First Reading: 2 Kings 4:42-44
Elisha feeds a hundred people
4:42A man came from Baal-shalishah bringing food from the
first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain
in his sack. Elisha said, "Give it to the people and let them eat."
4:43But his servant said, "How can I set this before a
hundred people?" So he repeated, "Give it to the people and let them
eat, for thus says the LORD: They shall eat and have some left."
4:44He set it before them; they ate and had some left,
according to the word of the LORD.
Second Reading: John 6:1-21
Jesus feeds 5000
6:1After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of
Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias.
6:2A large crowd kept following him because they saw the
signs that he was doing for the sick.
6:3Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his
disciples.
6:4Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.
6:5When 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?"
6:6He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was
going to do.
6:7Philip answered him, "Two hundred denarii would not
buy enough bread for each of them to get a little."
6:8One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said
to him,
6:9"There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and
two fish. But what are they among so many people?"
6:10Jesus said, "Make the people sit down." Now
there was a great deal of grass in the place, so they sat down, about five
thousand in all.
6:11Then 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.
6:12When they were satisfied, he told his disciples,
"Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost."
6:13So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the
five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.
6:14When 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."
6:15When 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.
It was a cloudless night, and there was a full moon. Nestled
deep in the Thuringian Forest of southern Germany was the town of Ohrdruf. The
year was 1696, and the wooden houses were dappled in the leafy shadows of the
moonshine. And in one of the houses an 11-year-old orphan boy was out of bed.
The house belonged to one of the boy’s much older brothers. A separation of 14
years and 30 miles meant the older sibling had been nearly a stranger when the
boy first arrived. And now, disobeying his barely known adult brother, he was
creeping across the moonlit room. With practiced ease he slid a small hand
inside the locked and lattice-covered bookshelf by the window desk. He’d been explicitly
forbidden to do what he was about to do, and most nights it was too dark to be worth
attempting. He wasn’t, after all, even allowed his own candle. Yet tonight the
moon was full, and so the boy carefully slid a small hand through the lattice
and unlocked it. The forbidden book was in his hand now. He opened it to the
page where he’d stopped after his last moonlit theft and pulled out a quill pen
and his own piece of paper. And he began to copy, note for note, the music
within the book.
The book was an anthology of keyboard music—celebrated
compositions by Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and other famous composers of the day.
And the orphan boy was named Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach, who might be the greatest composer in the history of
Western music, never stopped being inquisitive about the inner workings of
other composers’ music. There’s a collection of keyboard concerti that he wrote
(BWV 972) as an adult that are called the Weimar transcriptions which are
reworkings of Vivaldi, Marcello, and Telemann.
But even as Bach “transcribed” these concerti, he altered
them. For some, he merely noted which organ stops he thought were best. For
others he added complex flourishes and ornaments, and for others he pared back
the written ornamentation. Some transcriptions were rewritten in a different
meter, or stayed in the same meter and became more rhythmically complex. Some
were reharmonized. For some he inserted counterpoint—complex imitation and
transformation of what had been a simple theme.
One of the most original voices in classical music became unique
and won enduring fame as an innovator by recapitulating the work of those who
went before him, and he held onto the practice from his boyhood nights in
Ohrdruf through his whole celebrated career.
Today’s gospel lesson is the story of the loaves and the
fishes from the gospel of John. But like so many of the sayings and actions of
Jesus, we find that on closer examination that it is not actually an original
thought. Or, rather, that the originality of Jesus’ action can only be
understood in the context of the Old Testament story which he was
recapitulating. Jesus, like Bach, was an artist. And like so many artists,
whether composers, painters, architects, cooks, or clowns, Jesus both learned
his art and made his mark on it by copying—recapitulating—what the prior
masters had done. And the art of Jesus was the art of the prophet.
Our Old Testament reading for today--the bit of manuscript
that Jesus is copying—is recognizable in the story of the loaves of the fishes.
The prophet Elisha takes an inadequate amount of barley loaves and distributes
it to a crowd of a hundred. At the end there are somehow leftovers in
abundance.
Jesus of Nazareth internalized this story of miraculous
prophetic power and used it not only as a means of feeding a hungry crowd, but
as a way of unfolding his carefully guarded identity to his people with an unmistakable
symbol. If an American politician makes a speech (about anything) in a black
stovepipe hat, we know that they are appropriating the idea of Lincoln. If a
prophet in Jesus’ world feeds a too-big crowd with too-little barley, they are
appropriating Elisha.
This story in the gospel of John is one seven carefully
presented portraits of Jesus replaying the prophetic acts of the Old Testament
in the section of John which is commonly called the “book of signs.” Each sign
is deliberately and explicitly presented—John says “this is a sign” each time--starting
with the wedding in Cana in John 2.
In the wedding at Cana Jesus’ mother approaches him because
the wedding guests have run out of wine. Despite initial reluctance, Jesus transforms
the water contained within six stone jars into a wine that the steward of the
house praises for its quality. “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana
of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”
A prophet who makes a public demonstration of power by
transforming water would have resonated immediately with a faithful Jewish
audience. This has happened before! This is the story of Moses, transforming
the waters of Egypt, yet in our own time, and it is the prophet Elisha who (after,
like Moses, parting the waters of a river to make passage several verses
earlier) miraculously transformed water at Jericho in 2 Kings 2 to make it
drinkable.
John introduces another “sign” in John 4, when Jesus heals
the son of a (gentile) royal official who is lying ill in Capernaum. The official
begs Jesus to come into his house (a loaded request, from a gentile to a Jew)
and Jesus heals the boy in honor of the man’s belief. It is just as Elisha in 2
Kings 4 heals the son of a Shunammite woman—a questionably kosher practice—in
recognition of the faith displayed by the boy’s mother.
Jesus heals again at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem in John 5,
and it looks at first to be an obvious recapitulation of the story of Naaman
from 2 Kings 5. Naaman is cured of leprosy by Elisha’s washing. Yet in the 2
Kings story there is an unsavory twist. When Elisha refuses a payment of
thanks from Naaman and Elisha’s servant offers to take the payment in secret
for his own gain, the servant is cursed with the leprosy that Naaman was cured
of.
This is not the only barbaric twist within the pages of 2
Kings—a group of 40 children is mauled by bears who come out of the mountain
because they had the effrontery to call Elisha “baldy-head” as he passed by.
Jesus does this sign of healing at the Sheep Gate pool but
doesn’t even require the water—and he does it in public defiance of the sabbath
practice of the day.
John then tells the story of the feeding of the five
thousand, our reading for today, which is a nuanced reimagining of Elisha’s
action from our Old Testament reading.
The walking on water, the healing of a man born blind, and
the raising of Lazarus continue to demonstrate Jesus’ extraordinary authority
as a prophet, but these stories specifically demonstrate that his prophetic
language and actions are those he has inherited from Moses, Elijah, and Elisha
who went before him.
Jesus is doing intensely meaning-laden public acts that confirm
his divine authority, and—in what must have been a thrilling revelation to
those who understood what the presence of a true prophet meant—his mandate to
speak Yahweh’s truth to corrupt power. Whether it was Moses to Pharaoh, Elijah
to Jezebel, or Elisha to Jehoram, a prophet of this kind meant that Israel’s
god was acting on Israel’s behalf.
So what was new about Jesus’ recapitulation? How is he
altering the source material from which he is working? In today’s reading Jesus
is acting in ways that are faithful to the original from which he is
copying—Elisha’s barley story—and are recognizably unique to Jesus.
There is, as is so characteristic of Jesus, a compassion for
the poor before anything else, and not even a practical compassion for the
poor. He doesn’t set out to split one person’s portion four ways. He splits one
person’s portion thousands of ways. And in seeking the good of the poor above
any other good, at improvident and impractical proportions, there is more
leftover for everyone than can be carried up in twelve baskets, according to
one of the other gospel writers.
Secondly, Jesus is both politically savvy and politically
innocent. “As shrewd as a serpent, and as innocent as a dove.’ He understands
that in view of this extraordinary sign the crowd is willing to make him king.
They say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” This man
is for us what Moses was to our ancestors—he can rebuke Rome and Herod in the
way that Moses rebuked Pharaoh. This is a reasonable expectation on the face of
the Old Testament readings alone. There isn’t much of political timidity in the
actions of Elijah and Elisha, or Moses.
But Jesus will not be made king, at least in this way. When
a crowd would force him to be a king according to the world’s terms for
kingship and kingdom, “he withdrew to a mountain by himself.” Submission,
suffering, and a cross would be the only conditions by which Jesus would
finally allow a crown to be placed on his head.
And finally, Jesus, as he did so often, transformed what
could have been a dire crisis or a moment to put himself into power and prestige
into a moment for celebration and communal gathering—he turned the story into a
feast. Whether breaking bread with his disciples in the upper room, turning
water to wine at Cana, or sharing a meal with a tax collector, Jesus took the
work of a prophet and made it look something extraordinarily like a party.
And that is the challenge for the church of God today. Jesus
of Nazareth read the Old Testament, in which bears maul children for mocking
baldness and the ungodly are smote, and recapitulated its stories in ways that
emphasized the poor and the sick out of all reasonable levels of attention,
that eschewed obvious opportunities for political power and influence, and that
transformed the moments he touched into moments of feasting.
Our vocation is to be “imitators of Christ.” And that means
re-reading not only Jesus, but those Old Testament stories as well, and then
not only re-reading but copying out (literally copying out by hand is a
wonderful exercise) and retelling and re-enacting those stories in ways that
celebrate the poor, disdain the allure of cheap power, and invoke joyful
feasting.
How can you re-enact the story of the Red Sea crossing? How
can you retell the coat of many colors? How can you feed five thousand on a
hillside with a few loaves and fishes? The story of this church is a work in
progress, a manuscript of people bringing cans and cereal boxes that climb up
our walls outside.
There isn’t a right way to come up with your own
recapitulation. The beauty of being the church together is that when we all
copy down say, Matthew 25, to pick a random example of a text that we’ve
committed to embodying, we will come up with a hundred slightly different
flavors of recapitulation. They might differ as wildly as the two drawings that
James and Owen did a few years ago of the story of Jesus walking on water as
part of their Sunday School here. (James drew a man walking on water and added some
of the sayings he’d been working on in Latin about Jesus being Dominus Deus and
Agnus Dei. Owen drew a picture of Jesus punching a shark.)
No matter how you do it, we all are called to be disciples. Disciples
are students—students who are willing to copy the work of their master, to
wrestle with its meaning, and whether by moonlight and manuscript or with
crayons and construction paper, to wrestle forth the meaning of “setting the
captive free, making plowshare out of sword, and feeding the hungry.” May the Father
of our Lord equip us for the task he has set for us and fill us with his Holy
Spirit as we set out to recapitulate to the world the work of his son, Jesus.
