7/28 GPC Sermon

 

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.