Sermon: “Save the Leftovers”

Text: John 6:1-21

17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

July 26, 2009

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is the first part of chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus uses five barley loaves and two fish to feed the multitudes—the only miracles of Jesus mentioned in all four gospels—and later walks upon a stormy Sea of Galilee to join his disciples.  In John these two stories introduce a section in which Jesus teaches the crowds that he himself is the bread of life.  We’ll read that passage next week, as we also share the Lord’s Supper.

Considering the amazing event that took place on that Galilean hillside—feeding five thousand men and many other women and children—it is remarkable how few details John provides, reporting only that Jesus took the five loaves and two fish and distributed them among the multitude, so that everyone had as much as they wanted.  That’s it; that’s all that John tells us.  By the next verse—verse 12—the meal is over, and it’s time for the clean up.  “When [the crowd] was satisfied, [Jesus] told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’”  Then we learn that the leftovers filled twelve baskets.

The Greek word that we translate “left over” has a very positive meaning.  It suggests a super-abundance.  In our culture the term “leftover” can have a slightly negative tone: “What’s for dinner?  Oh, leftovers.”  But that’s not how we should read this passage.  John is not talking about scraps, but rather the over-abundance that remained after the people had eaten all they wanted.

Sermon.  When Amanda and I lived in Louisville, we had the privilege each week of hearing a sermon by Dr. John Roper, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church we attended there.  As much as I loved John’s sermons, I was often amused by how little the sermon titles had to do with the message itself.  I always suspected that he planned months ahead what passage he would preach and chose the sermon title at that early date.  By the time the sermon had taken its final shape, it often had gone in a different direction than the title.  Now that I am preaching on a weekly basis, I’m even more convinced that this was going on with John.  I don’t plan as far ahead as he does, but in order to get a sermon title in the “Church Briefs” section of the Saturday newspaper, I have to give them a title at least eight days ahead of time, long before I know what the main point of the sermon will be.  I often choose the titles by selecting that phrase of the scripture passage that I think summarizes the point of the passage.  At other times, even if it’s not a summary phrase, there will be a few words that really attract my attention—that make me want to dig deeper.  And I may choose that phrase, thinking that the sermon might revolve around that phrase.

That’s how it was as I first reviewed John 6 for this morning’s sermon.  I don’t know why, but somehow the reference to “leftovers” just jumped out at me.  I guess I had always focused before on the food that the people ate and not on the cleanup.  But it occurred to me that the reference to the leftovers was there for a reason.  Even as late as New Testament times, writing letters and books was a very expensive process.  They did not have abundant paper, as we do.  Parchment or papyrus were rather expensive.  So authors learned to write with an economy of words, recording only what was absolutely necessary for the author’s purpose.  So, why would John take the trouble to tell about the leftovers, using more words to describe them than he used to describe the feeding miracle itself?[1]

I think the answer lies in the Greek word for “leftovers.”  John wanted to emphasize the super-abundance that Jesus himself represented.  To use Jesus’ own figure of speech, he is the “bread of life,” and we receive that bread in such abundance that it literally overflows.  There is so much over-abundance of bread that it fills twelve baskets.  And in ancient times, the number twelve was symbolic of fullness and completeness.  So, even after the people had eaten their fill, the leftovers themselves still constituted a full, complete, supply. 

As Professor Gail O’Day has written,[2] the point of John’s story is not how hungry the people were.  In fact, John never says that they were hungry.  The traditional site for the place where Jesus fed the multitudes was on a hillside about a half mile from the fishing village of Capernaum.  Of course, we can’t be sure that this was the real location; but if it were, the people could have purchased some food in Capernaum.  Nor is the story about the selfless generosity of the boy.[3]  He probably was willing to give up his food, but as readers we have to infer that from the story; John doesn’t make that point.  What really seems to be going on here is that Jesus is teaching a lesson.  He begins by asking the disciples, “How are we going to get food for all these people?”  John tells us that this was just a test—to see how the disciples responded.  Of course, as is almost always the case in John, the disciples did not immediately understand what Jesus was trying to teach.  The correct answer to the question, at least in John, would be, “You will provide the food for them, Jesus, because you are the bread of life.”[4]  So Jesus took the opportunity to teach the disciples—and also the crowd—by performing a sign, a miracle, that would drive home the point that he was making.

This is entirely consistent with the way that John tells of other signs that Jesus performed.  Do you remember the wedding feast at the village of Cana, where Jesus turned the water into wine?[5]  Not just wine, but wine that was so good that it prompted a compliment from the master of ceremonies.  And do you remember how much wine there was?  I think I calculated it in an earlier sermon to be about 900 standard bottles of wine.  Now that’s a super-abundance for a small village.  Undoubtedly, there was leftover wine.  As I understand it, today’s text has essentially the same message, but this time it is further explained with the passage we will consider next week.  The abundance that Jesus offers is not simply abundance of things.  Jesus knew that the people were following him because of the earthly food that he provided, and in our passage for next week, he teaches that the abundance goes much deeper than that.  The abundance of this lesson is the abundance of God’s love and grace represented by Jesus himself and the abundance of the life that he offers.

There’s something else going on in the single sentence of verse 12, and I wonder if you heard it.  Up to this point all the action has been performed by Jesus; but when it comes to the cleanup, Jesus delegates that to the disciples.  And why is Jesus concerned for the cleanup?  Why not leave the leftovers for the birds to eat?  Jesus says, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”  Jesus did not want any of his hospitality—his generosity and grace—to be wasted.  The abundance was not just for one day, for one meal, but was sufficient to continue feeding the people.  And I suspect there was another reason that John pointedly mentioned Jesus’ directing his disciples to gather up the leftovers.  By the end of the first century, when John wrote this gospel, the age of the church had arrived.  Jesus had ascended bodily into heaven within weeks of his crucifixion and resurrection.  Now he was present with his disciples in spirit, and he had entrusted to them the mission of gathering people—all people—into the church.[6]  I suspect that by this particular phrasing, John was reminding the Christians of his day that Jesus expected his disciples to make his fullness available to all.  If the bread in the baskets was symbolically the bread of life—the body of Christ—then in the same way the church was the body of Christ.  The bread in the baskets filled twelve baskets full, and twelve was the number of fullness and completeness.  I believe John wanted us to interpret Jesus’ words as a charge that we disciples become the ones who spread the gospel—who gather the body of Christ together in the church—until it is fully filled.

This passage helps us understand our work as evangelists.  It’s not that we are the meal and all the people “out there” are the scraps, the leftovers, whom we must go out and collect.  Rather we are all, both inside and outside the church, the body of Christ (or at least potentially so).  Our job as evangelists is to go out and gather all the rest of the body to become a part of the church in its fullness.