The Courageous Gospel. Robert Allan Hill
sixteen, in the middle of the autumn we were dislocated or relocated to a new home by the remarkable ministrations of the Methodist church. It was November, and we all suddenly had a new house, a new neighborhood, a new room, a new city, a new school, a new church, and not a single friend. The school was a large urban school that was in the throes of serious unrest, some chaos and violence, and yet still with a fine building, faculty, and program. I have not thought, or felt, clearly about those November days of 1970 in a long, long, time. Maybe I have never done so.
For some reason the humble tuna-fish and bread carried me fully back. . .
There is a teenager alone in the cafeteria. For some days he goes alone to lunch, after trigonometry and before chemistry. He is not very artfully dressed. Some of that is the culture of the day and some is just who he is. He knows really no one. He is white in largely black school, overtall and awkward, hoping in vain against hope to make the basketball team, bright but not too eager to show it, curiously glad for a new and strange city environment and deeply lonely at the dislocation of the move. You can see him on these many days at the first lunch period. He sits with his back to the wall, close enough to some others not to appear solo. The school—and by extension the world around—run quite well without any recognition of his being there. He feels something that is hard and throat-lodged and aching and chilling and strange. He is homesick for a home that no longer exists. He hurts too much to laugh and he is too tall and adult–looking to cry.
In a month or so a group of other young men, Chris Bennett and Joel Burdick and Chris Heimbach, will somehow oddly include him in lunch, as if he had been there for the previous ten years, which he had not. But right now he is out on the boat, and shore is a long way off. And a shared meal seems like it will never come and if it did it might just be too awesome and too wonderful to receive. So he leans the chair against the wall. He watches the racial tensions and hatreds. He memorizes the periodic table. He tries not to look conspicuous in any single way. He looks at the girls and wonders what he could possibly say to any of them. He looks forward to basketball. He feels what it takes a young heart really to feel.
Every day he carries to his back table a brown sack. This is a full meal, fairly hastily but utterly lovingly prepared in the earlier morning before the two mile walk to school. It is the same lunch every day. Bread and fish. Two full sandwiches. Some chips. Carrots. Cookies, sometimes made at home. And it will take another thirty-five years for him to fully appreciate—to taste—what he could already feel against the cafeteria wall. At least here, in this meal, for all the depressing dislocation and frightening foreignness and leavened loneliness all around, here was something to eat. Prepared with love. As reliable as the sunrise and the seasons. Grace, in the midst of dislocation. The sandwiches come slowly out of their tight wrap. They taste the same, reassuringly the same. Maybe, day by day, this is really all we get, a taste.
Simple bread and fish. The five barley loaves and two fish of this complex Gospel passage clearly continued to carry for John such a memory. John is looking back many years, through the lens of a tradition of a feeding and a boat ride. He makes his changes in the way the story goes. More than at first you might think. But it is the memory of the meal that carries him here. Two fish, five loaves, lots of people, all satisfied, baskets to spare. Grace. And the meal is the ticket.
What John is able to see, so many years later, is more than those five thousand could ever see. He could see the stature of a Christ whose grace lived in dislocation and whose freedom survived disappointment. He could begin to sense the marvelous self-gift of the God-beyond-God who was made known in Christ. He could ponder, generations later, the enduring influence and power of the Bread of Life, for whom even the cross—no especially the cross—is a moment of glory. He could accumulate the other stories of meal and memory, the other experiences of the earliest church, both the heart of Peter and the mind of Paul, and begin to piece together the puzzle of providence. John could look back and see that through it Love did abide. This love. . .freedom in the world, freedom from the world, freedom to make the world a better place.
And so, too, the teenager, now fifty, can look back and see that through it Love did abide. He did not know it then. He could not. How could he? Look at him in those dungarees and long hair and faded shirt. How could that awkward teenager ever possibly have known, feasting on bread and fish, that the very pain of dislocation would give him his whole life: a real home, a girl to marry, a sense of purpose, a community of faith, a voice to lift, seven beautiful pulpits, three children, and a darn good jump shot. He could not possibly know that then.
Nor can you know now what grace will emerge in the heart of your current dislocation.
This is why John says something very odd, but very true. Your work is not your work. Work is not the real work. To believe. To have faith. To carry yourself and your inner being, and your soul, and your chin in a way that show you and the world around you that you may be the loneliest teenager in the world, but somebody packed you an awesome lunch, and don’t you forget it.
These things are spoken that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
This week you can choose to grow in faith, and so find a fuller part of your second identity. This week you can choose to grow in love, and so open a fuller part of the world’s imagination.
Faith is personal commitment to an unverifiable truth. It involves a leap.
Faith is an objective uncertainty grasped with subjective certainty. It involves a leap.
Faith is the way to salvation, a real identity and a rich imagination. But it does involve a leap.
Now is the time to jump.
All of us are better when we are loved.
Notes from Raymond Brown’s Lectures on John
Union Theological Seminary
Spring 1978
March 30–April 4, 1978: John 6
John 6 reflects both inner and outer misunderstandings. There is a shift from water to food. Chapters 4 and 5 are about water.
The importance of this story is part of the Elijah\Elisha parallelism. 6:14 (“This is indeed the prophet. . .”) is a remnant. John may have older echoes than the others! There were probably three or four different accounts of the feeding of the five thousand in early tradition. In theology, the so-called nature miracles are often too quickly shoved aside. Yet this feeding is by far the best attested miracle: two in Mark; two in Matthew; one in Luke; one in John. John’s source seems to be a third, independent source. (Of course, no one in the first century would have made the nature\healing distinction.) Twenty Loaves of Barley are connected to Elisha (2 Kings 4:22).
In all the narratives, there is some liturgizing done. There is anticipation of the Eucharist. Does John emphasize this more than the others? In the Didache, chapters 9 and 10 are very similar (except the cup comes first). The gathering of the crumbs may be Eucharistic too.
Bread is scattered upon the mountain. Also, the fish image is often used in early explanations of the Eucharist. Now this also may reflect Moses feeding the people in the desert. There is a great deal of symbolism in and behind all of this. Also, the walking on water may be tied loosely to the parting of the Red Sea. Is the great “I Am” a return to the Pentateuch? Or to Isaiah 51?
John 6: 22–24 is probably a polyglot of verses. John 6:25 is probably a two level question. “The Son of Man” will give you another type of food. Have faith in him whom he has sent. Most important: believe in Jesus Christ as the one sent by/from God, because he has eternal life to give. He can give God’s own life.
John 3: 30–33. Peter Borgen, Bread from Heaven. He uses a homiletic technique.
A recent study by Eileen Guilden analyzes worship in the Fourth Gospel. Her argument is that the gospels were designed according to a Jewish lectionary. Dubious, says RB (but he mentions it!) Guilden agrees with the above, and adds a three year cycle of the text. So, in her view, the author of John is playing on the synagogue lectionary. The law is most sacred, with the prophetic commentary second. The problem is that we do not have enough hard evidence to support her theory.