Readings:
Sermon:
We’re knee deep in sensational signs and miracles at this point in John’s Gospel; sensational things are happening in chapters 2-11, which, because of the miracles Jesus is performing, has become known as the Book of Signs. All of the signs Jesus shows to the world, from the wine and water sensation at Cana, to the mind-bending debate with Nicodemus, and onwards all the way to the jiggery-pokery with Lazarus and the tomb, all of these things, and many in between, point this Rabbi out as someone who’s got a whole variety of unique selling points, and shows that he is wholly unlike all of the other Rabbis making similar claims to him.
Truly, he is the son of God, as someone will say, somewhere.
Humanity tends to gravitate towards the sensational. Victorian fiction consisted of, in part, a genre called ‘Novels of Sensation’. Novels like Wilkie Collins’s ‘A Woman in White’, or Mary Braddon’s ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, and there were many others, challenged people’s belief systems, and appealed to the sensations. In buttoned-up Victorian society, they were frowned upon because they did what they said on the tin; they challenged people because they tested the sensation that the reader felt when they read the stories; their subjects were gothic horror, crime, loss of identity, anything that wrested with social anxieties. People who read these novels reacted to them, and became aware of different sensations, because they asked questions about the fundamental structures of society – they made all things new.
As Jesus takes, breaks, and multiplies the loaves he is publicly doing something that lies outside the norms, both of society and of physics. The Passover feast was near, we hear, and no doubt there were food vendors not so far off, but nevertheless, the word of God, and his charity, and his pastoral care for people can’t be bound by structures. He had said elsewhere that he came to fulfil the law, not to destroy it, and so here he fulfils the Festival principles of feeding those who don’t have anything. It’s a sensational mark of his difference, and it provokes the people to want to elevate him, to ‘make him king by force’, but perhaps the most sensational thing of the whole episode is his response. His response is one of humility and prayer; he ‘withdrew again to a mountain by himself.’ Not for him public adulation and public praise; instead, he takes himself away and, no doubt, offers thanks to his Father for the goodness that he has been able to mediate to his people.
So he shows us that there are many different ways to show signs; to be sensational. The world demands more and more ‘content’, and demands that we always move onto and provide for the next big thing. But Jesus, instead, arrives, appraises himself of a situation, gathers all that he has and, without apologising if it doesn’t seem enough, just places it in God’s hands. Its his acceptance of what life throws at him that’s the sensational thing; and, as we read, and learn, and pray, we need reminding of his sensational presence, already present in our lives and the world; and we remember that all we need to do is to allow Him to live, and move and have his being, and for him to be obviously present in us in all that we do in our lives. ‘Come, lord, and open, in us, the gates of your Kingdom.’
That should be sensational enough for anyone. Shouldn’t it?
Amen.
Questions:
- What have you forgotten is extraordinary in your life?
- How do people see the gates of the kingdom opened in you?
- Do you have the courage to withdraw from the world and just be, with God?