Don’t Just Explain the Alternative, Show It
John 6:1-15
Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley
March 2, 2025
Image: JESUS MAFA is a response to the New Testament readings from the Lectionary by a Christian community in Cameroon, Africa. Each of the readings was selected and adapted to dramatic interpretation by the community members. Photographs of their interpretations were made, and these were then transcribed to paintings. from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.
https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48287
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGoMR8yibaM
The day that Jesus fed a multitude is such an essential part of our story that it is the only miracle besides the resurrection told in all four gospels, and Matthew and Mark tell it twice. We know this story so well that we may not immediately notice the unique details that John includes.
John’s details point to a political meaning. They challenge the policies of the political and religious authorities and demonstrate a radical alternative to those policies. [1]
It was the time of the Passover, John says. It was the time of year when the roads should have been full of pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, the home of the Temple, the seat of political power. Instead, thousands of people went to rural Galilee to hear a peasant teach. This is a clue that the locus of power is shifting.
There were men, women and children in the crowd, but only the men were counted. That’s typical. We expect it. What might be significant is that there are 5,000 of them. We have heard that same number recently. It is the number of soldiers in a Roman Legion, an army battalion. Obery Hendricks notes that a gathering of this size without permission from the authorities constituted sedition; a crime punished by crucifixion. They are willing to risk that to be with Jesus, to receive from him. By the end of the story, they wanted to make him king. More clues that this story has political overtones.
We sometimes forget that this event, the feeding of thousands of hungry people, took place in wartime. These people were traumatized, fighting for their identity and their land, suffering under the occupation of Rome while King Herod Antipas, supposedly one of them, was focused only on building his own empire and protecting his own interests.
The event begins with Jesus asking Philip about how to buy bread for the multitude. It is a trick question, but his answer reveals a lot about the disciple’s mindset.
He says, “We can’t afford it. Six months wages wouldn’t even make a dent in the hunger of this crowd.”
Jesus goes on to demonstrate that the difference between feeding the hungry and not feeding them may simply be one of choice, of funding your priorities.[2]
A country may choose to fund medical care for seniors or it may choose to provide tax cuts for billionaires.
A country may choose to invest a small amount of its total budget in programs that alleviate suffering and help develop other nations’ capacity to care for their own citizens; a wealthy nation may choose to protect global peace and well-being with that kind of investment or it may choose instead to invest in the latest and greatest weapons of war and thus create more opportunities to use them at home and abroad.
When a person or a nation that is well-off says they can’t afford it, they are not telling you about their income and expenses. They are really making a statement about priorities.
But to be fair, Philip is not in that category. He is not a wealthy person, nor is the band following Jesus sitting on a pile of cash.
Philip is limited not only by his net worth, but by his imagination. The social political world he inhabits constrains his ideas about what is possible. Without even realizing it, he only thinks in terms of buying and selling, of hunger and scarcity. Even Andrew, who stumbles on part of the solution, says “there is a boy here with his lunch, but that won’t begin to stretch far enough.” We focus on what we don’t have; what we cannot do. Our moral imaginations are constrained by the political reality in which we live.
Of course, we know that Jesus takes that child’s lunch and feeds thousands with it. Today, people debate whether the miracle was divine multiplication or whether the miracle was inspiring everyone to share their own little supply with others until everyone’s hunger was satisfied. I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is both.
Jesus thought that the needs of the people were holy, that hungry people should be fed. He defined the people’s relationships to God and to each other as based on gift instead of debt. He put those teachings into practice and demonstrated his alternative vision.
I’m a lot like Philip these days. My moral imagination is constrained, limited by the political reality of our day. It is hard to think creatively, when the news is an endlessly numbing or terrifying. It is hard to know what to do when the power all seems to be in the wrong hands.
But, isn’t that the very context in which Jesus and his disciples were living? Isn’t that the very context in which most of our spiritual ancestors spent their entire lives?
“Christians, for the vast majority of their history, have had no say in who rules them. Kings, warlords, tyrants – they all came and went without any input from the average Christian. These past generations had to pay taxes to fill the king’s coffers. They had to serve in the king’s army. They had to subjugate themselves any time the king came near.”[3] That good reminder comes from Lutheran pastor Paul Drees.
I am struggling to know how to respond in this time. Many of us are. What is our calling right now? Isn’t it the same as it always was? Isn’t our calling in this moment to share the good news of Jesus, the one who lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things? Isn’t our calling to be the community which embodies love of neighbor and love of enemy?
We are not Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, who happen to be Christians. We are Christians who happen to be Independents, Democrats, or Republicans. I so hope this is true. The confession of the early church was Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Sovereign. That is my confession, and yours I hope. To put our ultimate trust in any political process or form of government is a violation of that allegiance.
In every time and place, under every kind of authority those who followed Jesus lived out the alternatives that Jesus taught.
They did not just speak about love; they lived lovingly.
They did not just proclaim their faith that Jesus rose from the grave;
they demonstrated it by their willingness to die for what was right.
They did not just say Thou shalt not kill, they refused to kill even in self-defense.
They did not just pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done they lived it, even when choosing God’s sovereignty over Caesar’s reign meant torture and certain death.[4]
We might remember Christians who endured faithfully under fascism. After the mainline church in Germany endorsed the Nazis in 1933, a few church leaders broke away to form a resistance movement which came to be called the Confessing Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer created a network of underground seminaries to train the next generation of ministers. It was such a threat that eventually the Gestapo arrested 27 students and shut it down.
We might remember Koinonia Farms, which has been called a demonstration plot for the kingdom of God. It was founded in 1942 in Georgia when the Klan and Jim Crow segregation defined the political landscape. It was an interracial Christian farming community where Black and White people worked and lived together. Formerly rich and formerly poor people together owned and worked 400 acres. When the community and its guests prayed or ate a meal, they all sat together at the table, regardless of color in a time when that could get you killed. They endured drive-by shootings, bombing of their roadside market and were denied membership in all the churches in town. But every single day, they lived out Jesus’ alternative vision.
There are so many more stories like these that we could lift up. I think of black churches that functioned as banks and provided loans when black people could not get them. I’m aware that white people these days are just beginning to feel some of the rage at the injustice being perpetuated by those in power, the kind of systemic injustice and abuse of power that black people in this country have lived with for generations.
Democracy is not yet dead. I believe we are still called to resist, to bring all of our power to bear for the good of each other as citizens in this place. But we are also citizens of another realm, one that requires the courage of Jesus alternate vision.
There are real and valid fears about what may be lost in this administration. I do not seek to minimize them. There’s a fear that people may lose the right to marry the one they love. That is a valid concern and we should resist that with all of our power. But I would gently remind us that we don’t bless marriages because the state tells us we can. This church and others blessed same sex marriages long before it was legal and we will continue to bless whoever we want to bless.
There are real and valid concerns about the white supremacy, about the dismantling of efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion. We should resist that with all of our power. But again, I would gently remind us that we have long been about diversity and inclusion. Generations of Christian children have sung about red and yellow, black and white being precious in God’s sight. We will decide who to shelter, who belongs to us, and we take our orders on that from Jesus, not from the president.
We gather in a moment around the table. We eat symbolically, but the early Christians consumed a full meal. They shared a banquet which broke the rules of social hierarchy that defined the banquets of the time. At the Lord’s Supper, rich free men had to accept as equals women
and enslaved persons and the poor.[5] Those with social status gave up their privilege and those without status gained it, as they lived out the alternatives Jesus taught, becoming a demonstration plot of the kingdom of God.
May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted, (New York: Doubleday, 2006), p. 179
[2] Hendricks, p. 181
[3] The Rev Paul Drees, https://www.instagram.com/pastorpauldrees/reel/DCCOWZmK9Lj/
[4] Hendricks, p 183
[5] Joachim Kugler, Politics of Feeding: Reading John 6 and (I Cor 11) as Documents of Socio-Politcal conflict https://d-nb.info/1153407906/34