At the end of an intense week spent ministering to those who have survived clergy sexual abuse, one small phrase in St John’s account of the feeding of the 5,000 took on a new connotation for me. Seeing the vast crowd coming towards him, Jesus asks Philip where they can get enough bread to feed these people. He said this, St John adds, “to test him”.
This is always the test of discipleship. That if Jesus places you in the face of a need he is also asking you to to believe that your ability to provide people with what they need for spiritual satiety is equal to the task, because Jesus sees and understands the hunger. He already has the resources. If someone has the faith and willingness to believe it is possible to be the instrumental (not the efficient) cause, they can be of use to him.
What Jesus is testing is Philip’s memory of salvation history. Faced with the need to feed a hungry multitude, will Philip raise his eyes heavenward and make the connection between this test and the miraculous signs he has already witnessed Jesus perform? Faced with a need on a fearful scale, is the disciple overwhelmed or does he invoke the memory of God’s previous miracles when human resources failed?
Jesus has in mind the manna in the desert, of course. And what is the particular feature that characterises the supply of manna? It gives you all you need, but only enough for the day. It doesn’t allow you to be self-reliant. In other words, it is both a motive for faith and an invitation to it in a place which is not meant to be your lasting destination. Every day it brings that “test” of asking whether you want to gather enough to satisfy your needs, or whether you will be tempted to hoard enough to end the very dependence which feeds you. The disciple who trusts only in the presence of Jesus to provide will see his limitations contained and confounded by God’s desire to bring salvation.
Manna comes in response to crying to God in the wilderness. For the would-be disciple, then, it is a response to fervent praying. It comes only after one has felt the emptiness of the sometime apparent futility of being a believer and a follower.
Manna is given to stop us compromising our freedom for the sake of things that do not nourish what we most truly need. Its “sign value” is of conversion of heart, reminding the disciple freed from slavery not to romanticise one’s identity as a slave.
“Why did you bring us out of slavery to die in this wilderness?” the Israelites demanded. If I am to be free, I must be willing to enter into the plan that the Lord has. That’s why manna gives you your daily bread, but not the end of daily need. It teaches the lesson that man does not live on bread alone. Manna is both the symbol of God’s immediate, practical providence, but also the refusal of God to let man remain imprisoned by self-reliance and bent on self-sufficiency. It is good to be in need when your provider is God. “Open wide your hands and I will fill them,” he tells the psalmist. If I could gather as much manna as I wanted, I might forget the giver, absorbed by the satisfaction at my own skill in acquisition.
Manna is an image for grace, but it is, of course also a foreshadowing of the Blessed Sacrament, the bread from heaven, once again, not a gift to make me complete and self-sufficient, but to make me dependent, in a liberating way, on the supernatural reality of God’s invitation to communion as the route of the exodus of my personal history.
When I go to receive Holy Communion I should remember that, however it feels, this is the bread from heaven which nourishes eternal life in me. Not something to make me feel full and self-satisfied, but food which enables me to journey towards an ever deeper encounter with him. It carries the pledge of his Providence that I will come to no harm, even when circumstances appear totally inauspicious and barren; for each “today” dawns with the opportunity to gather the food of God’s down self-gift. It contains all the sweetness which is Jesus, risen from the dead. I should garner it in the way that God wants and receive it not as a reward for my grumbling and sense of entitlement, but as the sacrament of his daily, living presence, guiding and directing my life towards His promised land.
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