Trinity 9

Opening Verse of Scripture  Ephesians 3:20

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Collect Prayer for the Day—Before we read we pray

Almighty God, who sent your Holy Spirit to be the life and light of your Church: open our hearts to the riches of your grace, that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit in love and joy and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Gracious Father, revive your Church in our day, and make her holy, strong and faithful, for your glory’s sake in Jesus Christ our Lord.

First Bible Reading 2 Kings 4.42–44

A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha said, ‘Give it to the people and let them eat.’ But his servant said, ‘How can I set this before a hundred people?’ So he repeated, ‘Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord, “They shall eat and have some left.” ’ He set it before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the Lord.

Second Reading Ephesians 3.14–21

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.

Gospel Reading  John 6.1–21

After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming towards him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, ‘Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.’ One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, ‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ 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.’ So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’ When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, got into a boat, and started across the lake to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The lake became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the lake and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land towards which they were going.

Post Communion Prayer

Holy Father, who gathered us here around the table of your Son to share this meal with the whole household of God: in that new world where you reveal the fullness of your peace, gather people of every race and language to share in the eternal banquet of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Commentary

Those fed by Jesus in today’s gospel reading were hungry for Israel’s restoration; they earnestly desired the Passover food of freedom, power and glory.  They wanted a king and in Jesus saw the man they thought would fulfil their desires.  Jesus will be King, but on His own terms.  Jesus will rule, but over His own Kingdom which is far greater than just a restored Israel.  This is Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians - that they too would know the fullness of the riches of God’s abundance, and not just as passive observers enjoying the Kingdom on their terms or according to their human and limited perceptions of it, but through their own lives which should be rooted and established in love. 

The feeding of the multitude in John is loaded with meaning. To a people hungry for Israel’s restoration Jesus fed them with Passover food and invited them into a life of freedom, power and glory, exactly what they were seeking.  He would be their King and lead them into a new Kingdom, only not in the way they expected.  The story is coupled with John’s account of Jesus walking on the water.  It is dark and Jesus had ‘not yet joined them’.  The evil and the cares of the world, in the form of the wind and the waves, threatened to engulf them.  Jesus comes to them and speaks to them in what can appear to be a very casual manner, almost as if He was saying, ‘Don’t worry chaps, I’ve arrived’.  But the words are much, much stronger than this.  They are the words that run throughout John’s gospel.  Jesus approaches them and says, ‘I am’, ego eimi. 

Jesus approaches them and says, ‘I am the human being that is also God that walks unhindered over the panic and darkness, the Messiah that is above and over all the confusion that consumes them in their stormy world.  He is the Saviour who has come to them and wants to join them in their world so that they can join Him in His.  It is a deeply profound exchange.  There is nothing casual about the encounter at all.  And it continues.  They willed to take Him on board and immediately the boat was on the shore.  Their journey was over.  As John tells us a few short verses before this story (Jn 5 v 24), Jesus says, ‘I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes in Him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; they have crossed over from death to life.’   The ending of our gospel reading is a graphic visual aid to help us understand the deep meaning of what Jesus speaks about to His followers: the passing over into a new life which is filled with the glorious riches of God’s grace.  This is far broader and deeper than the Jews could have ever believed in their quest for a new kingdom.  The people who have been fed want to respond by making Jesus their king.  They have seen the power and now want the glory.  Indeed, Jesus does demonstrate both in the feeding of the masses and on walking on water.  He is the one who brings the power and presence of God into our world and that all creation obeys Him.  But the key is how they (and we) respond to that power and presence of God in everyday life.  They wind and waves respond to the presence of God walking on and through them.  As we live out the presence of God that is Jesus through the Holy Spirit in our lives, so we learn more and more that we are created to respond to God too.  As we look around we are enabled to see the power of God in creation and at work in our world continuing to sustain all that has existence. 

The reading from Ephesians speaks of us as being ‘rooted and grounded’ in the love of Christ so that we see, experience and understand Him as the very source of our life itself.  Being part of the salvation story itself, being part of that salvation for others.  Like the boy whose food was offered (we don’t even know how willingly!) Jesus took the gifts and used them so that the lives of those around Him would be changed forever.  Sometimes we look at what we have to offer and think the same as the disciples, what difference can my own small and seemingly insignificant and imperfect offering make?  Like the disciples, if we are thinking like that, we are looking at the situation from our own small perspective.  Jesus sees beyond the apparent, immediate and physical to the cosmic, eternal and infinite possibilities that our world, responding to and co-operating with the presence of God, holds for all when it is transformed by his shattering generous love.   

The people in the gospels are captivated by the miracles of Jesus, the healings, the casting out of demons from the possessed, His authority over nature itself.  But what they see is only a small sliver of the true magnificence and authority of God, the abundance of His riches which He wants to shower down on His people.  This is Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians - that they too would know the fullness of the riches of God’s abundance, not just as observers but through their own lives which should be rooted and established in love.  Paul prays that they would be filled to overflowing with the Power of God, the power that feeds thousands, the power that heals the sick and raises the dead, the power that brings new life from old.  Prays that the Bread of Life would live in them and their hearts through faith.  This is no Passover remembrance; this is new life.  It’s perhaps because Jesus know that the crowd wanted to make Him King by force, He moves off with His disciples to another place, demonstrating His authority over creation as they go. 

And as if to emphasise who He is simply says to the disciples, ‘I am, do not be afraid’.  The ‘I am’ who created the world is with you.  The ‘I am’ who existed before the world itself was created is with you.  The ‘I am’ who holds all of the earth’s resources in His hand is here.  The ‘I am’ who takes the small and seemingly insignificant and wholly inadequate offering of barley loaves and fish and shares it among thousands is here.  The ‘I am’ who takes what is offered and uses it in abundance is here.  Through the gospel of John and Paul’s letter to the Ephesians we see that our lives and sustenance are inextricably linked to the freedom and sustenance that Jesus offers to all.  We are part of His creation and are nourished and redeemed through Him.  We are also part of that nourishment and redemption.  Jesus takes what we have and what we are prepared to offer him, however seemingly inadequate and insignificant and can use it in abundance.  Perhaps if the boy had not offered the bread and fish the story would be different and those who were hungry may not have been fed.  Being part of salvation’s story also means being part of that salvation for others, offering the gifts that we have so that the world can be changed and transformed by the Bread of Life Himself who takes what we offer and uses it as He will to the glory of His Father.

Meditation

After the feeding Jesus withdraws and the disciples get in a boat to cross the lake.  A storm builds up and Jesus comes to them walking on the water.  Christ comes to them, but they need to accept Him for who He is, the one who walks on water, the one who is over all creation.  They need to accept him not just as observers who are fed but people who are prepared to have their lives changed by Him eternally.  Symbolically they invite Him into their boat and into their inner being.  The message is beginning to get through.  This is the theme that Paul picks up in the Epistle reading.  He prays that the Ephesians would not only be strengthened (fed) but that Christ Himself would dwell (personally) in each one of them, and that they would know and experience that life changing and transforming love in their lives - the love that transforms water into wine, the love that transforms a few small loaves and fish into a feast for the crowds, the love that transforms whatever we have to offer into something more that we could have ever have expected.  Paul prays that the Ephesians would know the reality of the ‘I am’ who walks on water in their lives.  That’s the invitation that Christ offers each one of us day by day.  As we let Christ live in our lives, so we too are transformed.

Additional Material

For the past few weeks we have been reading Mark, now the lectionary takes us into John. In his gospel, John narrates seven miraculous acts by Jesus and he names them--"signs." He sees these signs as a special revelation about Jesus and in each, the believer is brought close to the all powerful and resurrected Lord. We not only witness a miraculous deed performed by Jesus, but through the sign we are invited to step closer for a more thorough reflection on what it says about Jesus. The signs John narrates help those with eyes of faith to see and to believe in Jesus in the ways each sign reveals him to us. Remember what John said towards the end of his gospel. He states his purpose for writing quite clearly, "Jesus performed many other signs as well, signs not recorded here, in the presence of his disciples. But these have been recorded to help you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, so that through this faith, you may have life in his name" (20: 30-31).

We now focus on one of these signs so that in "seeing" it we might grow in faith. Today we have the sign of the multiplication, this is intended to lead us to reflect upon Jesus as the Bread of Life sent down from God.

A large crowd has sought Jesus out. Unlike the Synoptic gospels, John doesn't say that Jesus expresses pity for the hungry crowd or that they are like lost sheep without a shepherd. Instead, Jesus opens with a question to Philip about where "we" will get enough food for the approaching crowd. John tells us quite plainly, Jesus is "testing" his disciples. The story has us focus on how the disciples will respond to this test and what Jesus' own response will be.

The disciples evaluate their meagre resources and what will be required of them and then express incredulity, "how are we going to feed them?" They are not blind or indifferent to the needs around and they seem to want to address them, but just can't figure out how they will do it. It is just too much for them.

Jesus is also looking at the same hunger and he takes charge. The problem for Jesus was that in his compassion he reached out to help people in their needs: he healed them and gave them food and drink, but he always did these things as a sign of something greater, something higher to which he was calling people. More often than not, people missed the higher message, they just wanted to have their needs satisfied in the easiest possible way. They tended to seek him out as a magical healer and not hear the call to expansion and growth that he was making to them. Making him king would be a shortcut in solving many problems.

This same tendency exists today in all religious people, and in our practice of prayer. Jesus encourages us to pray for daily bread, but for no more, our requests to God in prayer for physical comforts must be limited to that which is at the most basic. Only when we do this will we ever discover the meaning of real wealth and happiness. Charles Royden

Meditation

Please note that in the passage today, after speaking about Moses (5.45-47) Jesus goes on to peform a sign that might be expected of a new Moses, another prophet - providing manna (Deut 18:15). The fact that this was Passover is important, this is in the context of a new passover meal. To feed the crowds would cost in food the equivalent of 200 days wages. The Barley loaves are reminiscent of Elisha (2 Kings 4:42-44), where Elisha also multiplies loaves. Elisha faced the same scepticism from his followers as Jesus did. John mentions 5,000 men, this is not a generic term meaning people. This is men. The real crowds would have been perhaps four times that number with women and children. This was a crowd of huge proportions.

Commentary

We move this week into the Gospel of John and look at one of ‘signs’ which John tells us about. These are miraculous events, but they are much more than that they are intended to lead us deeper than the mere surface events themselves.

Today we have the feeding of the multitude, a grand miracle and the only one recorded by all of the Gospels, a fact that speaks loudly of its importance to the early church.

Note - The Feeding of the Five Thousand is recorded in Mark 6:35-44, Luke 9:12-17, and John 6:1-14. 
The Feeding of the Four Thousand is recorded in Matthew 15:32-39 and Mark 8:1-10.

These feedings are reminiscent of Elisha's feeding miracle in 2 Kings 4:42-44. In that story, Elisha had only twenty barley loaves to feed a hundred people. When he ordered his servant to distribute the bread, the servant protested, "How can I set this before a hundred people?" Elisha reaffirmed the order, promising, "They shall eat and have some left." The servant distributed the bread; the people ate -- and there was bread left over in accord with the promise. The linkage between the stories is made even tighter by the reference to barley loaves in John 6:9. It is worth noting that both Elisha and Jesus involved others (Elisha's servant and Jesus' disciples) in the accomplishment of their miracles.

These feedings are also reminiscent of the manna in the wilderness (Exod 16; Num 11). Like Moses, Jesus has crossed over the water to the wilderness. Like Moses, he is surrounded by hungry people. Matthew clearly intends to portray Jesus as parallel to Moses, yet surpassing him as the bringer of a new age. Jesus makes this connection even more explicit when he refers to manna in his Bread from Heaven discourse following the feeding of the five thousand in John's Gospel.

Jesus in the miracles, and the Gospel writers in reporting them, want us to see something deeper about who Jesus really is. We not only witness a miraculous deed performed by Jesus, but through the ‘sign’ we are invited to step closer for a more thorough reflection on what it says about Jesus. The signs John narrates help those with eyes of faith to see and to believe in Jesus. Remember what John said towards the end of his gospel. He states his purpose for writing quite clearly,

"Jesus performed many other signs as well, signs not recorded here, in the presence of his disciples. But these have been recorded to help you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, so that through this faith, you may have life in his name" (20: 30-31).

For some preachers the question of whether Jesus actually performed the miracle at all has been quite significant. Was it ‘just’ that Jesus taught them all to share? I have to say that I think that such a reasoning does not fit with what we are told today by John. Whether the story happened as presented is not the issue for John, it was rather that people saw the miracle and failed to look at the meaning. Look at what we read in this story and we can see that John leaves us in no doubt that miracles were taking place a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick

After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself

The crowd were under no illusion that Jesus had multiplied the food. They just jumped to the conclusion that this meant Jesus would make a better king than the Romans. The people liked the idea of a miracle worker, they were less inclined to look for the deeper spiritual meaning. Neither the crowd, nor the Gospel writers who reported the events thought that Jesus had given a lesson in sharing. Make no mistake, to imagine that this was a triumphant lesson in generosity misses the whole impact of the reports which the Gospel writers deliver to us.

Miraculous physical events demonstrated amazing spiritual truths, take away the miracle and the sign is diminished.

So it was that -

• The raising of the dead Lazarus therefore was a physical event with a message that Jesus was the way the truth and the life.
• The healing of the blind man shows Jesus as the light of the World
• Turning water into wine showed Jesus as the true vine

If we turn the feeding miracle into a sharing miracle, then the next stage is to question whether Lazarus was truly dead. To start removing all the miracle from the stories from the Gospels leaves us on shaky ground. I cannot believe that the writers of the Gospel who recorded these miracles had anything other than absolute confidence that they had happened as they reported. That’s why they were prepared to live and die for their faith.

The problem for Jesus as we see in our stories was not persuading people about the veracity of his miracles, but in getting them to see past the miracles to the deeper meaning.

In compassion he reached out to help people in their needs: he healed them and gave them food and drink, but he always did these things as a sign of something greater, something higher to which he was calling people. More often than not, people missed the higher message. They just wanted to have their needs satisfied in the easiest possible way. They tended to seek him out as a magical healer and not hear the spiritual truth that he was making to them.

These people hadn’t shared their lunch, they had been amazed at what Jesus did and wanted to make him king so that he would give them a better deal than the Romans.

Making him a physical king would be a shortcut to solving their problems. There is a lesson here for us all, as we might have the same tendency in our practice of prayer. Jesus encourages us to pray for daily bread, but for no more, our requests to God in prayer for physical comforts must be limited to that which is at the most basic. Only when we do this will we ever discover the meaning of real wealth and happiness.

So to the story

Perhaps a good way to look at the event is to do so through three of the key players and we begin with Philip 

1. Philip
A large crowd has sought Jesus out. John shows Jesus open with a question to Philip about where "we" will get enough food for the approaching crowd. John tells us quite plainly, Jesus is "testing" his disciples. The story has us focus on how the disciples will respond to this test and what Jesus' own response will be.

Philip answered him,

“Eight months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”

He couldn’t do the miraculous because he focused on what he didn’t have – not what he did have. There is a thin line between humility and negativity. One is based on strength and can be very powerful; the other is based in fear and results in powerlessness. Philip seemed trapped behind a wall of hesitation. When confronted with a task of impossible proportions he tells the Lord all he can’t do and never once thinks to ask Jesus what he can do. Philip is walled behind a facade of helplessness that Jesus must ‘pierce’ before Philip can become the man Christ knows him to be. Christ must pierce Philip’s doubt, his sense of inadequacy; his blaming and excusing or Philip would never become a man of consequence.

So we have to ask the question of ourselves -

How do I respond to the size of the needs around me? Am I like Philip? Do I look at how little I have, or do I think how much God has?

Do I say; “The problem is too big for my limited resources,” and then hope that the crowd goes away? Or do I ask for God’s strength to help me to expect great things from God.

2. Think of Andrew
Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up,

“Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”

Andrew evaluate the meagre resources and what will be required of them and then express incredulity, "how are we going to feed them?" He is not blind or indifferent to the needs around and wants to address them, however he cannot see the miraculous provision of God because the answer came in the faith of a child.

This is cynicism and we all have a tendency to do it. We decry the attempts of others, we criticise those who try to do things, but have no better offer from ourselves. We must not spend our time negatively focussing on what we think is less than perfect or what we do not have, but instead embrace what there is which is honest and pure and put it to work for his glory.

3. The little boy
Thankfully there was a little boy who who wouldn’t be pushed aside by Andrew and focused solely on giving what little he had to Jesus.

This is all that the Gospels have to say about this boy (Matthew Mark and Luke don't even mention him). The boy is an unlikely candidate to save the day, just as the shepherd-boy, David, was an unlikely opponent for Goliath many years earlier. His pitiful offering is as inadequate as was David's sling. The boy has little to offer, but he offers that little bit.

It is the same message as the widow’s mite. We do not disparage the efforts of those around, we expect that even a tiny offering made to God can be put to great effect.

The message is that Jesus will transform that little bit into more-than-enough.

But, what if the boy were unwilling to share his lunch? What if he were to say, "I need this for myself" -- or "My little bit won't make any difference"? "In the parable of the talents Jesus makes it plain that... it is the one-talent people who are most likely to falter and fail him; and this on the ground that anything they could do is so trivial as to be not worth doing.... That, says Christ, is a fallacy that has disastrous consequences.

"There would have been one great and shining deed fewer in history if that boy had refused to come or if he had withheld his loaves and fishes. The fact of life is that Jesus Christ needs what we can bring Him. We may not have much to bring but He needs what we have".

Conclusion

We are called to an impossible task as well. The challenge to us is whether we turn to our own resources and excuse our inabilities or are faithful enough to say; “Lord, what is impossible for me is easy for you! So, where do you want me to start?” Jesus can take the smallest gift from a sincere heart and use it to do the impossible.

As individuals

The disciples were tested, but we are tested too. We face the many needs of family, friends, church, world and perhaps we too like Philip feel overwhelmed. How shall we feed them is perhaps a cry which many echo. In all sorts of ways we perhaps recognise that we do not have enough bread. Doing the work, living the life which God has set before us may seem hard. But we, like the disciples, need to believe in One who walks with us. The answer from our story today is that we don't have to do it on our own; Jesus is with us and he knows how to make our resources become enough. 

As a church - The miracle asks the church the question,

• Do you believe God will provide what you need to do the ministry God wants done?
  Why do you believe this, have you anything from previous experience?

Note the essential qualifiers --

• what we need, not want,
• and the ministry God wants, not necessarily the ministry we’ve planned.

Do we operate mindful of the scarcity of our own resources or the abundance of God.

Charles Royden

Commentary

The letter to the Ephesians has rightly be called the “queen of the epistles” (ST Coleridge) because it is a marvellously concise yet comprehensive guide to Christian faith and practise. Although the letter declares itself to be by the apostle Paul, scholars from the early nineteenth century onwards pointed out that the vocabulary and style of the epistle was not the same as other epistles from Paul. Although the evidence that they produce to support this theory is strong, does it matter? Could it not be that some other brilliant writer took Paul’s words and précised them at a later date, rather than copy down every word from Paul’s letter? The theology of the letter is exactly in line with Paul’s teachings.

Ephesus was a former Greek colony. By Paul’s time it was the capital if the Roman province of Asia. As a port, Ephesus was a meeting place for many cultures and religions. It even contained one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the great temple of Artemis (Diana). Paul had visited there and caused a great upset to the cult of Diana which had a valuable trade in selling little silver models of the temple. Paul was thus addressing a church planted right in the heart of a powerful pagan culture. The excerpt from his letter, which we read this morning, deals with a concept which is powerful and central to the Christian faith. Put simply it is this: God is not in a building, a Temple, whether the Great Temple of Solomon or any other, He is not far away in Heaven, He is close to us, closer than close, in the souls of those who believe in Him. This great promise comes through the love of the Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The reading is in the form of a prayer for the faith of the people of Ephesus to be deepened. The miracle of love has made Christ dwell in their hearts, it is for them to try to understand the implications of this “indwelling”. By accepting Christ into their lives, at their conversion, they had allowed Him to enter into their hearts and minds. But what does that mean? By turning back to the original Greek used by Paul we get a clearer picture of what he was trying to say in this phrase of God dwelling within them. There were two similar Greek verbs paroikeo and katoikeo that he could have chosen to express the concept. The first paroikeo means merely to inhabit a place as a stranger. He chose to use the second word, Katoikeo which means to settle permanently. What Paul was insisting was that God was not a fleeting visitor in the soul of the believer, a presence which would fade away, but a permanent resident, a faithful and abiding presence in the lives of those who had welcomed him. What difference does such an idea make to our idea of God’s relationship with us? If God dwells within us, why sometimes do we feel so far from Him? What can we do to keep that miraculous closeness of God a living reality in our spiritual lives? 

 

Feeding of Multitudes
Given that feeding many people form scarce resources is an incredible happening its not surprising that we have multiple accounts of this type of events, including the one from 2 Kings. The verses that precede our reading from 2 Kings record that 'there was a famine in that region' and that under Elisha the people had tried to cook something for themselves from herbs and wild vegetation with near disastrous results. In the reading from John, a great number of people had followed Jesus as a result of the miracles he was performing. They were hungry for His teaching and the new life that it offered. In one sense we could also say that 'there was a famine in that region'. The people had tried to cook up something for themselves and had failed. Jesus teases the disciples and asks where will all the food come from to feed the people sitting in front of them. To which they reply with the equivalent of, '…a whole truck load of food from Tesco's or Sainsbury's wouldn't feed this lot... … all we've got between us is a small rice and pasta salad and a diet yoghurt'. It's perhaps easy then to interpret these passages as an indication of God providing for our material needs. When all seems lost we need to trust to Him for our provision. What we have to offer is so meagre in comparison to the riches he offers, and so freely gives out of the abundance of his riches in glory. And there is a sense in which this interpretation is true. We all know of occasions where God has indeed provided for His people in a very real, physical manner, perhaps through gifts of money through faithful Christians or in many other ways. Our partnership buildings are testimony to God's provision to us, through His grace and the hard work and efforts of many of His people working in tandem with Him. God does provide for us, but perhaps the key to these passages is to see that we need to understand that God's provision for us is both physical and spiritual. The gospel writer John, of all the gospel writers, especially weaves this theme into His writings several times. Think of the wedding at Cana, the Master of Ceremonies did not know from where the good wine had come. The woman at the well in Samaria did not know from where the living water would come. In the gospel reading from John, Philip does not know where on earth he's going to find the food for the many thousands of people who are gathered on the hillside and who want feeding. But in each of these situations the pattern is the same. And so is the result. At Cana, at Samaria and now here on the hillside, all that the people have, the stuff of their everyday life, is taken and offered to God. Water, the woman's humanity, bread, and fish are all given thanks for, and offered up to God, to be received by Him and exposed to His touch. He is not constrained by the physical rules of nature, He can even walk on water. But in being exposed to Him, everything, even nature itself, is transformed into something more than anyone ever expected. Just as the more we expose ourselves and all that we have to Him, there more we, and it, is transformed into something beyond even our wildest dreams.

Meditation   Riches

A holy man on a pilgrimage was resting beneath a tree at the outskirts of a city. He was interrupted by a man who ran to him, saying, "The stone! Give me the stone! Please, give me the stone."
"What stone?" asked the holy man. Then the man told how an angel had appeared to him in a dream and told him that he would find a holy man, a pilgrim just outside the city who would give him a stone and make him rich forever. The holy man reached into his pocket and pulled out a great diamond. "The angel probably spoke of this, " he said. "I found it on my journey here. If you truly want it, you may have it."
The diamond was as big as his fist and perfect in every way. The man marvelled at its beauty, clutched it eagerly and walked away from the pilgrim. But, that night he could not sleep, before it was light, he went out to find the holy man. At dawn he woke the holy pilgrim, saying, "Wealth! Give me the wealth! Please, give me the wealth that lets you so easily give away the diamond."

 

Prayers

Almighty God, in all the business of life, help us to be still in your presence, that we may know ourselves to be your people and you to be our God. Amen

Heavenly Father, you taught us by your Son Jesus Christ that all our possessions come from you. Help us to be faithful stewards of our time, our talents and our wealth, and to consecrate gladly to your service a due proportion of all that you have given us. Take us and make us your own, for Jesus Christ sake. Amen

Almighty God, as we stand at the foot of the cross of your Son, help us to see and know your love for us, so that in humility, love and joy we may place at His feet all that we have and all that we are and all that we will be, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

May our Lord Jesus Christ be near us to defend us, within us to refresh us, around us to preserve us, before us to guide us, and above us to bless us; with the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with us now, in the week ahead, and for ever. Amen