Signs of the Kingdom
Written by Kent McDougal
Signs of the Kingdom
Days of promise, breaking forth like the new spring, are returning to the people of God. Signs of deliverance and the coming kingdom are afoot. A prophet like Moses has come to Jerusalem proclaiming good news and healing the sick.
Now crowds from that city, numbering thousands, follow him through the sea up the mountainside and are instructed to sit down in the grass in anticipation of God’s hospitality. The setting for this spring picnic should sound familiar.
Long ago God delivered his people from bondage through the sea, met them on a mountain, and then fed them in the wilderness. John even says this all takes place when it’s almost Passover - the very time the Exodus is rehearsed and hoped for again.
When Jesus sees the great crowd coming, he asks Phillip (who’s from these parts), “Where will we get bread for our dinner guests?” Jesus knows the answer, but he asks his church-in-discipleship in order to see how they will size up the situation.
The nascent church doesn’t do well. Taking ourselves and the crowd too seriously (big crowd, small resources), we forget to take the One who questions us more seriously. The result? The disciples do what we so often do. They do the math…not enough!
Amid the hopeful signs and plush grass of the spring mountainside; amid the promise of our Psalm today, “You satisfy the desire of all living things;” scarcity raises its ugly anxious head. The church asks, “How could we ever extend God’s hospitality to all these people?”
But Jesus simply takes the meager gifts at hand and gives thanks (eucharisto) to the Father for them. Jesus’ eucharistic prayer, like the Eucharist itself, graciously dismantles all our economics of scarcity. After all, this is God’s hospitality, this the Lord’s Table!
All the bounty of the earth are “the gifts of God for the people of God;” gifts joyfully received and shared! As Alexander Schmemann reminds us, God creates us with a need for food, God provides that food, and we give him thanks and praise. All food is about Holy Communion.
The Bread of heaven, like the manna, teaches us that God’s gifts are not to be hoarded. If there are hungry people in the world that’s on us - both on a micro (school lunches) and macro level (climate change)! In the Divine Economy there’s more than enough - leftovers!
Grasping at Signs
Satiated with the bread that perishes, the crowd misses the miraculous sign pointing to the Bread of Life who comes down from heaven. So rather than give thanks for God’s gifts, as Jesus did, the crowd tries to grasp Jesus and forcefully make him their welfare king.
Jesus gives us signs of the greater gifts of the Age to come; yet we grasp after his signs, and so miss the point. So he disappears up the mountain. Jesus refuses to give himself to us on our own terms because he loves us and so wants more for us than we want for ourselves.
After all, getting what we want is hell. Look at David in our O.T. reading today. David is a king; kings can get what they want. He wants Bathsheba. He gets what he wants and all hell breaks loose in its aftermath.
David’s restless soul couldn’t find rest in the things of this world - including a one-night stand. It could no more satisfy him than the crowds could be satisfied by getting another meal out of Jesus. Like the crowds, David will wake up “hungry” in the morning.
In theological terms this is the choice between idolatry and worship. Idolatry divorces the gifts of God from God. Then it tries in vain to displace God as the source of life. Worship, on the other hand, receives the gifts of God as signs, signs that point us to God who alone is our Life.
Ironically, the very goodness of God’s gifts makes this difficult for us. What’s wrong with wanting a little food security? What’s wrong with wanting a little romance? Nothing - when they are ordered under and to our love for God and neighbor!
The problem isn’t our desire for God’s gifts. The problem is wanting them apart from God. We try to possess God’s gifts in order to eliminate our need for God. But our need for God is God’s greatest gift to us. It calls us beyond the scarcity of idolatry to the abundance of worship
In those moments of scarcity, in those moments when we discover this world just isn’t enough for us, we are faced with a choice. It’s a fundamental choice between worshiping the living God or our lifeless idols.
We can, like David and the crowd, grasp at the idols of Aphrodite and Mammon. We can try to squeeze life out of them only to find they can’t deliver. Or we can give thanks for God’s good gifts that draw us to embrace the bread of eternal life in Holy Communion.
In Over Our Heads
Jesus uses a nice spring picnic to catechize the church. That seems all well and good. But to use a storm threatening our life for his next catechism class is a bit more disconcerting! (If we did something like that with our catechism classes we might be more interesting than soccer!)
Jesus will not be possessed by the crowds or the church. Despite all our grasping, Jesus is the gift that won’t let us have him without also bringing us to the end of ourselves in a watery death called baptism.
So in the second pericope we have a picture of the church setting sail in mission alone. Although toiling with all her might, she is overwhelmed by the chaotic powers of the wind and the sea, just as earlier that day they were overwhelmed by the task of feeding thousands.
It’s a gift to realize we can’t feed the crowds or overcome the powers of chaos opposing the church’s mission on our own. For in these moments we come to the end of ourselves and are beckoned back to God and his abundance.
Will the mission, with its sea of needs, put us in over our heads? You better believe it! And yet that is the gift – to be thrown back on the bounty of God through our own share in his death and resurrection through baptism.
Jesus comes to his overwhelmed church as Lord of the wind and the sea. We’re terrified when Jesus comes to us in ways we never imagined - like resurrection! But the Lord comes to his needy fearful church saying, “It is I (AM); do not be afraid.”
And with this good word God gives us the courage to accept our baptism and weather the storms of our calling to be the church. God often uses storms to kill our idols and teach us to long for Jesus alone. And immediately we reach the land toward which we are going!
Jesus is our destination because he is the Bread of Heaven, the abundant eternal life of God. By our death and resurrection through baptismal water and wind/Spirit we discover there is no scarcity of God’s gifts. This is why the Apostle Paul is able to pray for us this morning:
“I pray…that you…may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”