July 25, 2021 “Enough?” – John 6:1-21

John 6:1-21
“Enough?”
July 25, 2021 – Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Remember last year when you celebrated because you found toilet paper to buy? Or disinfectant wipes? It’s hard to believe such humble, seldom-mentioned commodities became so precious for a while. Yes, there were manufacturing and supply problems because of COVID-19, but most of the scarcity was caused by panic-buying and hoarding. In other words, fear of a toilet paper shortage created a toilet paper shortage.

Will there be enough? We bring that question to much of life. Earlier this year it was vaccines. There weren’t enough rolling out fast enough for all of us who wanted them. Now we worry that there aren’t enough people willing to receive them. The threat of “not enough” looms. We see and hear governors and others calling for people to be vaccinated in states like Alabama where the virus is surging and think, “Too little, not enough.”

That “too little, not enough” feeling affects us in simpler, more ordinary ways. Last week you may have surveyed the sandwiches being safely served after worship and worried there wasn’t enough. Maybe you wanted two or three instead of just one. Maybe the kind of chips you like ran out before you got there. Getting enough concerns us.

Our text today takes us back to the scene we skipped over in Mark 6 last week. Here at the beginning of John 6, we find a crowd, maybe largely men, as I said last time, gathering on “the other side of the Sea of Galilee.” Because John’s Gospel was later, he adds the Roman name “Sea of Tiberias.” In 20 A.D. Herod built a city on the western shore, naming it after emperor Tiberias. It gradually became the name of the lake as well.

As in Mark 6, Jesus and the disciples rowed back and forth across the Sea of Galilee. The crowds kept following. In verse 3 John offers a slightly different perspective from Mark. Jesus went up the mountain with His disciples, then in verse 5 looked up to see a large crowd coming toward them. Jesus Himself asks the “enough” question of Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”

Jesus may have asked Philip because Philip was from “around there.” It was like an out of town visitor asking you, “Where can I get some good sushi in this town?” or “Where should I go for a great local brew?” Philip was the local guy who would know where to go for food. But as you heard, Philip was flummoxed.

Verse 6 tells us, “He [Jesus] said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.” Jesus was just messing with Philip, but the poor guy took it seriously. He had a head for numbers and did the math. His answer in verse 7 was, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” Literally, he said, “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough.” A denarius was a day’s wage, so 200 of them is over half a year’s salary. It’s interesting that Philip did not figure out how much money it would take to do the job. He just grabbed an arbitrary figure, decided it was way too much, and concluded there was absolutely no way for Jesus and the disciples to set out enough sandwiches for everybody to have one, much less “seconds.”

Philips’ mindset was very like that pandemic scarcity thinking. It may be wired into us as human beings to calculate whether we will have enough, whether what we have is sufficient to meet our needs. When we come up short, we may just short-circuit, quit thinking, stop coming up with solutions.

It’s what sometimes called “zero-sum” thinking. The term is from game theory in which what one side wins is equivalent to what the other side loses. Winning and losing cancel each other, zero out. If Sally takes your pawn in chess, then you are down a pawn in comparison. If the USA wins a gold medal, then China loses that one. If the Beavers win, the Ducks lose. And as Ropert Sapolsky indicates, if you view that other side too much as “them,” it feels like a loss for you even when the other “side” wins against someone else.[1] Some Duck fans don’t want the Beavers to win against the Huskies either.

In any case, Philip was clearly calculating from a zero-sum point of view. Whatever money they had, it was not enough to feed the crowd. There were just so many resources on hand, and some people, maybe a lot of people were going to lose out.

Andrew did better in verses 8 and 9. He at least got beyond mental calculation of the problem and went out to scout the crowd. He found a little food in the form of a boy’s lunch, “five barley loaves and two fish.” Mark the loaves and fish, but only John recalls the boy and that they were barley loaves, the very cheapest, roughest sort of bread. The fish were small dried, pickled things like sardines, barely an appetizer to go with the bread. So Andrew did his own calculations, his own analysis of this impossible, zero-sum game: “But what are they among so many people?”

All along, though, John has been dropping hints about what is to happen. Verse 6 told us Jesus “himself knew what he was going to do.” Earlier, in verse 4, for no apparent reason, John mentions this is the time of Passover. Mark just tells us the grass on which the crowd sat was green. It was springtime. But John makes the connection between this event and the fact that it was time for the Jewish holiday which celebrates Israel’s exodus from Egypt, a time of miracles, a time when God fed people with manna in the desert.

Almost everything Jesus said and did leading up to the miracle must have baffled HIs disciples. In verse 10 He told them to have the people sit down on the grass. You can just imagine them silently asking “Why?” As Mark recounts, they sat down in groups of 50 or 100. As Stan pointed out to me this week, that meant the disciples could pretty easily see they might each be responsible for about 400 people.

Stan pictured the disciples doing their own math as they imagined dividing up the loaves and fishes. “Let’s see, we’ll each get less than half a loaf, and a sixth of a fish. Now I’m going to take that in my hand and carry it over to that first group of fifty in my 400…” They would each have had to conclude yet even more clearly, once again, “There’s not enough. There is absolutely, beyond a doubt, not enough!”

You and I are often just like those disciples. We expect scarcity. We doubt there will be enough. We live and work and vote according to that expectation. We try to protect ourselves, to guard against inevitable disappointments when it turns out there’s not enough toilet paper, or money, or housing, or God help us, even food. Like Philip and Andrew, we do the math and it comes up short. Somebody is going to lose out, and, perhaps we think, “Let’s not have it be us!”

Jesus responded to all those expectations, to all such expectations of scarcity, with an act of abundance. The story turns around when we read in verse 11, “Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.” That’s the heart of the miracle here. Jesus takes the bread and the fish, gives thanks to God and then distributes it. And there is enough.

Again, the food which was enough in Jesus’ hands was plain fare. He changed water into the best of wines, but, as I said, the loaves and fishes were cheap, common stuff, survival provisions. Jesus didn’t give the crowd the rich food they might have wanted, but He gave them enough of what they actually needed.

There was, in fact, more than enough. In verses 12 and 13, Jesus directs the saving of the leftovers. There are twelve baskets full, one basket for each disciple. This is the only one of Jesus’ miracles that appears in all four Gospels. It made a huge impression on the disciples. When they shared their memories of what Jesus had done and said, they must have told this story over and over. They remembered how that day by Galilee, when everyone thought they would go hungry, there had been enough, more than enough.

Let us remember that miracle too as we go through life and encounter scarcity of all sorts. Beth and I have saved for a new roof that will be installed next month. We worry if we’ve saved enough. Part of that worry is the scarcity and price of building materials like plywood. But we know others, even right here in our community, are worrying about enough food, enough safe places to put up a tent in which to sleep, enough medical care if they get sick.

Let us try to bring Jesus into our calculations about the scarcities we face. His presence on that spring afternoon by the sea meant there was enough. How can the presence of Jesus change the zero-sum games we play and in which we compete? Is our focus only on scarce resources? Or can the game be about joyful celebration of abundance?

Verse 14 shows people there trying to get Jesus into their own games. They put theological pieces together. It’s Passover time. When Moses led the people out into the desert, God fed them with manna. As they munched a humble barley loaf they may have remembered what we read from II Kings 4. Elisha fed a hundred men with twenty barley loaves. Jesus did more. He fed thousands with five loaves. And those twelve baskets of leftovers may have been figured in. There were twelve tribes of Israel and a full basket for each. Maybe, the thought, Jesus could feed the whole nation, all Israel. Maybe He was the Prophet, the one Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18:15.

So, as I mentioned last week, verse 15 says they were going to take hold of Jesus and make Him their king. If this crowd was, in fact, men wanting to be an army, they had found both the perfect commander and quartermaster. All their supply problems were solved. They could march clear to Rome itself and still have enough rations.

Yet something is way off about the crowd’s approach to Jesus. It’s a little like hoarding toilet paper, with no thought about how what you do will affect others. If they make Jesus their king and corner the market on bread and fish, what does it mean for the rest of the world? What happens to the Romans their army will fight and kill? What happens to those whom they imagine are not worthy of sharing in the miraculous feast? Were they working on the basis of “There’s enough for everyone,” or just on the basis of “There’s enough for us?” Or even merely, “There’s enough for me?”

Jesus did not want anything to do with the kind of “bread and circuses” by which Roman rulers pacified and controlled people. Instead, verse 15 tells us He, “withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” He left the crowd because it wasn’t only bread and the fish they needed. There was more to the miracle than just getting enough to eat. Over the next few weeks we will unpack what Jesus had to say about that “something more” in the rest of John 6. Eating literal bread was a sign for eating spiritual food that was even more nourishing and even more necessary.

Our lectionary reading tacks one more story onto this text. In verses 16 to 21 the disciples set out yet once more to row across the lake. Jesus stayed behind alone on the mountain. Mark tells us He sent them ahead so He could pray by Himself. Out there on the lake, they were once again in rough water, with the wind blowing hard against them. Then they saw Jesus walking toward them on the water.

John just says in verse 19 that they were terrified. Mark explained they were afraid because they thought they were seeing a ghost. But listen to what Jesus said to them. “It is I; don’t be afraid.” Jesus said the same thing aloud that He said with the miracle. “Don’t be afraid.” Don’t be afraid of rough seas and the appearance of frightening images. Don’t be afraid of not having enough. “It is I.” The Good News is that Jesus comes and brings us into His kingdom where we need not fear, where there will be enough.

Mark 6 verses 51 and 52 said that the disciples were amazed at Jesus walking on the water because “they did not understand about the loaves…” It wasn’t just that didn’t yet realize how powerful Jesus is. What they didn’t yet grasp was who He was and what that meant. Jesus is the One who comes and banishes our fears, our fears that we will not have enough and our fears of all other evil both real and imagined.

We gather together as followers of Jesus Christ to remember that our Lord has enough, enough not just for us, but for everyone. And while the miracle of the loaves and fish means more than just having enough food for everyone, it does not mean less than that. People who know and love Jesus believe that He asks to trust in His abundance and make that available right now for people among and around us.

Last week I opened a letter from a family in our congregation. It was a letter of thanks for how many of you helped them before the pandemic with gifts to our Love Offering fund. What you gave became part of larger gift we gave them to help in a time of crisis. But as it turned out, the letter said, they had everything they needed financially and more. So a check fell out of the envelope to repay that gift… with interest. Now there will be even more in our fund to help someone else in need. That’s a concrete example of what the loaves and fishes teach us. God is not a God of scarcity but of abundance. There’s enough.

We are not followers of zero-sum economic theories or games. We are not disciples of those who tell us that feeding the hungry or housing the houseless or providing medical care for those who have none will only mean less for the rest of us. We are followers of Jesus, members of a kingdom in which there is meant to be enough, enough not just for me and you, but for everyone. Let us calculate the ramifications of that kingdom’s abundance as we decide how to live and relate to others in this world.

When I talked to Stan about this text, he also noted how dividing up the crowd and perhaps assigning several groups for each disciple to serve is much like what we did Thursday evening. Your deacons met and each took responsibility to look after and care for a group of people in our congregation. The aim was that no one be left out, that no one slip through the cracks and be forgotten. Again, that’s the abundance of God’s kingdom, the abundance of love and care that provides enough for everyone.

I don’t know what you each came looking for this morning, but the Good News of Jesus Christ is that there’s enough for you. It may not be an abundance of what you think you want, but there is enough of what you need. There is enough forgiveness, no matter what your sins are. There is love enough for you to find a friend here. There is enough kindness and generosity among us for you to receive some help from us. There’s enough.

There’s enough, because Jesus is enough. Sometimes we’ll see grand miracles of provision and generosity. If we bring Him our little loaves of bread, Christ our Lord may multiply them far beyond what we can imagine. But Jesus didn’t come just to give us a nice lunch or even to heal our diseases. He came and still comes saying, “It is I.” Get to know Jesus alongside others getting to know Him, and it will be enough, more than enough.

Amen.

[1] Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), p. 394f.