April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
WORD OF FAITH

Looking beyond the signs

FROM A READING FOR JULY 26, 17TH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
'Lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love...' -- Ephesians 4:1-2

 Only one of Jesus' miracles is included in all four Gospels: His extraordinary feeding of a huge crowd of people. It's narrated six times!

Yet, as Scripture scholars constantly remind us, two (or more) evangelists can include the same passage in their works, yet use it to convey completely different theologies. Though every Gospel bread miracle has something to do with the Eucharist, each writer concentrates on a different aspect of it. This is certainly the case with Sunday's Gospel (John 6:1-15).

Up to this point of the "B" lectionary cycle we've been methodically listening to Mark's Gospel, appreciating how, in passage after passage, he develops his insights about dying and rising with Jesus.

Yet, just when we reach the point at which he presents his ideas about how we accomplish our dying and rising in the Eucharist -- his first bread miracle -- we shift from Mark's theology to John's, a biblical "no-no." (What's even sadder is that we'll never, during any weekend liturgy, hear Mark's take on that important miracle.)

Jesus in charge
 Mark focuses on the role of the disciples in feeding the crowd; John zeros in on Jesus. He's the one who first notices the lack of food, and then, on His own, takes care of everyone's hunger.

He's totally in control of the situation. After all, from the very beginning, "He Himself knew what He was going to do."

This is the image of Jesus the fourth evangelist almost always conveys. He usually pushes Jesus' humanity into the background and displays His divinity front and center. That's why we can't compare Elisha feeding 100 people in Sunday's II Kings (4:42-44) passage with Jesus feeding 5,000. Besides, Elisha depends on Yahweh to pull off the feat, while Jesus -- as Yahweh -- does it on His own.

Yet perhaps the most important part of John's chapter-six narrative is his insistence that this event, like all his miracles, is a "sign." What's implicit in the synoptic Gospels is explicit in John's Gospel: No evangelist employs miracles willy-nilly. Each has a reason why he puts this particular miracle in this particular place. There's always something deeper in such passages than immediately meets the eye.

For John, as for us, a sign is something which leads us to something else. If we don't reach the "something else," we won't understand what the sign was trying to convey.

It's a sign
 The late Rev. Anthony de Mello, SJ, an Indian Jesuit priest and popular spiritual author, often told a story of an Indian peasant who had a lifelong dream of visiting Bombay. When his friends and fellow villagers eventually raised enough money to make such a trip possible, he was overjoyed - yet he surprised everyone by returning from Bombay much earlier than expected.

When his benefactors asked, "Did you actually see Bombay?" he assured them he had: "It's green, about two feet long and a foot high, with big yellow letters, 'B-O-M-B-A-Y.'" Like many readers of Scripture, he had confused the sign with the reality beyond the sign.

We can't understand John's theology without understanding John's signs. For instance, in Sunday's passage, the "12 wicker baskets with fragments" can only refer to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. John is convinced that all Jews, like all Christians, could be fed by Jesus if they only permitted themselves to be fed by Him.

Of course, to appreciate John's signs we must have the same frame of mind the Pauline disciple who wrote Ephesians (4:1-6) had. We have to commit to "living in a manner worthy of the call we've received." Gospel signs are only for those committed to becoming other Christs. All others will stop at the city limits.

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