Belief and impossibility

John 6, 12-15: When they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten.

Many people see Christianity as unacceptable because it requires them to believe the impossible. Certainly, if one were designing a religion for the 21^st century, one wouldn’t start from where we Christians find ourselves, with a virgin birth, walking on water, a resurrection from the dead, an ascension into heaven, and the feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes. Much better to have a few high-minded moral principles, like human equality or even loving one’s neighbour. Whatever they may have done for the people of the first century, miracles really don’t win us many friends. One thinks of Alice’s exchange with the Queen in Through the Looking Glass:

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

That ‘six impossible things’ has become for many a shorthand for the irrationality of Christianity was underlined when Lewis Wolpert, the Professor of Biology at University College, used the phrase as the title of his book on the evolutionary history of (of course delusional) belief.

Alice’s Queen mentioned breakfast, and breakfast is very much to the point here, because what we have in this evening’s reading is an impossible breakfast: plenty out of nearly nothing, so much that the people simply can’t eat everything that they are given. And as if that weren’t enough, the author of John’s gospel makes it still harder for us. We cope as best we can with the story of the miraculous meal, and then he adds the final incredible touch: what was left was more than there was at the beginning: twelve baskets, full, from just five loaves.

Where does one start with this kind of story? The first thing to say is that people in the first century did not approach stories in quite the way that we do. Our first instinct is to categorise, to ask what kind of story this is. Is it an account of something that really happened? Is it fiction? Is it some kind of symbolic narrative? We want to know where to place it, so that we can read it appropriately; and our categories are mutually exclusive. If it is fiction, it can’t be history, and if it is poetic and symbolic, then it can’t be biography, which is what the gospels appear to us to be.

But the writers of the first century were not working within our categories, nor were they worried about keeping different kinds of writing pure and distinct from each other. If you were writing the life of a great hero, it was all to the good to include tales that emphasised his heroic stature, even if there was little evidence for them. And the purpose of the writers of the gospels was not to provide a fully-researched, footnote-authenticated biography of Jesus, but to convey the truth of who he was. That is why we call them gospels and not biographies: because they insist on the meaning of Christ, not on what we, if we had been around, might have discovered about the facts.

So: the point of the story of the five thousand is not, primarily, to record the details of one amazing afternoon, but to make plain the meaning of Jesus for his time and for ours. Certainly some real event is involved: this story is not offered as a parable. But also there is John’s deep reflection, over some sixty years, on the truth of Christ, on what Christ means for the world. And into that reflection John draws the tradition of the Eucharist, already well established by the last decade of the first century, when this passage was written.

If you look carefully at the story, you will see that in several important ways it parallels the Last Supper narratives, the accounts of the institution of the Eucharist which we find in the other gospel writers but not in John. First, this miraculous feeding happens at the time of the Passover. There is at least the suggestion that this miraculous meal is a new Passover, the Passover of a new dispensation. Then there are the details that John very carefully gives us gives us. The gifts are passed from the people to Christ, who accepts them, gives thanks, and returns them to the people, all of whom are invited to eat. This follows, with remarkable closeness, the familiar words of institution: “he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, eat ye all of this…” The only detail missing is |Christ’s identification of himself with the food: “for this is my body…” But in John that comes later, in verse 35 of the same chapter: “Jesus said to them ‘I and the bread of life.’” One might even see something of Eucharistic practice in the careful gathering of the remnants: then, as now, there is an obligation that “nothing may be lost.”

This story is, then, from one point of view, John’s account of the institution of the Eucharist. But it is also, and more importantly, an enactment of Christ’s relation to the world and to us. Notice where the story starts from: it begins with human need—these people are hungry—and from human insufficiency—what they have is not enough to feed them. That on the one side. But on the other side—that of Christ—there is no great wealth, no magical cornucopia of gifts which the God will shower on these devotees. If the people have little, Christ has nothing at all. But this man, whose poverty is greater than that of the people sitting around him, takes the little that they have and returns it to them as fullness.

That, of course, is implausible, impossible, against every standard of rationality. And that is John’s point. This gospel was not written by a primitive peasant gullibly recounting fantastic tales about a man whom he had, in retrospect, made into a god. It was written by someone who had spent a long lifetime reflecting on the wealth of Christ: on how it could be that this impoverished, defeated preacher could, in truth, be the life of the world. And he had come to see that the impossibility of it all was the key, that in that impossibility the true being of Christ was revealed. John could not explain what happened on that afternoon any more than we can, except to be sure that what Jesus had to offer was his poverty, his emptiness before God; an emptiness that allowed God to fill him entirely and so made him the means by which God’s life, in its fullness, flowed into the world.

The impossibility of this miracle story is not there to display the power of Christ, as though he were some magician. It is there to show that at the point of impossibility God’s wealth enters our lives. When we can see no rational way through; when all the possibilities have been closed to us; when we are left with our inadequacy, with a hunger that we have no way of feeding, then we shall know what it means for Christ to say, as he does later in this chapter: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.” Amen.