Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Every summer of Year B in our lectionary cycle we take five weeks to read one chapter of one book. The sixth chapter of the Gospel of John covers the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand and the debate it inspired. It is the primary teaching of John on the Eucharist.

And it is the key to why John’s community split off from a traditional 90 C.E. Jewish-Christian Community over the issue of how to celebrate communion.

Up until John all Christians celebrated communion according to the formula prescribed in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, picked up verbatim by the communities that created the gospels of Luke, Matthew and Mark. The Eucharist was tied to the Last Supper and Christ’s sacrifice and was meant to be a repeated symbolic sacrifice of Christ “until he comes again.”

John’s people would have none of it. Even though they would have known full well the formula and practiced it often in the Jewish-Christian synagogue (in Ephesus? Antioch?) when they put it in writing there was not a loaf of bread or a cup of wine included in the last supper ritual. Instead, this community took the last supper and Christ’s sacrifice as a call to servanthood symbolized by the washing of feet. For them the Eucharist was something else entirely.

Bountiful Abundance. Eternal Life. All are fed, not just the twelve. The Feeding of the Five Thousand. It is not a memorial to Christ’s sacrifice but Christ’s actual flesh and blood given for the life of the world. ““I come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly.”

In John’s chapter six, Jesus drives his disciples and Jewish teachers through a vortex of new understanding. First his miracle. Then the comparison of his miracle with Moses and Manna in the Wilderness. Then the final revelation, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

If you were part of an early Jewish Christian community and through revelation had come to understand the profound mystery of a new ritual that involved the symbolic (and more!) eating of flesh and drinking of blood -- and then actually practiced that ritual -- you would have been violently forced out of the community. And that is exactly what happened to John’s community. The new revelation of the meaning of the Eucharist broke the church apart and it has been cracking it open ever sinse.

I actually take a little comfort that the dialogue of the meaning and the mystery of the Eucharist has been a contentious one since the first Christian communities formed. And after reading one chapter for five weeks, I have gained a profound appreciation for the fact that John’s community refused to deny the new revelation they received. Without it, communion could feel like going to a funeral over and over again.