John 6.1-15
Just a day after Passover—
On Easter Sunday 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. languished in a Birmingham jail cell under the charge of parading without a permit, a crime deemed serious enough for solitary confinement. With their leader imprisoned, the movement refused to relent. Civil rights activists planned a march from New Pilgrim Baptist Church to the Birmingham city jail on Easter afternoon. Over five thousand followed the LORD from New Pilgrim to the city jail on that Easter Sunday.
As Andrew Young recalls in his book An Easy Burden: “By the time church ended some five thousand people had gathered dressed in their best Sunday clothes.” The marchers set out in a festive mood, confident they were not marching but following. Suddenly they saw police, fire engines, and firemen with hoses in front of them, blocking their path. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor bellowed through a loudspeaker, “Turn this group around!”
Theophilus, the addressee of Luke’s Gospel, means “Friend of God.”
The president of the Alabama Democratic Party, Bull Connor was a staunch white supremacist. Due to his unabashed brutality and tolerance for bombings, by Passover 1964 white Alabamians had voted Connor out of office. But he refused to step down, citing election fraud.
“Turn this group around!” Bull Connor hissed at the five thousand. The marchers stopped in their tracks, standing as before an undivided sea. The crowd waited for instructions from their leaders.
As Andrew Young writes:
“Wyatt Walker and I were leading the march. I can’t say we knew what to do. I know I didn’t want to turn the march around. I asked the people to get down on their knees and offer a prayer. Suddenly Rev. Charles Billups, one of the most faithful and fearless leaders of the old Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, jumped up and hollered, “The Lord is with this movement! Off your knees! We’re going on!” Stunned at first, Bull Connor yelled, “Stop ’em, stop ’em!” But none of the police moved a muscle. Even the police dogs that had been growling and straining at their leashes were now perfectly calm. I saw one fireman, tears in his eyes, just let the hose drop limp at his feet. Our people marched right between the red fire trucks, singing, “I want Jesus to walk with me.” Bull Connor’s policemen had refused to arrest us, his firemen had refused to hose us, and his dogs had refused to bite us.
It was quite a moment to witness.
I’ll never forget one old woman who became ecstatic when she marched through the barricades. As she passed through, she shouted, “Great God Almighty done parted the Red Sea one mo’ time!”
As Karl Barth writes:
“When Jesus performs miracles, he does not do so as a magician or sorcerer, but as creation’s true LORD. His miracles are always signs that the dominion of God interrupts and contradicts the dominion of human empires.”
We err grievously, therefore, if we suppose his miracles are ever limited to private, personal piety. His miracles are always politically charged.
In the middle of the Gospel of John, having witnessed Jesus speak Lazarus forth from the dead, some bystanders begin “believing into Jesus.” Some of these bystanders betray Jesus to the Pharisees. In turn, the Pharisees report Lazarus’ resurrection to the chief priests. The chief priests respond by alerting the Chief Priest, Caiphas— Caiphas, who in a few short chapters will be outing himself with the words, “We have no King but Caesar.”
Hearing the miraculous news that Jesus has called Lazarus from corruption in the tomb, Caiphas worries, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe into him, and the Romans will come and destroy our nation.” Again, Jesus does not perform magic. Because he is LORD, his miracles are always political. Just so, when the chief religious leaders hear about Jesus’ power over the Power of Death, their immediate worry is neither religious nor spiritual. When Caiphas hears Christ can work a miracle like raising the dead, two things worry him: currency and country.“Power over Death?” Caiphas frets, “But death makes our economy of scarcity possible and it’s what makes our authority over the people possible. Resurrection will ruin the nation!”
“Turn this group around!”
True miracles are nothing less than incursions of the Kingdom.
And the presence of the Kingdom is always a political temptation.
Here in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus has just announced that he is the origin of the law revealed to Moses. Now he recapitulates the work of Moses. He crosses through the Galilee. He leads thousands to the other side of sea. Just as the Israelites had grumbled in the wilderness, the crowd hungers.
And this time the LORD provides them more than manna.
John reports that the Passover is at hand.
Like a host at a table in an upper room, Jesus beckons the crowd to sit in the grass. Mind the detail the evangelist provides. Five thousand includes only the men. The crowd is larger— potentially much bigger— than the name which we give to the miracle. The masses sit as guests while the host eucharists.
There is no Last Supper in the Gospel of John. This is that Passover meal. It takes place in the grass on a mountain beside the Sea of Tiberius.
Just note the verbs:
Jesus takes the bread.
Jesus gives thanks.
Jesus breaks the bread.
Jesus distributes the bread.
The miracle on the mountainside is a Time Machine. Just as baptism clothes you now in who you will be in the Last Future— Christ— here, a full year before he dies on the Passover, Jesus sates their hunger with himself. The loaves and the fish he multiples are his crucified body. He says so. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus tells them in his sermon on the sign— this manna is me, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
Or, put that sentence into a promise rather than a threat, “Because you eat the flesh of the Son and drink his blood; therefore, you have life in you.” As Karl Barth comments on the miracle, Christ feeds them with his own death; the crowds consume in the present the future fact of their accomplished reconciliation in Jesus Christ.
But they know not on what they feast.
They think Jesus is just a man.
Theophilus Eugene Connor witnessed the miracle on Easter Sunday 1964. He saw his police stricken as still as deadmen. He heard his attack dogs in the street rendered as mute as Zechariah in the Temple. He witnessed the fire hoses fall limp to the ground and the blockade part way to make a way for God’s people. Like the begrudgers before Lazarus’ tomb, the Friend of God witnessed the miracle. He saw the sign. But he did not see what it signified. As stubborn as Pharaoh’s riders swallowed up by the Red Sea, he died a few years later having never repented of his sins.
Being witness to a miracle is not the same as bearing witness to a miracle.
On the mountain beside the Sea of Tiberius, the masses see the sign but they do not see what the sign signifies. Remember, Israel’s festival of freedom is at hand. The Passover meal is their edible Declaration of Independence. To remember the exodus past is to hope for future deliverance. In John 6, the Passover is at hand and the masses gathered on the mountainside suffer under a new Pharaoh named Caesar, who has turned the promised land into another Egypt.
Just so, their full bellies quicken a different hunger in them.
True miracles are incursions of the Kingdom, and the presence of the Kingdom is always a political temptation. Whereas Caiphas viewed Christ’s miracle-working as a dire threat, the crowds see his power as a propitious opportunity. If he can multiply two fish, only imagine how he can beat plowshares into spears! With a sword in his hands, Caesar will be on his knees!
Just as there is no Last Supper in the Gospel of John, there is no Temptation in the Wilderness. This is that trial. And notice. Instead of Satan appearing to the Son in the desert, luring him to turn stones into bread and daring him to take possession of our politics, by the Sea of Galilee, the Devil appears on our lips and in our hearts. “Let us seize him by force,” we say, grasping after him, “and make him king.”
“Let us make him our Caesar!”
They try to seize him for the very same reason they later recoil from the invitation to eat his flesh. They think Jesus is but a man albeit an extraordinary man. Supposing him to be merely human, they think Jesus can be conscripted to serve their cause. As Karl Barth writes, Christ’s refusal of sovereignty is itself a royal act. The attempt to make Jesus king is the attempt to bind God to our own self-assertions. This is not an error; it is idolatry. In fact, the notion that Jesus can be made to serve our purposes is demonic.
In August 1935, a month after the German Evangelical Church dissolved under the process of Nazification, Dietrich Bonhoeffer delivered a lecture to a gathering of dissident pastors. He titled his lecture “Contemporizing New Testament Texts.” Bonhoeffer chose his theme because he believed that the desire to make the scriptures relevant to the present age— to prioritize Christianity’s utility for contemporary culture— made “the Christian message itself the shifting, questionable element” and this, he judged, was what had rendered the gospel vulnerable to pagan ideology and fatal apostasy. “The entire New Testament in all its parts,” Bonhoeffer stressed to his listeners, “is intended to be interpreted as a witness—not as a wisdom book, not as a book of teaching, not as a book of eternal truths, but as a book of unique witness to a unique fact. It is the joyful cry: This Jesus is Christ; this man is God!” For this reason, Bonhoeffer warned preachers not to approach the New Testament’s miracle stories as object lessons with morals for us to emulate.
Instead Bonhoeffer argued:
“One interprets a miracle story correctly neither by referring it back to a universal truth; such as, the lesson of the wedding in Cana is that “Jesus deserts no one” or the moral of the loaves and the fish is that “We ought also to feed the hungry.” One interprets a miracle story correctly not by directing our attention basically to the miracle itself and then adducing corresponding examples from the present. Rather, the miracle narrative is to be proclaimed instead as a witness to Christ as the Lord, which Christ became as the Crucified.”
“Let us seize him by force and make him our king. If he can command loaves, then surely he can command an army! Let us make him our Caesar!”
But this Jesus is Christ!
This man is God!
A king? Another caesar?
WHY WOULD THE ALMIGHTY WANT SUCH A DEMOTION?!
The first time I ever preached was the sermon for the Sunday following the terrorists attacks on September 11, 2001. I’d just been appointed by a bishop who was desperate to fill a vacancy at a small, clergy-killing church and who had scoured the seminary for a United Methodist student. I made the mistake of trying to say too much in my sermon that Sunday, as though God needs defending.
Fred was a quiet, elderly African American who served as the patriarch of the congregation. I didn’t know it at the time. Fred’s son always attended service with his Father, but Fred sat alone that Sunday after the eleventh and every Sunday thereafter. His son’s office had been in the second tower.
I stumbled across Fred some weeks later. I was making my way from a coffee shop to campus. Fred was standing amidst a small crowd gathered in Nassau Square. Someone with a bullhorn led the marchers in call and response. They were protesting the war in Afghanistan.
So I was surprised when, a month or two afterwards, Fred rushed up the stairs of the little white church one Sunday morning and flung a rectangular sign at my feet. It was plastic and encased in an aluminum frame. The dirt from its legs smeared onto my robe when Fred tossed it at me, anger in his eyes and disgust in his voice.
“You ought not to have done that!”
Fred was soft-spoken but he made no effort to avoid a scene.
The white sign displayed the spare outline of a dove with an olive branch in its beak. In navy blue block lettering, it simply said, “Christians Against War.” The sign was not my idea, but— being a new pastor and not knowing any better— I acquiesced when a prominent congregant had asked to put the sign up in front of the church.
“You ought not to have done that!”
I blushed and fumbled for words to save face.
“I figured you’d agree with it, Fred, given your activism and all.”
“Pastor, whether I agree with it or not is beside the point.”
And then he pointed outside the church, urgently, like a witness to a four car pile-up, “That cross out front and the one above the altar table— they already say everything you think that sign says.”
I didn’t understand.
“But don’t you think Jesus has an opinion— I mean, his teaching is pretty clear…”
Fred shook his head, dismayed he needed to teach the pastor so elementary a lesson, “Of course I believe Jesus has views on all matters that matter, but Jesus is God Almighty. How dare you let him be made into a mascot for some group’s cause— even if it’s a group I belong to.”
I thought of Fred a few years later when I read a quote from the theologian Leslie Newbigin, “Christ has come to proclaim liberty to the captives, but he will not become the mascot for a people’s movement of liberation.”
Until he died, Theophilus Eugene Connor was also a lay leader in good standing at Woodlawn Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Connor saw no incompatibility between his baptism and his brutality. When you treat the Bible simply as a book of wisdom or a book of teaching or a book of eternal truths, it turns out it’s easy to make Jesus into a mascot for your particular political tribe.
When you forget that the scriptures are a unique witness, it is easy to forget that this man is God!
“Let us seize him and make him our Caesar!”
The temptation abides.
Of course, we seldom speak today of conscripting Jesus into kingship. But we do talk about voting him into office. Or legislating our values. Or putting God and Country back together again. These days we don’t offer him a crown; we just paint him in red and blue hues— set him astride an elephant or a donkey. We depict the Holy Family in an I.C.E detention cage. We lay down the law and ask, “Who would Jesus deport?” We paint him laying his scarred hands on the president.
No matter how sincere the motivation, it is the same old temptation. To seize Jesus. To conscript Jesus. To draft Jesus onto our side.We still think we can seize him and possess him on our terms. As an emblem for our nation. As a mascot for our party. As an amulet for our ideology. No less than the five thousand, we still want a Christ who fights for us and against them. A Christ who leads our front in the culture war. A Christ who blesses our biases. A Christ who endorses our self-selected causes.
But this Jesus is Christ! This man is God! And God does not want to do our bidding! That’s what idols (allegedly) do. Idols are god reduced to resource, deity made commodity.
As if to double-down on the point he’d made to me that morning just inside the church steps, the dirty sign at my feet, Fred served communion with me during worship.
Ripping off a piece of bread, lacquered in honey and speckled with far too many seeds, Fred looked into to my eyes and said as though it was the most important thing in the world that can be said (it is): “This is the body of Jesus; it’s given for you.”
You cannot seize what is already freely given to you.
In his lecture on “Contemporizing New Testament Texts,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer insists we do not faithfully interpret a miracle story if we focus on the miracle itself. We must look at the whole passage, he asserts, as a witness to “the entire Christ.” And if you relax your gaze from his sandwich powers and look at the entire text, then you can see that, yes, the miracle story ends by making clear what the LORD Jesus Christ does not want. He does not want to do what you want him to do. The Almighty does not want to be your mascot. But when you look at the whole passage, you see that out of fifteen verses a full third of them disclose what Jesus does want.
Faith.
He wants our trust.
In verse five, when Jesus sees the five thousand following after him, he asks Phillip, who was a guest at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, “Where in the world are we going to buy enough bread?”
Jesus asked Phillip this question, John reports, “in order to test him, for he himself knew what he would do.”
Jesus wants to see if Phillips trusts him to handle this impossible situation.
“Several thousand dollars’ worth of bread wouldn’t be enough to give even a tiny bite to all these people!” Phillip responds.
Phillip can only see the problem before them.
What are we going to do? Jesus asks again.
Andrew responds next, saying, “Well, there is a kid here with five loaves of barley and two fish, but what are they for thousands?”
Andrew’s faith hardly warrants any superlatives but it is about the size of a mustard seed. And it is in reply to Andrew that Jesus beckons the five thousand to sit in the grass. As much as he does so to fill the crowd’s hungry bellies, Jesus performs the miracle in order to confirm Andrew’s meager trust in him.
Take your gaze off the miracle itself. Look upon the whole story. A full-third of the passage features Jesus attempting to find faith in his disciples.
Jesus does not want baptize your causes. Jesus does not want to bless your biases. Jesus is adamant— he’ll run away from you, even— he will not be the mascot to your movement.
But!
Jesus does want you to trust him with the impossible situations set against you. Five of fifteen verses: he wants you to trust him. Not just when the crowd outnumbers the food by 4,993 but in every impossible-seeming situation, he wants you to turn to him in trust. He wants you to rely on him in faith that he is able.
He is able to make a way out of no way.
He is able not only to feed five thousand, Patricia, Elizabeth, Brad— he is able to keep your cancer at bay. He can satisfy more than hunger; he is able to heal the wound of your divorce— you know to whom I speak. He is able! Not only can he multiply loaves, he can bring peace to anxious, grieving parents in a Texas flood— I know it sounds impossible, but not only is he able, he wants you to trust him. Trust that Abby, is not lost to him. Trevor and Marissa, he is able not only to turn two fish into a smorgasbord but to cover your children in his own righteousness such that whatever befalls them they are— nevertheless— in him.
He is able!
Exactly a year ago, I did not think I would be here now. He is able! And— let’s be honest— if I am here this time next year, it will be because his word works what it says.
He is able!
He can ease the loss you’ve just suffered, Ken; he can navigate the family and financial difficulties that follow death. Juliet, he’s got you and your unborn child. And Dennis, he’s got your niece Lwazi. Church— we’ve got all kinds of facility woes here and needy clients at the Mission Center, just ask Dana.
We say, “Where in the world are we going to find the money?”
But take a look at the whole passage!
He says, “I’ve got this!”
He is able to part the Red Sea more than one mo’ time!
Jesus Christ, the LORD of Time, does not want to be made a mascot. But— number the verses— he does want us to give him a little credit for being able to handle a great deal with the very little we have to add to the cause.
“Five loaves and two fish? Try me.” Jesus dares Andrew.
So give it to him. Give him your few fish and you meager barley. Trust him!Don’t stick him on a donkey or an elephant. Entrust him with your worries for the nation. Either this man is God or he is not. If he’s the former, give him your grief over Gaza. If he is not the latter, give him your outrage over October 7th. Give him your 5 and your 2— tell him, “Here’s what I think about the invasion of Ukraine…do something!”
Either this man is God or he is not!
If you look at the whole passage, it is not simply a miracle story.
It’s a revelation of what Jesus Christ does and does not want from us.
And what he wants is for you to trust.
Trust that, though loaf and cup, like water and the word, appear to be small ordinary creatures they are nothing less than himself. And this man is God, and with God— no matter what obstacles or hardships or heartbreaks face you— nothing is impossible.
So come.
Do no seize.
Receive.
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