A Meditation on John 6:1-15

A Meditation on the Gospel According to John 6:1-15

by Dr. Meghan McGrath

Jesus said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they^* sat down, about five thousand in all. 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. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’

Many extol hunger for beauty, wisdom or justice as a powerful force for good, but some even extend this description of hunger to include the hunger for food.  Social activist, Dorothy Fisher tells us that “hunger teaches the value of food.” Playwright Miguel Cervantes seems to go one step further when he writes, “There's no sauce in the world like hunger.”

But these statements speak to a sort of hunger that is in one’s control, a hunger that enriches rather than depletes us. These statements speak to a hunger that we who have enough, who have plenty, sometimes use as a corrective to our condition of over abundance. But for those who do not even have enough, those who are starving rather than fasting, hunger is not a spiritual practice, it is a matter of life and death. As musician and humanitarian Bob Geldof puts it, “It's really very simple…. When people are hungry they die.”

The United Nations estimates that there are about the billion people in this world who are chronically hungry; and not by choice. And so we who have more than enough would be well to remember that we live in a world where one billion people do not have enough, where one billion people are hungry, seemingly without hope. What is it like to be hungry without hope?

Real hunger imposes so many limits on this life, limits on growth, on our perceptions, and on the possibilities and liberties that should be inherent in our birth. But as Adlai Stevenson said: “a hungry man is not a free man.” And as Pearl Buck wrote:  "A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.”

The miracle in today’s Gospel reading described by John involves Jesus miraculously turning five loaves of bread and some fish into enough food to feed the crowd of five thousand, with enough leftover to fill twelve baskets of leftovers.  For early Christians, this over-the-top miracle of plenty must have been stunning.  How do we, with our comforts of modern life, with leftovers in our fridge and the need to exert “portion control” in restaurants, understand what it means to be truly hungry?  How can we connect with those in our world who are truly hungry, as we live with more than enough. What sign do we need, we who have plenty, to proclaim with those who have less than enough, that:  “this is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world?”