John 6:1-21
The feeding of 5,000 people with five barley loaves and two fish is one of the more well-known stories about Jesus. Aside from the passion narrative, it is one of only a few divine actions recorded in all four Gospel accounts. John’s version, which we have just heard, requires some context to appreciate.
Listen again to the opening and closing sentences in John’s account of this story. At the opening of the story, John recounts, “Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee…A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing.” And, at the closing of the story, John recounts, “When people saw the sign that he had done, the began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’” John’s framing emphasizes that Jesus’s followers are responding to his signs: the crowd followed Jesus because of the signs, and they believed him because of the signs.
The use of the word “sign” here is important for John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all refer to the feeding of the 5,000 as a “miracle;” however, John intentionally does NOT use the word “miracle.” For John, a miracle is an act of power that has independent integrity, whereas a “sign” is something that takes meaning only through associating itself with the thing towards which it points. When John says that the crowd follows Jesus “because they saw the signs that he was doing,” he is saying something like, “The crowd followed him because he drove a nice car and wore cool clothing.” Similarly, when John says that “the people believed Jesus when they saw the sign that he had done,” he is saying something like, “the people trusted the CEO when they confirmed that the quarterly earnings were positive.” In each instance, John is highlighting the superficial, so-called “belief” of the people. Signs – like nice cars, cool clothing, and quarterly earnings – do not necessarily predict that a person is worthy of our trust. John’s point is that people are following Jesus for superficial reasons.
Before we consider the significance of the “sign” of the feeding of the 5,000, it is worth considering how common it is for us – like the people in this story – to place our trust in signs without realizing that they are only tools or actions designed to direct us someplace else. The classic vocabulary for this dynamic is the difference between “means” and “ends.” It is easy for us to become so focused on “means” such as wealth, status, or power that we lose sight of worthy “ends” such as fulfillment, purpose, or truth. This confusion often leads to lives wherein we might achieve a level of “success,” but still feel empty. For example, we might focus excessively on earning money without reflecting on how that money will contribute to a life worth living. Or we might focus obsessively on our own parenting without reflecting on how our children’s flourishing and life isn’t, ultimately, about us or our parenting.
This challenge runs deeper than individual will power can reach. It is not easy for us to decide, on our own, that we are going to follow Jesus for the “right” reasons. There is a powerful scene in the movie The Shawshank Redemption that illustrates the difficulty of the human condition in this regard:
The movie is set in a maximum-security prison. One prisoner, named Brooks, completes his sentence of 50 years, and he is notified that he will soon be free. Counterintuitively, Brooks does not want to leave prison. The prison is all he knows; he has friends in prison; he is respected as an educated man in prison. The prospect of being an ex-convict trying to make ends meet in a foreign world is terrifying for him. So Brooks attempts to murder one of his fellow inmates to stay in prison. After this bizarre encounter, Brooks’s friends are trying to make sense of it. One of the friends, played by the actor Morgan Freeman, observes, “These walls are funny: at first we hate them, then we get used to them, then we can’t live without them.” This is easy enough to see within a prison context. At first, who would want to live in prison? We’d hate it. After 50 years, however, we might imagine how we would get used to prison. Finally, at the end of our lives in prison – like Brooks – we might find ourselves in a place where we can’t imagine living anywhere else.
From a Christian perspective, we are born into prison. From the moment we are brought into this world, we are confronted with the difficulty and scarcity of the flesh. We can’t see; we can’t speak; we are cold and hungry and there’s not always enough milk to go around. At first, every one of us hates this prison of flesh. But then, we start to get used to it. We learn how to move and talk and meet our needs. We learn how to get what we want in a world that isn’t fair, to play the game of life and read the signs of the world. Slowly, this world, which is so scary and painful at first, becomes our world. We forget the difficulty and craziness that we first encounter as an infant. As the years go on, we become more and more sophisticated at meeting our needs through the means of our world; we become dependent on its rules and regulations, its “means” and its “signs”. Then – just like Brooks – we become incapable of imagining a different reality. We might be able to ignore the “walls” of our proverbial prison for much of our lives. Eventually, however, the scarcity of our lives comes back into focus when our death comes into view, at which time we are reminded of life’s prison walls: our birth and our death.
Through this lens, the problem of confusing “means” and “ends” is less about individual willpower and more about the prison into which we have been born. Jesus tries – over and over again – to point us beyond the walls of our prison, towards a reality that is governed by a different kind of power. The problem, however, is that we are often just like Brooks from The Shawshank Redemption. We have become incapable of imagining what could be different.
Consider how the crowd responds to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000: they try to take him by force to make him king. This is a natural response if we consider the rules of our prison. Imagine what a king with that kind of power might be able to accomplish for us (and for the world). Imagine the security and wealth that he might generate for us (and the world). Of course we would want Jesus to be our king! And if Jesus were to resist, we would try to coerce him through bribery, manipulation, tribal loyalty, or perhaps an appeal to altruism (pointing out his selfishness if he were to demure). Why? Because those are the rules of our prison. Those are the rules that we have learned to live by since before we can remember. Jesus, however, withdraws from us when we try to force him to conform to the rules of our prison. He plays by a different set of rules, so he leaves us and goes to a mountain by himself.
So what is Jesus’s purpose in the feeding of the 5,000? John is showing us with some clarity that Jesus’s primary concern is not the 5,000 people or the bread and the fish. Rather, he is performing a sign. Remember a sign is something that takes meaning by pointing us to something else. Today’s sign is a story of divine provision. Jesus is telling us that we don’t have to worry about scarcity the way that we think we must because there exists another way of being in the world. This sign points us beyond the walls of our prison.
Ultimately, Jesus doesn’t reveal the kingdom through his signs. He reveals it with his blood, offered on the cross, towards which every one of his signs point. After three years of trying and failing to get us to look beyond the walls of death, Jesus submits to death himself, breaks his own body, and then returns to us to demonstrate that there is more to life than the flesh that every one of us will lose. In that act of ultimate love, Jesus plants in our hearts a new imagination, an imagination that holds the power to escape the prison.
When we read these so-called “miracles,” if we find ourselves wondering about the physics or practicality of them, then we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the rules of the prison, and we fail to see their purpose. On the other hand, if we receive them as signs, as John intends, and we look at them through the lens of Christ crucified and risen, we are invited into the possibility that there is a kingdom where difficulty and scarcity are not sovereign.
Our task is not to “believe the sign;” rather, our task is to follow Jesus, because he is walking out of the prison and asking us to follow him. That Way is the kingdom of God, where the rules of the prison no longer apply. “Come and see,” Jesus tells us.
Amen.
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