John Barleycorn

Propers: The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 17), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I love the paradox of August. It’s still hot, still undeniably summer, and yet—the harvest has begun. Even ignoring the holiday decorations already on so many shelves, the sight of the harvesters, the turning of some of the leaves, give us a glimpse of autumn as the dog days run their course. It’s a transitional time, a liminal space. And those are always holy.

August 1st marks Lammas day, the Loaf-Mass, when loaves of bread would be prepared from the very first gleanings of the wheat harvest, and those loaves then brought to the local church for a blessing, as an offering of firstfruits. Granted, this tradition only works for temperate climes in the northern hemisphere, but it harkens back to the Old Testament, to the Hebrew Scriptures in the time of the Temple, when God would be thanked as the Lord of the Harvest. All good things fall from His hand.

Even our word “lord” in English derives from the Anglo-Saxon hlāfweard, “loaf-ward,” the keeper of the loaves. The guy who was in charge was the guy who gave you bread. This held even for the might of Rome, as the satirist Juvenal famously quipped that leaders keep their power through the promise of panem et circenses: bread and circuses. When the French peasantry ran out of breads, they took instead some royal heads. Never underestimate a baguette. Even our word “companion” means “with whom I break my bread.”

All of which is to say that this “staff of life” which we so take for granted—readily available bread—was to our forebears so vital, so indispensable, that they would consider it holy. And they weren’t wrong. At what point, I wonder, does a miracle become so commonplace, so ubiquitous, that we simply consider it natural, and regard it as our due?

Human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet it wasn’t that many millennia back, but a century of centuries, that we first domesticated grain. And that changed everything. We took something that we couldn’t digest, wild grasses, and turned it into oceans of porridge, bread, and beer. We settled. We civilized. We specialized. We invented literacy, the earliest systems of writing and mathematics, just so that we could keep track of all our bread and all our beer.

Thence came kings and prophets, poets and philosophers, blacksmiths and potters and scientists and sailors. Everything we’ve built, we built by baking bread. So of course it was holy. Of course it was the gift of God. And so it remains today. One might go so far, barring abuse, as to say that the bakery and the brewery are really a sort of a temple. Ask me sometime about the Hymn to Ninkasi.

John’s Gospel focuses very profoundly, very powerfully, upon bread. John’s is the Gospel, as we may recall, that refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God, the Word of God, the Light whom the darkness cannot overcome: divine and worthy titles all. Yet more than this, far more, John calls Christ our Bread of Life. It is his overarching image of who and what Jesus is for us.

So much does he belabor the point that the entire sixth chapter of John’s Gospel has come to be known as the Bread of Life Discourse, so full of gluten that our pages practically rise. Such is what we’ll be reading over the course of this next month. Our lectionary walks us through no less than five consecutive Sundays of living bread, and that’s a lot of dough.

This is why it’s important for us to understand from the outset that all throughout the Bible, through Middle Eastern and Western history alike, bread is the difference between life and death, between scarcity and capacity, between the savanna and the city. Bread is celestial light come down from heaven, captured in the grain, and offered in abundance for us all. “Give us today our daily bread.”

Our Gospel reading this morning kicks things off with the Feeding of the 5000; the only miracle, apart from the Resurrection, that we find recorded in all four canonical Gospel accounts. After an unfortunate confrontation with the Jerusalem authorities in Chapter 5, Jesus returns to His home region of the Galilee only there to be dogged by crowds seeking healing. It is the time of the Passover, which Jesus has celebrated every year of His life in Jerusalem. But not this time. Contrary to His usual custom, He gathers with the crowd atop a mountain.

Other Gospel authors provide us with additional details and even alternate motives for this miracle, yet John clearly wants to stress the centrality of the Passover. When crowds would typically flock to Mt Zion, to the Temple in Jerusalem, here instead they flock to Jesus. He is, in effect, the new and true Temple atop His own holy mountain. Moreover, He fulfills now His promise to the Samaritan woman of Chapter 4, that God would be worshipped neither on Mt Gerizim nor on Mt Zion, but “in spirit and truth.”

“Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” Jesus asks of His Apostle Philip, though John assures us that He does so in order to test and thus to strengthen him. Philip despairs that six months’ wages could not be enough to feed such a multitude even a morsel. Andrew, however, has been speaking with a boy in the crowd who has with him five barley loaves and two dried fish. He, or perhaps his mother, had foresight enough to pack a lunch. But what could such a pittance mean among so very many?

I suspect you all know how the story will go. Taking the loaves, Jesus offers thanksgiving—literally a eucharist—and distributes them to the 5000, along with the two fish. And somehow, miraculously, all are fed and filled, a rarity in the ancient world. People often had enough to survive, but not enough to satiate; such indulgence was usually limited to religious festivals and feasts. Full tummies were for special occasions.

Christ then directs the disciples to gather up all that is left, just as the ancient Israelites once gathered up manna of old, that bread from heaven, whilst wandering in the wilderness. The Apostles require no less than a dozen baskets in order to compile every crumb. This consciously echoes the miracle of Elisha, which we also read today in 2 Kings. The Bible presents Elisha as a sort of second Moses, yet Jesus’ work outdoes his 50 times.

The numbers involved may prove significant. Five loaves for the five books of Torah, the Law of Moses; two fish for the Prophets and the Psalms; 12 baskets for the 12 Tribes of Israel, the people of God, led here by 12 Apostles. Such interpretations are common enough. Even the crowd of 5000, for Matthew’s Gospel especially, recalls a Roman Legion: an army here raised in the service of celebrating life, rather than dealing in death.

And just in case the message wasn’t clear, our reading concludes with Jesus returning to the far side of the Sea of Galilee by walking on the waters—something which the Scriptures repeatedly insist only God can do. This is John bonking us over the head. Christ, then, is the new Temple, celebrating the new Passover; He is the God atop the mountain; the Lord of the Harvest, provider of bread; revealed here as Yahweh who walks upon the waves. John, my friends, is many things, yet rarely is he subtle.

This does, however, lead me to my final point for this morning regarding the Lord and bread: that John never mentions Communion. Not explicitly. Not openly. Unlike the other Evangelists, John plays this particular card closer to his vest. In the early Church, Communion—the Holy Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper—remained a hidden thing, a sacred mystery reserved only for the initiated, for the baptized.

Our Divine Liturgy possesses two parts: the Word and the Sacrament, with the passing of peace in between. In John’s day, those not yet baptized left after the Peace. It was too sacred a thing, too holy a thing, too scandalous a truth, to hold up a piece of bread and repeat the promise of Christ: “This is My Body, given for you.” Bread is literally the Body of our God. And when we consume it together, we all become one in Him.

The Sacrament, as we shall see, saturates John’s Gospel. Jesus talks about it all the time, calls Himself the Bread of Life, throughout this chapter and this Gospel. For the next five weeks, let he who has ears to hear, listen. Then come, taste and see that the Lord is good.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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