The bread of life: hunger and power

  There is much in ordinary life that we take for granted, much that we appreciate only when there is a shortage. Then everyone scrambles for the remaining resources. As a Palestinian Jew, Jesus was brought up in a religion which hallowed everyday things, such as bread and wine, because they were appreciated as gifts from God himself. Food was a holy thing, and the Law required people to say a prayer of thanks every time they had eaten. The rabbis taught that a meal without a prayer was a meal that was accursed. Bread was the essential, basic food: ‘’to eat bread’’ in Hebrew meant ‘’to have a meal’’ The poor ate barley bread, the rich ate the bread of wheat. Whether of barley or wheat, bread was to be treated with respect: if crumbs were ‘’as large as an olive’’, it was forbidden to throw them away. An unknown author has a simple poem in praise of bread, an appreciation of this food of life: ‘Be gentle when you touch bread. Let it not lie uncared for-unwanted. So often bread is taken for granted. There is much beauty in bread - beauty of sun and soil, beauty of patient toil. Winds and rain have caressed it, Christ often blessed it. Be gentle when you touch bread.”

  The disciples tell the people to sit down. Jesus takes the food the boy is willing to share; he gives thank to God for it; he then gives the food to the waiting people. When everyone is satisfied, nothing is lost: the scraps are collected ‘’from the meal of five barley loaves.’’ At the end of the story the emphasis is on the bread. With Jesus as the resource, the bread of the poor is seen to be enough to satisfy the hunger of so many people. In the hands of Jesus, shortage becomes abundance, deficiency becomes plenty, nothing is lost of what has been given to him. 

After the crowds take the food, they want to take Jesus by force and make him king. Their action is the kind of suspect gratitude that Dr. Johnson described as ‘’a lively sense of favors still to come’’ But Jesus is not going to be tempted to exercise that kind of fragile power and authority. In the Gospels of Luke and Matthew Jesus fights this temptation in the wilderness; here in John’s Gospel, the temptation comes not from the devil but from a crowd of Galileans. But Jesus knows when to run. He does, into the hills.  Jesus is happy to satisfy the hunger of the crowd by offering them the bread of the poor; he is not happy to satisfy their hunger for power by agreeing to become their king. There are some hungers Jesus refuses to satisfy: the hunger for domination is one of them. He is bread that is offered, a lordship of care that is a sign of God’s ultimate reign when all will be fed. He rejects the lordship of domination, the destructive power of which he sees all around him.

Perhaps Jesus believes that the power which lords it over other people is one that keeps bread from the hungry, a power that steals the community’s resources to secure its own superiority. This is something we are beginning to appreciate ourselves; especially with our massive defense spending. And that spending is related to other issues, not least the hunger of many people. As President Eisenhower observed: ‘’Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed.’’

  The power that dominates with force steals from the hungry multitudes. In saying no to the Galileans who would make him king, Jesus gives us the model of Christian leadership- one that must forever escape from being made in the image of secular power, because it must be free to offer itself to all the multitude. That is Jesus’ challenge to us all. Only when we share the little, we appear to have, will we discover how much we have left over. That truth can only be discovered by doing it.