In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.

Confession: I am a bread nerd. Between college and grad school, I worked as a baker with a collective of farmers growing culturally significant wheat in central California. We thought together about how church-owned lands could be sites for food sovereignty by partnering with Indigenous growers and seed-keepers to preserve these wheat varieties in an economic system designed to eradicate them. My passion for bread and call to the priesthood co-evolved, so it makes sense that Jesus would reveal something significant about himself by blessing and breaking bread on the land among friends.

 

I love barley bread, but if you have ever eaten it or made it, you will know a barley loaf is not something you would present proudly at a dinner party. Bread made with barley alone, a grain high in fiber and protein and low in gluten, can be dense and sticky, sometimes requiring pressing the dough together in your hands to keep its shape. Barley bread is what you eat with butter in the middle of the night when you are sad or hungry. It is what you make for a friend when they are sick or lonely. It is what you pull together when your pantry is bare, in the winter, in times of war, in times of pandemic when you cannot access essential goods like flour and sugar from the store. You break and share a barley loaf in the hard times, in the thin times when you are worn, and at the rough edge of your hunger. Barley bread is what you feast on when there is nothing left and nothing else.

 

Except for the Passion account, the miracle of the barley loaves is the only story common to all four Gospels. From its sheer repetition, we can deduce that something is significant about this story. What does the repetition of breaking bread and sharing it among friends reveal about who Jesus is and what it means to follow him?

 

Before we engage this question, it might help to note a few contextual signposts. First, the text tells us that the miracle of the barley loaves occurs near Passover (6:4). This detail is unique to John’s Gospel. Passover commemorates God liberating the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and their Exodus to freedom. It also remembers the “passing over” of the Angel of Death, who spared the Israelites’ firstborn during the 10th Plague. So, in Passover, God’s people remember that God has saved them from the forces of death.

 

The barley bread of this miracle carries these memories of affliction and liberation. Reflecting on this week’s Gospel lesson in his Substack, the Rev. Dean McGowan expressed: “In the loaves, there is parallel with the gift of Manna to the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. Not only can Jesus feed the hungry, but the sign reflects God’s care for the poor in their need and for a people seeking freedom from oppression.”

 

As Rev. McGowan notes, the sign of multiplying bread for the hungry is meant to evoke a memory of God providing through gift. Like the manna, this barley bread is not only the Bread of Life but the Bread of Liberation from all forces seeking death. Second, the reference to barley is a nod to 2 Kings, chapter 4. In this reading, a man from Baal-shisha, like the boy in today’s Gospel, comes to “a man of God (Elisha)” with twenty loaves of barley bread, which miraculously feeds the one hundred people gathered. In this story, the servant asks: “How am I to set twenty loaves before one hundred men?” Elisha replies, “Give it to the people to eat…for this is what the LORD says: ‘They will eat and have some left over.” (2 Kings 4:42-43). So, too, in today’s lesson, the bread of barley is broken; people eat and are satisfied, and baskets are left over.

 

Throughout scripture, the image of the kingdom as bread that is broken and multiplied among friends is told repeatedly, so this act must represent something essential about who God is. Of course, in celebrating the Eucharist, we remember through bread the reality of Christ’s body as the Bread of Life, broken for the love of the world. What is God speaking to us through the breaking of the barley loaves?

 

The Johannine accounts of Christ uniquely emphasize Jesus’s identity and invite witnesses of these accounts to contemplate who Jesus is, what the kingdom costs, and to whom the kingdom belongs. Some scholars suggest that the miracle of the barley loaves broken eucharistically is the sign of Christ as Prophet-King.

 

We get the idea of the three-fold office of Christ as Prophet-Priest-King from theologian John Calvin, who introduced it at the Geneva Catechism in 1545. If we read John’s account of the barley bread miracle within this threefold office of Christ, we see how John is drawing our attention to how layers of Jesus— the prophetic, the priestly, and the kingly interact to transform the cultural, religious, and economic systems around him. Theologian Marco Hofheinz takes this idea deeper by suggesting friendship should be the relational interpretive lens through which we understand Jesus’s threefold office as Prophet, Priest, and King. In short, he expands upon the scholarship of Jürgen Moltmann to contend that Jesus performs each of these offices first and foremost as a friend. This Gospel narrative, therefore, reveals something to us about how Jesus carries out his ministry as a friend. 

 

The Johannine account is one of the places in the scripture where Jesus’s threefold office as a friend is most evident. John foregrounds Christ as a friend through table vignettes, like the one we read today, that remember Passover and anticipate the Last Supper. In breaking bread, Jesus acts as a friend to the poor, the sinners, and the outcasts. Eating with them and blessing the fruits of their labor and the fruits of the land to which they tend is one of the primary ways he testifies: I am your friend. He doesn’t purchase food for the meal and, in so doing, participate in an extractive economy. Instead, he blesses the food they have and collects it into his hands to be broken, shared, and enjoyed. This is a family meal.

 

So, what kind of prophet does Jesus reveal himself to be in this act of radical food ministry? John Calvin posed a version of this question himself at the Geneva Catechism. He inquired: “In what sense do you call Christ a Prophet?” (Question 39) And the people do call Christ prophet after they witness the sign of this humble meal. Verse 14 of our reading notes: “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’” So again, we ask, what kind of prophet? This query remains suspended until Jesus answers it later in the Passion narrative. When confessing his kingship to Pilate, he says: “You say that I am a king. For this end I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth” (18:37).³

 

There it is: Jesus has come to bear the Truth as our friend through the breaking of the bread. Today’s Gospel narrative shows us that we understand something crucial about who Jesus is when we sit at his table to serve and be fed. When we eat and feed, we know God as a friend. Friends are distinct from ‘others’ because friends are loved and fed by God, and friends are loved and fed by each other. And this friendship is not an abstract concept. It, as Hofheinz says, “changes social and economic status.” Friendship is a [relational] revelation that causes revolution.” This reordering is the kind of work Christ’s prophetic office is concerned with, and therefore, that the Church, as Christ’s hands and feet in the world, is concerned with, too. 

 

This revelation of Christ as the Prophet who “witnesses to the truth” is unveiled in the blessing and breaking of barley loaves among friends.  More than another fixture of today’s Gospel story, the barley locates us in a time, place, and people. To the original hearers of this account, the gathered crowd of Jewish and Gentile Galileans, whom we join as we listen, barley bread was a familiar symbol of life and liberation. Borders have shifted through climate, migration, war, and displacement over the years, but Galilee was a part of ancient Palestine in biblical times and is now inside modern Israel. In Palestine, wheat and barley were, and still are staple crops. Since barley is a rotational crop that grows in the off-season, inclement weather, and poor soil conditions, it is more affordable and accessible than wheat. Accordingly, barley bread became a signature meal for the laborers, the growers, the bakers, and the working class. These ordinary, essential people are the witnesses of the barley bread miracle today. So, while breaking bread symbolizes Jesus’s body broken among friends for the life and dignity of all persons, the bread here is not only a metaphor for life.

 

Bread as the body of Christ is Life.  Breaking bread together signals life and reminds followers of Christ of the humanizing effect of sincere friendship. The making and the eating of bread together signifies material sustenance, survival, and resistance to dehumanizing death. 

 

Barley bread is the bread of liberation and affliction; it is eaten in hard times and on the heels of hard times. And we are in hard times. Fires have not ceased in the Holy Land. War rages on. Bodies and lands continue to be occupied, bombarded, and destroyed over long-held conflicts about who gets to claim citizenship in and ownership over these holy places. In Palestine, where barley grows natively and is preserved as a religiously and culturally significant seed, bodies have been stripped, land has been burned, and community ovens have been bombed. The land of the barley rund fresh with the blood and ash of the friends of God. Palestinian-American journalist Amanny Ahmad, who is presently writing on the atrocities and beauties of the Holy Land, shared in her most recent piece, “Bread and Salt,” the lyrics sung during the preparation and baking of traditional bread in Palestinian ovens called tabuns. It is a song of covenant and friendship. The lyrics go like this:

 

 “ غني يا زهر الدحنونوارقص يا خبز الطابونطاح الشومر والزعتروودعنا سقعة كانون “

“Sing wildflower, dance bread of the tabun, fennel, and thyme have grown; we have left the December cold.”

 

About these lyrics, Palestinian ethnographer and folklorist Tawfiq Canaan recounted: “Partaking of food means making a covenant. The host, as well as the guest, may remind each other bênna ‘ês u-milk, “there is between us (the covenant) of salt and bread.” The expression “there is bread and salt between us;’ which has been used since biblical times, is equal to say: “A formal covenant binds us together.” – Tawfiq Canaan.

 

There is bread and salt between us, but it is the salt of tears and the bread of ashes. This covenant of bread and salt has been desecrated with the blood of the innocents. Five months ago, already four months into the genocide in the Holy Land, Ahmad painfully documented the intimate entanglements of bread and life in Gaza. She recorded:

 

“So many of the horrors that we have seen and heard from Gaza in recent months are tied to bread. Many fathers, sons, and pregnant widows were bombed in broad daylight, clamoring for a bundle of pita, and thousands of people waited in lines for hours in the hopes of getting a few pieces to feed their families. Images of sacks of fresh bread that should be dipped in precious olive oil and za’atar instead soaked in the blood of someone recently dispossessed of life…Children and babies are starving, and the world watching still has its daily bread.”

 

Bread is not a metaphor for life; it is life. Jesus becomes the barley loaf broken amid hunger and murder. Jesus’s body, represented in the barley loaf, becomes the Bread of Affliction and the Bread of Life for people who know the horrors of death. Jesus is doing something intentional in this story. He is setting the table. He asks people to sit in the grass and invites them to a meal. He gives thanks and, in so doing, prepares these elements of the earth for the Eucharist, ‘eucharist’ which derives from the Greek eucharistia and the Hebrew berekah, both of which mean ‘to give thanks.’ By giving thanks for these humble things— fruit of the earth, barley, and fruit of the sea, fish, and by blessing it and breaking it, Jesus is saying the kingdom of God is like this: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first to rest on this land and be satisfied. In this gathering, we are witnessing to the truth.

 

So what can we do as Christians to insist on life and repair the broken covenant of bread and salt in this time? Organizations are streaming direct aid and hunger relief to starved families in Palestine and Israel. We can give them our resources, and we should. But monetary relief is not enough. What if we try to feel the pain of the land and the people in our bodies? Can we dare to be this intimate? We are, after all, family. Our bloodlines are connected in this tradition of breaking bread. So, can we stay awake to the weeping and the longing for justice on the lips of war-torn people in a war-torn holy land? We must try, fervently, not to become numb, not to turn away, but again and again to look Palestinians and Jews in the eyes and say I see you. I love you. I am sorry for the horrors. Let us break bread together.

 

When we eat together, we remember we are alive, and Christ lives in us. And that some are no longer alive, and we give thanks for their life. Even if this story of the barley bread miracle is only a story, it witnesses to the truth because it speaks to a core reality of what it means to embody Christ in the world. God took on flesh in Jesus as a body who knew and witnessed hunger— hunger not only as a physiological condition but as an economic system. We prophetically gather up the fragments through Christ and the power of the Spirit by working as friends towards freedom– towards the liberation of bodies and lands, of which the meal of barley bread is a symbol and promise. We are in hard times and need to pray for the courage of the saint activists to break bread among friends and live out our witness to Christ’s insistence on life with our bodies. When you eat, remember your neighbor as your friend. Do what is yours, and do it with all your heart. Give thanks and intercede with the Spirit for justice to come like a mighty river to people, the lands, and around our tables. God has gathered up the remnants. God is gathering the remnant. God will gather the remnant again. This is our hope.

 

For this is the kingdom of God: to feed and be fed. God is working for justice in love. We may not see it in our lifetimes, but we must not lose heart. A change is gonna to come. It’s gonna to come. So may we, with Maria Skobtsova, Assata Shakur, Tawfiq Canaan, Sonya Massey, St. James, Mary Magdalene, and all the saints and martyrs, be gutsy, courageous, and charitable to the end. Amen.