NOTES for Joh 6:5-6

Jesus clearly uses every opportunity to show the people listening to Him what the Kingdom is. And often these opportunities are connected with a meal, with food, with being fed. To some of us today, such manifestations of the Kingdom may appear "low" and "unspiritual." But it is important to remember that in those days a meal was never simply the consumption of food. It always began with the blessing of bread, and if there was wine on the table, of the wine as well. No one sat down at the table without such a blessing. And with this approach every meal became sacred, because God Himself was always invited to take part in it. And the breaking of bread, if there was bread on the table, was also an essential part of it, since bread, like wine, was in any case blessed separately. With this attitude toward the meal, it became a form of communion with God in which all who had gathered at the table took part.

And Jesus, as we see, uses this in order to bring His listeners into communion with the Kingdom, to show them what new life in the renewed world can be. Of course, the people sitting on the ground in expectation of the meal knew perfectly well how bread and wine were blessed. But they hardly expected the blessing to have such an effect. And the effect was plain: the food, which had seemed to be very little, was enough for everyone.

Such is the nature of the Kingdom, where matter is completely subject to spirit. Jesus' listeners began their meal in our world, not yet transformed, according to its laws, and finished it in the Kingdom, according to the laws of the Kingdom. There could have been no better testimony: after all, it is always better to see once than to hear a hundred times, and this applies to the Kingdom more than to anything else. Of course, the people listening to Jesus did not fully understand what had happened. But they received the experience of being in the Kingdom, and such an experience is not forgotten.

The text about the multiplication of the loaves is incomparably important for us: important liturgically, important theologically, important ecclesiologically. We never tire of repeating this. It is simply important, because it is a living connection with the Lord, a connection that takes place during every liturgy. This event is mentioned six times in the Gospel, more than any other. We understand that it is a kind of bridge between the Last Supper and every liturgy.

But now we would like to look at this text from another side. Christ says: I am the bread of life (John 6:48). But He is also the incarnate Word, for in Him "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Word and bread... Guigo II the Carthusian ended his prayerful reading with this prayer: "You break for me the bread of Holy Scripture, and by breaking this bread You grant me to know Yourself..." (from the book Prayerful Reading of Holy Scripture by E. Bianchi).

The Gospel is such a small book in volume, just as five loaves are few; but it satisfies everyone who partakes of it, and everyone finds his own meaning, especially dear and understandable to him alone, as everyone receives his own piece of bread. Yet at the same time this will be a meaning related to the universal meaning, just as each piece is taken from one loaf.

And not only one meaning, but meanings that are constantly multiplied, like the loaves. They are multiplied so that we may not grow weak and in the end die. This does not happen with any human book. Between a human book and the Gospel there is the same difference as between ordinary bread that we eat and that prosphora which alone feeds the whole parish.

The multiplication of the loaves is a great miracle in itself. But for Christians the most important thing, of course, is that this miracle becomes a prototype of a much greater miracle: the sacrament of the Eucharist. Through the centuries and until the end of the world, the Lord gives us Himself as food under the form of Bread, and, as with the multiplication of the loaves, this food is enough for everyone.

Because the Son of God Himself becomes food for people, life not only does not diminish, but increases in the world. This is exactly why the Cross, on which the Lord gives us His life, has become for Christians a synonym of that Tree of Life which the Lord planted in the midst of paradise.

And we also see in this miracle that it is not performed without the participation of the disciples: one way or another, each according to his calling, we all become participants and celebrants of the sacrament. Clergy participate in the Eucharist in one way, the laity in another, but the place of each of us in the Church of Christ depends in a most essential way on this participation. After all, the multiplication of the loaves also required the boy who gave his bread to Christ, and the apostles, and those who ate that blessed bread.

Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, mostly in emigration, created an entire theological movement, new and rather unusual, which received the name Eucharistic ecclesiology. Among these thinkers were Fathers Nikolai Afanasiev and Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff and Cyprian Kern, and many others. As a result of their work, arguments and positions appeared in theological discussions among Christians, perhaps for the first time among us, that we had needed for centuries. What matters most for us in their legacy is the thought that the Church is not simply a hierarchical institution in the Latin style and not simply a community of believers in the spirit of Protestantism. The Church is more an event than a structure, more an action than a state. And this event is the Eucharist.

Is it not strange that the One who comes from heaven takes care to feed crowds of His listeners and followers with bread? Is that what He came for? And yet the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves for five thousand people is the only miracle described by all the evangelists, and that means it is especially important. It is this miracle that serves as the starting point for the conversation about the true bread by which a person truly lives, the bread of life.

We have heard since childhood that a person does not live by bread alone. But if we try to understand what makes up our spiritual diet, will we find in it what can truly satisfy the heart, rather than a substitute that leaves only a hangover and nausea?

The Lord offers us this kind of bread. It is not teaching, not commandments, not faith in God - the Jews already had all this, and it exists in many spiritual schools and religions. Jesus speaks of the bread that truly comes down from heaven and gives real, eternal life. It is He Himself.

Today's reading helps us better understand what is usually called Jesus' "messianic secret." In speaking of it, people mean the fact that Jesus Himself, until the last days of His earthly ministry, almost never spoke directly about His messiahship, at least not openly. The evangelist's account takes us back to the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves (vv. 1-14). And the reaction to it, as we can see, was an attempt to proclaim Jesus "king," to make Him the leader of a new messianic movement (v. 15). This is no surprise: according to the commonly accepted ideas of that time, the Messiah was to become king, restore an independent Jewish state, and introduce in it laws corresponding to the Torah. But Jesus, of course, was not going to become the leader of any religious-political movement.

But Jesus had another, more important reason to conceal His messiahship. He Himself speaks of it directly to those who went looking for Him in Galilee: most of the people seeking a meeting with Him did so not because they thirsted for the Kingdom, but because they wanted, in time of need, always to be able to receive free bread (v. 26). Jesus, however, speaks with them about eternal life and about the main thing without which one cannot partake of it: trust in the One whom God sent into the world to give people the Kingdom (vv. 27-29).

But they do not understand Him. They ask Him: where are the proofs that Your words are true (v. 30)? And at once they give an example of what proofs would convince them: manna from heaven, as in the days of Moses in the wilderness (v. 31). Jesus again tells them that the Kingdom is greater than any miracle, and that the bread of the Kingdom is more important than manna (vv. 32-33). And again they do not understand Him.

His listeners cannot grasp that with the Savior's coming into the world a new era has begun, and that what happened to them on the shore of Lake Gennesaret was not a miracle in the sense in which manna was a miracle. Simply by being with Jesus, they found themselves in the Kingdom and lived for a while according to its laws, but, as we can see, they did not understand fully what had happened to them. That is why they ask Jesus for bread and expect to receive it just as their fathers once received manna from God (v. 34). And Jesus again and again tries to explain to them that the point is not bread, but the Kingdom and that fullness of God's life which is given there to everyone, so that no manna will be needed there anymore.

A miracle is the Kingdom's invasion of our world, the manifestation of its laws where completely different rules usually operate. But now the Kingdom is entering the world, transforming it, and the times of miracles are passing. The time of the Kingdom is beginning - open to everyone who seeks it and wants to enter.