Today's Gospel reading (St. John 6.1-21) is a bit of a mash-up of two miracle stories. The first is the Feeding of the Five Thousand; the second is the shorter version of Jesus Walking on the Water (Simon Peter does not go for a swim in this one). That one would be a challenge for any homilist, so many split them up and have a pretty good sermon on one of the two miracles.
The way this Gospel puts these together should not be ignored, however. What we don't hear today is what happens when Jesus and the Disciples get to the other side of the lake the next day. That day, Jesus delivers His statement that He is the Bread of Life and that one must eat His Flesh and drink His Blood for eternal life, his Flesh being food indeed and his Blood being drink indeed. A big shock, and a great topic for another time, but why is that of any matter for what we read today?
The BIG DEAL is that the crowd of the Feeding of the Five Thousand and the Discussion of the Bread of Life are one in the same. This crowd saw the sign that they would never be hungry in this lifetime and that the perpetrator would be their deliverer from the crushing heel of Rome. Jesus went to a lot of trouble disabusing them of that notion. The point He was making indeed was about the Kingdom of God, but not the Kingdom the populace had envisioned. While Jesus indeed would feed them, as He had the previous day, that day was a foreshadowing of how He would feed them in the ages to come. They received Bread at His hand, but that bread was a foreshadowing, a type of the Bread that is His very self, the Paschal Sacrifice on the cross that we receive in the Holy Sacrament and the Paschal Sacrifice that shall eternally sustain us in the age to come.
So what about the quick trip across the Sea of Galilee? Jesus had things to do, places to be, and a few laws of space and time had to be bent to fit them in, but more importantly, He had to drive home to His Disciples that they were not dealing with just any prophet of old. Moses and Elijah both did really amazing things by the power of God, but Jesus needed to impress on these future witnesses of the Resurrection and the future teachers of the Kingdom of God just Who He was. Granted, He had to deliver other examples, but it is a cumulative effect. He fed thousands, He walked on water, He bent time, just who...what...exactly was He?
So let us take away today a couple of things from today's Gospel:
Jesus is our nourishment, body and soul.
Jesus is Lord of both time and the elements.
That way next Sunday's Gospel should not come as a surprise, nor the Miracle we see every time we go to Mass.
The Feeding of the Multitude, Mosaic of the Church of Christ the Saviour in Chora, Istanbul, Turkey, 14th Century AD