Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 25, 2021 – 2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 4:1-6; John 6:1-15

For those of you who were not here when Mass began, I asked the congregation to look around the church and see what things were different. Because every now and then you get one of those puzzles where the same picture is printed twice, side by side, and there are changes in the second picture, and you have to figure out what they are. Usually there are about twenty of them, and I always get about three. So here’s the changes I made in the church. I moved the credence stand off the platform to the floor. By the way, credence stand is the English for credenza. And many of you still have a credenza in your dining room set. I separated the two candle stands, which were together. And I moved the kneeler from here to here. Did anybody get that, or any part of it? I didn’t think so. The reason why I did that is because of today’s gospel.

Before I discuss today’s gospel you have to understand something about ancient writing. We have so much print in our society. When we finish with the daily paper, if we still get one, we put it out with the garbage. We have magazines, all sorts of things. We’re inundated with print media. Writing was extremely rare in the ancient world. Few people could read. And even fewer could write. That seems odd to us. How could you be able to read and not write? But they weren’t taught to write, only to read what they had to read to get by. Not only that but there weren’t many words. If you took all the words that existed in Ancient Greek and put them in a dictionary it would take up only about a quarter of any standard American dictionary in size. That’s how small the language was.

So language was precious, and words both denoted something - this is a fish, this is a tower - but the words also connoted other meanings. And people could pick up on both the denotation and connotation right away, because the language was not as fluid, it was not as expansive, as language is today. And St. John, when he wrote his gospel, would have known that. The other thing to realize is, by the time John wrote his gospel, even though writing was scarce, many, if not most, Christian communities had someplace in their possession at least one copy of one or more of the other gospels. And John counted on that when he wrote his gospel.

Let’s take a look at the changes that John made in the all too familiar story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. “Jesus went up on the mountain and there He sat down with his disciples.” In the other stories there is no mountain; it’s a big level stretch. But that exact sentence, word for word, is used in Matthew’s gospel to introduce what we call the Sermon on the Mount. “Jesus went up on the mountain and sat down there with his disciples, and He began to teach them.”

What does he teach them? The first stuff out of Jesus’ mouth is what we call the eight Beatitudes - blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful, and so on. What Jesus did was propose a way of life based on good actions that supplanted the ‘thou shall nots.’ Why? Because in people’s memory the most important person who had ever gone up on a mountain was Moses. When Moses got up to the top of the mountain, he didn’t give people laws, he got laws dictated to him by God. Now here’s Jesus making laws Himself. So what John is going to tell us is that, for Jesus, law or guidance is the same as feeding, and feeding is the same as teaching.

“He raised his eyes and saw a large crowd coming toward him.” In all the gospels, that sentence appears somewhere. Every time Jesus raises his eyes and sees a large crowd coming toward him, he responds with pity, because they are like sheep without a shepherd. That’s what we heard last week in Mark’s gospel. And as a response to His own pity, Jesus takes some action - He teaches them, He heals them, today He feeds them.

“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.” In none of the other stories of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, do we hear what kind of loaves they are. But this morning, in the first reading, someone brought to Elisha, the prophet, a basket full of barley loaves. And he multiplied them so people could eat and there were fragments left over. The significance of barley loaves is that barley loaves were the bread of the poor. Rich people ate wheat loaves. Poor people ate barley loaves. So this is a feast from the poor for the poor. From the poor for the poor.

“Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks (which is the same as blessed), and distributed them.” Every story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes uses the verbs from the Last Supper - took, blessed, broke, gave or distributed. Most of the time the writers of the gospels want us to see the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes through the lens of the Last Supper. But John does exactly the opposite. John wants us to see what happens at the Last Supper through the lens of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. Why? Because John is not going to tell the story of the Last Supper in his gospel. He’s just going to tell the story of the washing of the feet. And so for John feeding is equivalent to serving as well.

Then He says, “Have the people recline.” In all the other stories, the people sit, but here the people recline. What is that all about? Most of the time when people ate, they probably sat on the floor of their house or outside or at a very, very low table. But at a banquet, people were provided with couches. The couch was raised up this way so that the head end was much higher than the foot end. You laid on your side and reached over onto the table with your free hand and put stuff in your mouth. You could talk to the person next to you or you could turn around this way and talk to the person behind you. So this thing that’s about to happen, in the mind of St. John, is a banquet and not an ordinary meal.

The next thing. “There was a great deal of grass in that place.” Not that kind of grass. Of course there’s a great deal of grass; it was outside. Why does it matter? Those last two lines when people were told to recline with a great deal of grass in that area. “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want. He lets me lie down in green pastures, and by peaceful streams he leads me.”

St. John wants us to see what’s about to happen in terms of the great story of the Good Shepherd, which he himself will tell a couple of chapters from now. But right now this whole thing is a lead-in to something else. After this episode is over, Jesus will give his great speech called the ‘Bread of Life’ speech, which takes up almost all of chapter six. And in that speech, Jesus first talks about himself as Word. He is the Bread of Life because He is the Word of God. The wisdom of God in the Old Testament was frequently pictured as a woman who hosts a banquet for people in which she provides her wisdom.

So the first way which Jesus feeds us with His bread, is through the bread of his Word. Then he’s going to repeat the whole homily a second time, changing everything to mean He’s going to feed people with his actual body and blood. So insistent was He in that homily that what He was going to do would be really Him in all of His existence, that, when He finished the homily, people walked away because they felt it was abhorrent to talk about such things.

So what do we have here? We have a story in which Jesus imitates the teaching given to Moses, gives his own teaching, and indicates that for him, teaching and law giving is the same as feeding, is the same as healing. And this is meant for everyone, but primarily for the poor, from whom comes what is fed back to them as a banquet, a banquet that sort of prefigures the banquet always talked about in the Old Testament as the final fulfillment of God’s presence with His people. And so Jesus will feed us with His Word and His Body.

What is the takeaway from all this? Two things. First, you need to ask yourself now and then, “What do I hunger for, and how are my hungers satisfied?”

The second thing is this. Obviously, for St. John, as for all of the writers of the scriptures and passed down to us, the Eucharist is the center of our spiritual life as followers of Jesus. But, there have been times in the church, and there will be times again when the Eucharist is scarce. One little tiny germ so small that you could only see it in a microscope kept us from the Eucharist for almost a year. What if it happened again? In the early stages of the church the Eucharist was very scarce. It was performed in the homes of the faithful by the head of the household. There were no priests. And shortly after that custom began, the Church was persecuted. People had to hide. Sometimes they hid in the Roman catacombs, where Eucharist was celebrated using the casket of a dead Christian to place the elements on, because there was no other table available. There were times throughout the growth of the Church in Europe and in North Africa, when there was only one priest for thousands and thousands of people. The same thing was true of the great missionary activity of the Church. We’d send maybe a dozen priests, if we had that many, and they would begin mission work among hundreds, if not thousands, of people somewhere. And if those people got to have Eucharist once, twice a year, it was a lot. The same thing was true during colonial times. One of our great American saints, John Newman, an immigrant from Germany who became a bishop here in New York. His territory as pastor was all of upstate New York and most of northern New Jersey. How often do you think those people got to Mass? It’s happened often in the past, and can happen again.

So what do Christians do when the Eucharist, the center of our life, is taken from us or unavailable to us? Jesus feeds us with His Word, as well as His Body.