Loaves and Fish and the True Bread: 25 July, 2021
John 6:1-21
This is one of those rare places where Mark and John seem to tell pretty much the same story with pretty much the same point. The only major difference is that in John when Jesus appears he says, in the Greek, ego eimi, which is probably a reference to God’s self-disclosure as “I am that I am” in Exodus 3:14.
As for the feeding story itself, it may well reflect a telling of the story that fits the situation of John’s community. When the people say that Jesus is “the prophet” they may mean that he is the prophet predicted by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:18, a prophet who will be like Moses only more so.
It is hard not to note eucharistic overtones in the passage since Jesus gives thanks and distributes the food. If so, perhaps the Johannine community knew a sacred meal of bread and fish (see also John 21). The boy who provides the loaves is the subject of many a sermon and children’s sermons about modest generosity and amazing results, yet is probably not the main point here. The main point here, I think, is that as usual Jesus knows exactly what he is going to do and does it. In the verses that follow he draws his own sermon about the bread. He is the true bread. The loaves and fishes only point the way to him. –– David Bartlett
Ephesians 3:14-21
When a paragraph begins “for this reason” it helps to know what reason it’s talking about. Ephesians has been talking about the mystery of God by which, first, both gentiles and Jews might come together in the church and, second, that through the church the fullness of God’s plan and mercy might be known.
Because this is just what God is doing, and because the Christians who receive this letter are part of that plan, the apostle prays that they will have a clear sense of their important role in a drama that includes them and far transcends them. “This is about you,” he might say in our jargon, “but this is not just about you. This is about the love of Christ from eternity to eternity.”
The benediction that closes the section is a blessing for the church and for the cosmos, whose destinies are intertwined in ways that our American stress on voluntary organizations and membership drives can barely begin to comprehend. –– David Bartlett
2 Kings 4:42-44
The story shows God’s power to sustain God’s people and to meet their hunger through the agency of the prophets. (It follows a more complicated food story where Elisha greatly improves a potentially poisonous stew.) It is almost certainly included in the week’s readings as a kind of typological foreshadowing of Jesus’ feeding the people in the wilderness. –– David Bartlett
David Bartlett (1941-2017), was an ordained American Baptist minister, Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and Lantz Professor Emeritus of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School.
Homily Service 39, no. 8 (2006): 44-52.