Kathleen Rushton highlights aspects of John 6 as a guide for our contextualising the Gospel in our lives and world.

Gospel stories invite us into a two-way creative wrestle: with being Christian and with culture. John 6 presents Jesus in a dynamic process of contextualising, understanding his place, in his place. It also invites us into a process of contextualising, understanding our place, in our place. Taiwanese theologian Shoki Coe explains that we move beyond the past-orientated processes suggested by “context” or “contextual” to a process of contextualising. It is an on-going work of being in the present and always on the way. It can remind us that we are on pilgrimage, called to be in one place and also to be frontier-crossing.

John’s contextualising of the feeding the 5,000 was written probably during the 90s in Ephesus in the prosperous Roman province of Asia Minor. Today we are invited to understand the significance of the story for contextualising in our world. Particular features of John 6, such as, Tiberias, the portrayal of Jesus, barley loaves, fragments and abundance and other aspects of the discourse may help us.

Contextualising in the 90s — Significance of Tiberias

Jesus went to the other side of the “Sea of Galilee, of Tiberias” and a “large crowd kept following him”. At the time the marginalised crowd living under Roman occupation could not afford to go up to Jerusalem for Passover. The establishment of the nearby Roman cities of Tiberias and Sepphoris meant that many had lost land and been displaced. Jesus understood that many were unmoored from the faith of their ancestors. He adapted the Wisdom and Exodus traditions to their situation in prophetic critique of the way things were.

Portrayal of Jesus

Chapters 5-10 in John’s Gospel are structured around Jewish feasts. After the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, the question about where Wisdom was located was debated. By John 6, Jesus is established as Wisdom-Sophia. He evokes the female wisdom figure in Proverbs 9:5 who takes the initiative and gathers her disciples: “Come, eat of my bread and drink of my wine”. Whereas the other Gospels have the institution narrative at a Passover meal the night before Jesus died, in John Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. The Passover-Eucharist link is made in John 6:4: “the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.”

Barley Loaves

Jesus took the initiative on behalf of the crowd whom he “looked up and saw” and asked Philip where they could “buy bread for these people to eat”. “Buy” comes from agora (marketplace). Jesus and the disciples had money and to give to poor people (Jn 12:5-8; 13:29). Philip took a business manager’s approach — they did not have enough money to feed the crowd. They had only five loaves made from barley, the food of the poor.

Fragments Mean Abundance

Jesus gave thanks (eucharistein) and distributed the bread to the crowd himself. (This evokes the other Gospels’ last supper accounts where he took the loaves, gave thanks and distributed them.) And there are biblical echoes: Elisha feeding a multitude with barley loaves (2 Kgs 4:42-44) and having some left over; the Exodus feedings, and other biblical feedings where there was always some “left over”. In John 6:12, “left over” has the sense of extraordinary, overflowing abundance. The expression “gather up the fragments” is also found in early Christian writings referring to Eucharistic fragments.

Contextualising in the 2020s — Bread for All

In proclaiming: “I am the bread of life” and “I am the living bread” (Jn 6:35,51) Jesus gives human grounding to the Eucharist. We speak familiarly of bread as a specific food and, as well, we use bread to include food in general. Sayings such as to “earn our bread by the sweat of our brow” and to put “bread on the table” mean to provide the food necessary for life.

Jesus’s “I am” statements are not about who he is but about what he does. He nourishes with bread. When the crowd asks: “What must we do to perform the works of God?” (Jn 6:28) Jesus replies: “This is the work of God that you believe into him whom [God] has sent.” This can cause us to reflect about the situations of hunger in our world.

According to the United Nations, nearly 690 million people in the world are hungry or affected by hunger. The more we know about world hunger, the more we spread the word and the more likely we will contribute to achieving the UN’s second Sustainable Development Global Goal of erasing hunger completely in the world. Hunger in the world is not just a political and economic problem. It is a moral and spiritual problem. For us as Christians the social dimensions of Eucharist are incomplete while world hunger exists. Like Jesus-Wisdom-Sophia, we can become agents of change.

The good news is that Earth produces enough food to feed everyone. We have an abundance of food. The bad news is that too much food is wasted. Every year about one-third of the food produced for human consumption — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — is lost or wasted, especially in rich countries. This is an imbalance we have to correct as we place wellbeing at the centre of our choices — choices we make as individuals, households, civil society, local government and the global community. We must make these choices for the common good.

In the Johannine story the boy gives the disciples five barley loaves — a tiny amount considering the size of the crowd. We can gather our food “fragments”, too, making sure we don’t contribute to food waste. We can develop habits such as composting and donating food we don’t need. We can contribute food to the supermarket food bank bin, or the St Vincent de Paul collection. We could volunteer at a food save, Meals on Wheels, or other organisation. We can support local and international ventures to feed the world.

John’s Gospel insists that the life that Jesus gives us is right now. “Eternal life” is not about the future but is concerned with what is necessary to sustain life today. Bread — our daily bread — is linked to what Jesus wants to give – “the food that endures for eternal life” (Jn 6:27). It is about enabling us to live contextualising a new way of being in and for Earth and all people.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 261, July 2021: 24-25