Beyond the Patio

We are One
John 6:1-21

We have many family gathering. We have a number of birthdays in our family at this time of year so we often get together to celebrate. We have a great time together.  There is a lot of talking and of course there is always much food on the table. There is a great significance in eating together.  It is not just that the food is good but there is a feeling of being together in a special way.  There is a real sense of communion. I think of the movie Soul Food, where the family was held together by the Sunday meal and when they no longer met together for that meal, the family started to break apart. Eating together does not merely feed our physical hunger but also feeds our need to know that we are not alone in the world. We are one.

Eating together has always been important to Church congregations.  It has been considered to be essential to our sense of unity, so much so that in many  In many Anglican congregations, the Pot Luck Supper is considered to be the eighth sacrament of the church.

*

Eating together was important in Jesus life and teaching. It is an image frequently used in his parables.  He speaks of wedding feasts in some of his parables. There is a huge celebration and eating and drinking when the prodigal son returns. In the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus, the Rich man did not share his feast with Lazarus and so there was no sense of  unity between them. Instead, there was a great chasm fixed between them. We find Jesus eating with his disciples and criticized for eating with publicans and sinners. It was presumably in the course of a meal together with Jesus that Zacchaeus’ life was changed and he decided to give half of his possessions to the poor and pay back to anyone he had defrauded four times the amount.  It was during a meal together that Jesus took bread and wine, blessed them and gave them to the disciples as a particular way of sharing his life. We still today share that meal of bread and wine together in the Eucharist. Some of the resurrection appearances include eating together. Eating together is always seen as a special bond of unity.

In the Gospel today Jesus takes the meagre meal of five barley loaves and two small fish that a young boy provides and feeds a very large crowd of people.  To me there are layers of meaning behind the feeding of these thousands of people. It is not just in the miracle of multiplication of loaves and fishes.  It isn’t just in the fact that people’s physical hunger was met.  Can you imagine this huge crowd of people all eating together, talking together, sharing with one another? This was an act of communion.  They were all one.

*

I believe that this sense of community is what was behind Jesus’ great compassion toward people.  He saw them as one with him and so he could feel their hunger and need.  He could feel their pain and suffering and also their joys and delights.

That sense of unity is behind our compassion.  When we see the grief of parents who lose a child, or when we see suffering of people through war, or when we see people without food or shelter, or when we see people in any kind of distress, misery or torment, our compassion comes from that deep feeling that we are one.  That is the basis of our compassion.  This unity with God and other human beings is the food that does not perish.  It is the food of eternity. It is love that remains when everything else is gone.

Joseph Donders talks of the unity behind compassion in one of his sermons

More than three hundred years ago, a mystic in Wales, Henry Vaughan  wrote this:

Charity is a relic from paradise,
and pity is a strange argument 
that we are all descended
from one human being.

It sounds rather mysterious and very mystical, yet he was right: Our compassion for others derives from the fact that we are one. We all participate in the same human, God-given life. Though many, we are one. We form one communion, or at least we should.

That is what we know, that is what wefeel, when we see one another smashed-up, hungry, thirsty, frustrated, or miserable.

There is something new going around our world these days. More and more communities of laypeople and priests, more and more congregations and societies of sisters and brothers, are becoming aware of the necessity of doing something about justice and peace. Our pity is growing, due to a development by which we feel more and more united.

It is that pity, that awareness of our oneness, that is at the heart of the growing concern for justice and peace.

Henry Vaughan foresaw this very long ago, when he added that he believed words like alienand stranger would disappear. He believed that those words often indicating a total lack of pity –were notions received from Cain and his posterity among us. They feature in the vocabulary of the killers and murderers among us.

We are many, though one. We are one, though many!

Joseph G. Donders Praying and Preaching the Sunday Gospel, Orbis books, Maryknoll, New York, 1988 p. 131

*

It was the great compassion of Jesus that led to the feeding of the five thousand.  It was also that huge meal that showed us all to be of one people.

Jesus made it quite clear in the verses that follow the feeding of the crowd that he didn’t want them following him just because their bellies were full.  He wanted them to catch the vision that they were one people and that as one people God was present with them. Jesus wanted them to follow his way of life, to have the same compassion towards others, to reach out to one another, to identify with their joys and sorrows, to give, to share, to love without looking for any reward except knowing that they were doing God’s will. He wanted them to be at one with God and their neighbours.

Let us capture the vision presented to us in the Gospel today. Let us pray that Jesus’ love and compassion may grow in all of us.

We are one.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You are visitor number

 

Hits Tracking

 

---

Connect with Deacon Sils Homelical resource

My daughter Carol is a Yoga therapist, talented singer-songwriter and an alternative health practitioner.

Check Out her web site CARLY’S STRENGTH

My daughter Mary Anne is a very talented artist.    You can access her site at:
Artist

My daughter Megan has a Food Blog

You can check out some of Megan’s recipes and meal planning on her Blog  “Food and Whine, Adventures in making food for my toughest critics, my family.”

“Food and Whine” has been listed in the top 25 Mom’s Food Blogs.