Bread of Heaven: The forthcoming transition to John’s Gospel is full of meaning
This being Year B of the Sunday lectionary cycle, we will mostly be reading through St Mark’s Gospel; but only mostly, because it is the shortest of the four Gospels, and so we will make a brief sojourn into St John’s Gospel in July and August. The detour into John is certainly not random: we The post Bread of Heaven: The forthcoming transition to John’s Gospel is full of meaning appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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This being Year B of the Sunday lectionary cycle, we will mostly be reading through St Mark’s Gospel; but only mostly, because it is the shortest of the four Gospels, and so we will make a brief sojourn into St John’s Gospel in July and August. The detour into John is certainly not random: we interrupt our reading of Mark midway through Chapter 6 (this year, we read Mark 6:30-34 on July 21) and take it up again six weeks later at the beginning of Chapter 7 (on September 1). What is omitted is St Mark’s account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and this is what we read from John, followed by the long discourse that follows. This miracle is the only one – unless you count the Resurrection – which appears in all four Gospels, so clearly it is in some way the miracle of Jesus, the very paradigm of what a miracle is.
Why should this be so, and not, for example, the wedding at Cana or the cleansing of the 10 lepers? The answer that leaps to mind is that it foreshadows the Eucharist, and this is surely right, but before leaping to that conclusion let us consider what else is distinctive about it. What strikes me in particular is that this miracle is a response to a general rather than an individual need. What I mean is that, in most of the miracles, Jesus is responding to the needs of one person or a small number – 10 lepers, the guests at a wedding, the frightened apostles in a storm-tossed boat. But here Jesus is dealing with “a multitude” – the Greek word is okhlos, often translated “crowd”, and is used by all the Gospels to mean the great mass of the people, including all those who turned against Jesus at his Passion. Moreover, before we leave St Mark behind he tells us that “as [Jesus] went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things” (Mark 6:34). This is what leads into the miracle.
St Mark sees the Feeding of the Five Thousand as a miracle not just of feeding the body but also of feeding the mind, of providing the teaching without which the people of Israel are so many lost sheep. St John then expounds that teaching explicitly in a way that the other evangelists do not, and this teaching is introduced by Christ saying, in rather exasperated fashion: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you” (John 6:26-27).
He goes on to make clear that this food is nothing less than Himself: Christ’s flesh and blood broken and poured out as they will be upon on the Cross. I take it as axiomatic that St John wrote his Gospel for Christians who already had and valued at least one Gospel, possibly all three of the others, and intended not to replace them but to supplement them. This is why he feels able to omit the story of the institution of the Eucharist from his recounting of the Last Supper, and in a certain sense anticipate it here, so much earlier in the story. We know, when we read the Bread of Life discourse, that Jesus is talking about the Eucharist – talking about how Christians are to participate in His life-giving death, and gain a share in His Resurrection, by sharing in the one bread and the one cup.
It is this reality, and our true understanding of it, which unites the Church, making us one body; or, to use the language of St John’s Gospel, it is because we eat His flesh and drink His blood that He abides in us and we in Him, making us one with Him as He is one with the Father. This teaching is a hard saying, as many of Christ’s disciples said at the time (John 6:60) and continue to say so now. But our sojourn into St John’s Gospel ends with words of Peter which we are invited to make our own: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that You are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68-9).
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