How do you feel about crowds?
Social scientists say that our relationship to crowds is cultural, determined in large part by the “personal space” in which we grew up. The technical term for this study is Proxemics. It examines how population density aPects behavior, communication and social interaction.
When I was growing up in a sleepy West Los Angeles neighborhood – when the population of Los Angeles was less than half of what it is now, there were these kids from New York – back East we called it then – that would come right up to your face to talk, and I was always stepping back. Later I learned that they meant no harm, it was simply that their personal space was developed from constant crowds and big families in cramped spaces.
Crowds have been a big part of our cultural life lately. Political rallies of one sort or another fill stadiums and our screens.
Crowds stuck at airports when huge storms and a global outage hit at the same time.
I was in one of those crowds.
And then of course there are sports crowds – most especially The Olympics, where the whole world seems to be gathered together in the pouring rain or the sweltering heat or vicariously from the non-crowd comfort of our living rooms.
There are the day-to-day crowds of freeways and parking lots and checkout lines and service desks – and then there are the crowds where we went to escape crowds, like the beach, national parks, scenic trails, and on and on.
What is your experience with crowds?
How do you feel in the midst of them? What crowds from history do you wish you had been in?
Any crowd where Jesus preached, I would have liked to have been there!
Crowds can be thrilling in the energy they produce when everyone has their phone light on in raised hands swaying together, singing at a Billy Joel or a Taylor Swift concert. The surge of positive energy can be remembered for a lifetime.
Crowds can also be frightening, unstable, unpredictable, filled somehow with a dangerous clashing energy that feels as if life itself is at risk.
Somewhere in between, crowds can be impersonal and lonely, as you walk among hundreds of individuals and small groups that all have separate lives, all know where they are going, and you are alone surrounded by lots of energies you are not part of.
Today, John’s Gospel is the second of 5 in a series called The Bread of Life Discourse. Last week was the feeding of the 5000,
a crowd of people, some solo, many in family groups or neighborhood groups, all seeking Jesus because word of his healings had spread.
So, why did they come?
Some desperate for help, healing, change.
Some to see what’s the big deal about this guy?
They were fed. Free food. But …How?
In this crowd, some could see better than others. Were there arguments about what just happened?
The disciples witnessed it all;
For all their ‘help’ in trying to manage this crowd,
they were stopped in their tracks and rendered speechless as the power of God took over, a power beyond their imagining,
beyond any reason or understanding.
What the crowd didn’t see was the second part of the Gospel,
where the disciples head out in the boat without Jesus, get caught in rough waters, and Jesus joins them by walking on the water, and then somehow whisks the boat to Capernaum.
If the disciples were speechless before; they must be dumbstruck now.
Our Gospel today again features the Crowd. John writes ‘the crowd’ as a kind of lump sum and gives it lines to say, as if it were one unified thing.
But of course, they weren’t.
This ‘crowd’ tried hard to find Jesus. They saw that the disciples had gone, decided to get “into the boats" and go all the way to Capernaum to find him.
That’s a lot of boats!
My guess is that the women, children and elders went home, and groups of men set out to find Jesus. And it was not a short ride.
This crowd is persistent, energetic, driven.
But when they get there, the question that gets blurted out is beside the point, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”
‘When’ is not a meaningful question.
It reflects, instead, the awkward, clumsy, thing we say when we are out of breath or don’t know what to say.
Jesus doesn’t answer their question, but answers instead the questions they are afraid to ask:
Who are you? and how did you feed all those people?
Jesus answers that question by saying, in essence, do not pretend that you have come for high purposes. Yes, you have worked hard to get here, but you’ve come because of all that free food!
And, I imagine Jesus smiles, kindly, as he says: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.
For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”
Without skipping a beat, another blurt:
What must we do to perform the works of God?
Again, a poor question--
--asked before really listening or hearing.
It’s not about performing a task or doing a thing. It is about slowing down, observing, receiving something deeper; it is about seeing and understanding that Jesus was sent by God, that Jesus is the Son of God, that God’s food through Jesus brings eternal life.
I have some sympathy with the crowd, even though their spokesperson asks stupid questions,
and most seem to misunderstand again and again who Jesus is and what he is saying.
The scene feels to me a little like the press surrounding Jesus and shouting questions at him, looking for quick answers that he refuses to give. They have forgotten yesterday’s miracles,
feeding 5000 --old news, and now they are hungry for a new angle to the story.
But I also understand that a crowd, even this one, is made up of people, individual people, with real questions, real concerns, real doubts, real longing, with different needs, different styles, and different abilities to perceive and understand what they see and hear.
Just like you and me.
And so Jesus ends this particular segment with something the press can quote, something that seems like an answer:
“I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” The press is satisfied for a moment.
They have the video and they have the quote.
It seems like an answer,
but you and I know it is not that simple.
It asks rather than answers
It asks: what is the bread you most need?
What will satisfy your hunger and thirst?
“Give us today our daily bread” we pray.
What is that bread for you today?
Jesus often speaks to and teaches to crowds, but he enters one heart at a time.
Yours and mine.
He heals one soul at a time.
Yours and mine.
You and I know that we will reflect on this bread and pray about it for most of our lives.
If I am honest, I know that
I will struggle with what feels like a demand: believe or else,
even when I know that “demand” is not how Jesus does it. We will sing and feel the beauty of “I am the bread of life”;
we will cling to that image and the feeding stories, and we will feel fed, even when we don’t completely understand how that could be.
These five Sundays of The Bread of Life discourse are opportunities to reenter the Gospel we have heard time and time again, and to look around with new eyes, hear with new ears, and to step away from the crowd, to slow our crowded lives,
to allow into our hearts the Bread of Life we need, the very life and breath of God.
AMEN