to be servants of Christ seeking to bring eternal life to their clientele, or mere providers of food parcels for the hungry?  Do they recognise the need to draw aside and pray together, to spend time with Jesus, to re-charge their batteries with a fresh infusion of the Spirit, before they begin their work each day?  Or do they see themselves merely doing the job they are paid to do, just like any social agency that does not bear the name of Christ?

As we pray for them today let us do so in the hope that they, too, will be spending time over the next five weeks with this great chapter of St John's gospel and be nourished and strengthened by it for the work they have been called to do on our behalf.  Amen.