Whaley Bridge Parish
July 24th 2021
John 6: 1 – 14
Have you ever baked a loaf of bread? To my mind, baking bread is one of life’s simple joys that everyone should try. And when I bake bread – usually in a bread machine these days – I often think about baking bread with an Italian monk called Bernadino. Every summer Bernadino used to take a break from his Franciscan monastery to give young people a taste of the Franciscan life at the San Masseo community just outside Assisi.
At San Masseo life was lived in community. We slept in simple dormitories and were woken at 6.30 am by Bernadino playing his mandolin outside the window. Like monks do, we worshipped together, worked together, ate our meal together and washed up together. In the rural setting of the Umbrian countryside, we shared in all the elements of a Franciscan experience; singing, gardening and bible study figured highly, as did silence, partying and importantly, baking.
Like everything else at San Masseo baking was a communal experience. Baking involved around twenty people, ranged either side of a long and very ancient wooden bench. Bucketfuls of dough were emptied onto the tabletop for kneading. When the dough started to look a bit too sticky, Bernadino would empty the contents of a sack of flour onto the table so that flour filled the room like a billowing cloud. When the dough started looking dry, Bernadino hurled a bucket of water down the table, soaking everyone in the process. For Bernadino, baking was away of having fun, and if you didn’t get wet, floury and laugh a lot, you weren’t doing it right.
Eventually a long sausage of dough was formed which twenty pairs of hands rolled from side to side across the table. At this stage in the process we all had to sing the Song of the Volga Boatman: I’m not quite sure why, but it was an indispensable part of the ritual. Then the loaves were formed; you kneaded your loaf and then passed it on to your neighbour. No loaf went into the oven until it had been kneaded by everyone in the room. Some of the freshly baked loaves were used for the Eucharist: the rest was for the lunch table.
And the experience of sharing the eucharist with a loaf baked by the community was a powerful one. It was our own home baked bread that we were offering to God at the altar. It was something we had made with our own hands that was being transformed to be the bread of heaven, the food in which we could taste the living God present within us.
The sharing of bread is the most basic human experience, and it is also the act that is most characteristic of the Christian Church. In the gospels we read of how Jesus put the sharing of simple meals right at the centre of the life his community of followers. Unlike John the Baptist who was more the ascetic type, Jesus was criticised for eating and drinking with all comers – behaviour deemed to be unsuitable for a Rabbi, or holy man. The invitation from Jesus was – and still is – to sit and eat with him around the table.
“Do this in remembrance of me” said Jesus – and we do. For Christian people belonging in Christ has been about the bread we share. Although in Covid times the way we celebrate and share the bread is not quite as we would choose to.
Bread also corresponds to our most basic human need for survival. To be hungry, to be deprived of bread means that human life becomes precarious and threatened.
When we pray “Give us today our daily bread”, we are acknowledging our dependency upon God for our essential needs. We are acknowledging that the soil, the grain, all creation is God’s gracious gift to us – these are no ours by right. We are recipients of grace in each breath we take and each meal we eat.
So bread is a powerful symbol for us in many ways. And bread is the theme of this wonderful chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, which we will be exploring together over the coming weeks. John chapter 6 is long – 70 verses in all – and in a way, this chapter is like the whole of the gospel in miniature. In this chapter we find out who Jesus really is, and why that makes a difference once and for all for us and the world, now and in eternity.
Chapter six starts out with the passage we just heard – the feeding of the five thousand. That leads into a discussion between Jesus and the disciples about physical bread and spiritual bread and what the difference is. Right in the middle of the chapter we have Jesus saying to us “I am the bread of life” – one of the “I am statements of John’s Gospel – I am the way, I am the good shepherd, and so on. These I am statements are key points in the gospel at which we need to sit up and pay attention. As the chapter goes on, Jesus speaks about the promise of resurrection and eternal life about his relationship with God and with his followers. And at the end of the chapter some of Jesus’s disciples struggle to accept this and stop following Jesus – while others find their commitment to Jesus has grown.
I hope that you will enjoy exploring this chapter together over the next few weeks. We will have time to think about how insights from this part of John’s gospel can help us reflect on what it means for us to be followers of Jesus in our particular time and place.
If you could manage to read John’s gospel, chapter 6 this week that would set us up well for the coming weeks. I hope you have got a version of the Bible at home in a modern translation that’s comfortable to read and easy to understand – if not, this week might be the opportunity for you to invest in a new one! Or if you prefer to read online, you can find the bible in a range of translations in the Bible Gateway website.
The story of the feeding of the 5000 is at its heart so simple: people gather, people are hungry, a peasant lad offers his humble picnic and through the transformational action of Jesus everyone is fed. It’s an image of abundance beyond what we could ever image: everyone has enough and there is so much food that twelve baskets are filled with leftovers. With Jesus, we need to know, grace is abundant. Salvation is abundant.
Where there is abundance, where there is plenty for everyone, people can live in peace with their neighbours. Where there is scarcity, competition for resources soon begins. If one country doesn’t have what it considers to be enough resources of water, food, or oil it may invade another country to plunder their resources. A person who has no resources to live on may be driven to crime to obtain them. Unequal access to basic resources is a major cause for human conflict at every level.
So when we picture these 500 people on a hillside with Jesus, I want to suggest this is an image of peace. It’s not a case that some people have masses of bread and others have none. Rather everyone has enough, and the need for conflict and competition is removed. Everyone can simply be at peace with everyone else. This is what life looks like when the people are reconciled to God and to one another. The human community gathered at the feet of Jesus, relaxing, fed by him, at peace with God and neighbour. This is a picture of the kingdom of God. When we pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, as we do every time we pray the Lord’s prayer, this is what we are praying for.
Let me end with a prayer from Mexico.
Come on
Let us celebrate the supper of the Lord
Let us make a huge loaf of bread
And let us bring abundant wine,
Like the wedding at Cana
Let the women not forget the salt
Let the men bring along the yeast
Let many guests come,
The blind, the crippled, the poor.
Come quickly, let us follow the recipe of the Lord
All of us, let us knead the dough together
Let us see with joy
How the bread grows.
Because today
We celebrate
The meeting with the Lord.
Today we renew our commitment to the kingdom.
Nobody will stay hungry.
Amen
Frances Eccleston