Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6: 1-21
Sunday 28 July 2024
©Suzanne Grimmett
What actually is the Good News?
The feeding of the five thousand appears in all four Gospels, so that is a clue to how central a story it is to the Jesus tradition. In this narrative of thousands gathering where hunger was met with a miraculous abundance, we may imagine that the crowd encountered very good news indeed. It is the kind of hope that we hear in the beautiful blessing from the letter to the Ephesians (in a slightly different translation); that God, who can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, through the Spirit may give you the power for your hidden self to grow strong…until knowing the love of Christ which is beyond all knowledge, you will be filled with the utter fullness of God.
Fullness. Abundance. A God who attends to our hunger in all its forms that we may be “utterly filled.”
I wonder if people today believe the church is the place that could go with their hunger…their thirst? I think many would believe that their hunger and thirst for relationship and meaning has more chance of being satiated through interest groups, sporting clubs and social media. And sometimes they would be right.
We spent time talking last Saturday at our Visioning Day about what is Good News and how can we live and share it. Do we have a sense of what is not just good news but wonderfully, amazingly, almost too-good-to-be-true incredible news that we have to live and to share? Do we connect what we do, breaking bread around this table, with the God who appeared on a hilltop, filled with compassion for the people who came to him in their need and gave utterly of himself that they might be utterly filled?
Shortly we will be inviting James to the water for baptism- a rite that marks not only belonging in the family of God, but names us as Christ’s own, taking us through the waters of death into life; holding us in relationship for eternity, with God and with one another. What we will witness and participate in is the promise of God’s steadfast love that took the initiative to break down all barriers that would separate us, becoming one with our humanity, in our living and our dying. In this way Christ, (as we hear in Ephesians), lives in our hearts through faith, planted in love and built on love, giving us the strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth of this good news of God’s steadfast commitment to be with us always.
There is never any promise that our life will be free of suffering. There is no guarantee that all of our physical needs will always be met. But what we do have is a God who enters into our suffering and has been joined to our physical humanity, understanding the enormity of the world’s need. In this scene on the hillside, Jesus is responding to the people in actions that flow from his compassion for their very real and practical needs and present hunger. It is important to note that he does not spiritualise their problems or judge whether their need is worthy or question their motives- he just meets it. The compassion Jesus feels results in simply meeting the needs as they present- healing the sick and feeding the hungry. However we seek to interpret the miracle, the message is clear- when it seemed there was an enormous need and scarce resources, God made a way of abundance. We so often feel that we do not have enough or are not enough, and this central story in the Gospels reminds us that “not enough” is never the last word. In the miracle of the incarnation- of the Divine presence in the crowd of humanity- God is able to show up and transform our limited expectations.
The crowd in Jesus’ time would have had varied experiences and struggles with Roman occupation, poverty, sickness and different kinds of social and religious exclusion and what they heard about Jesus seemed a way through to good news from so much bad news. I wonder if what the church today communicates about Jesus leads people to think that this is about good news- the kind of good news that can speak to their sufferings and longings and be a counter to the bad news of our time? In every generation the Gospel speaks a fresh word of hope and grace into the circumstances of our lives that seem to be utterly bad news.
I wonder how you would express what is bad news right now for our time and place?
In response to that, right now, what would sound like good news?
It seems to me that part of our task as the church is to recognise the needs of people in this particular place and share a gospel, in both words and action, that brings hope to the hunger and despair of those around us.
Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago I joined a retreat set against the astonishing backdrop of the South Island of New Zealand with a group of year 12 students from Coomera Anglican College. What struck me on this trip was that I was seeing a body of young people encounter, some for the first time, the message of faith as Good News. There are three lines that Dom Fay, who was leading the trip, uses to open worship at school and the discussion on the retreat;
Life is a gift.
The world is full of wonder
At the centre of everything is a love that will not let you go.
Doesn’t that sound like such good news? Today when so many young people feel anxious, lonely and isolated and like the world has lost all enchantment and meaning, such words speak directly to a deep hunger. Such words are teaching and healing and they were motivated by a compassion that saw the anxiety and despair of so many young people who maybe would not have responded to traditional religious language.
The God who is revealed in compassionate longing for us and solidarity with us calls us to attend to the needs of others without judgement. We, the people who know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, can live and speak a word of good news that speaks directly and thoughtfully into all the bad news of our world today. When we feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the world’s need, we might find ourselves asking, rather like St Andrew looking at a few small loaves, “Who are we among so many?” To that we are given not a simple answer but a story of God showing up, not as a great King but as a Jewish peasant from Nazareth, who gathers a crowd on a hillside and makes a meal from scarcity that is enough to fill all those hungry for the bread of life. May we, too, here in the community of St Andrew, entrusting ourselves to the abundance of the Spirit, discover Christ here working within and amongst us, doing infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
+Amen