READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 2:7-17
Romans 6:19-23
St. Mark 8:1-9
Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and our Lord
Jesus, the Christ.
Who speaks to you today, saying:
In today’s Gospel of the feeding of the 4 thousand, we see Jesus hiding. Not that He is behind a tree so no one can see Him, but that, instead of doing work immediately with His own hands such as His miracles, He is doing His work mediately, that is through something or someone else. In today’s case it is a double hiding, one because He makes His disciples hand out the food He multiplied, and two, He is handing out multiplied food and not some eternal power gift.
One thing we understand from this is how we even know about God in this world that seems completely devoid of Him. This, God wants for our lives, so that we know and believe that knowledge of God must be revealed to us and that it is impossible to understand Him only through the things He created, also known as the Natural Knowledge of God.
But, the scientist in me wants to get a piece of that bread that Jesus miracled and that fish and study it. Is it different from other bread and fish in the world? Has its structure been changed, seeing as though they multiplied and don’t usually do that? Was there something special about that particular bread and fish Jesus had, that made it possible for Jesus to use it in such a way that doesn’t normally happen on my table at home?
With these curiosities leading us into the unknown and invisible, we start on the path towards being a theologian of Glory as opposed to a Theologian of the Cross. A Theologian of Glory operates on the assumption that Creation and history are transparent to human intellect, or reason. That one can “see through” what is created and what happens, so as to peer into the invisible things of God. In other words, “what’s really going on”.
We may take bread as an example. Jesus held it in high esteem so we attempt to understand bread. We have taken it apart and put it back together, so to speak. We have delved into its secrets. We know how to make it, what ingredients come together for it. We even know their chemical make-up and atomic structure, peering into its blueprint. With this blueprint, we can not only make a variety of breads, but also bread substitutes, that is bread without God.
You may not know the difference between a hydrocarbon and a carbohydrate, but your body does and if we can make your body think its eating bread simply by feeding it a chemical formulae, then we would have achieved a state where we don’t need bread, as we know it. Jesus just had to use bread because He didn’t know what we know.
And if we don’t need bread, then we don’t need Jesus. That is the logical conclusion of the Theology of Glory. That we can see beyond what God has made and discover how to make it ourselves, thus ultimate truth and ultimate knowledge become ours. God multiplied bread and fish, but so what? What was His real purpose behind such an act? Who is the real Jesus?
The problem with Glory is that you continue to run into God’s divine attributes; His timelessness, His immutability, His almightiness. If God immutably chooses people to be saved, before time even exists, then how can there be any freedom? If God is almighty, then why use bread and fish to feed people?
Thus, the standard explanation for the Theologian of Glory is analogy. That is, since God is a higher being, He can only interact with us lower life forms in certain ways. So feeding with bread and fish becomes a clue to something bigger and hidden for us to follow, like a mystery novel.
And Jesus says, guys its bread and fish and eating. What’s not to get?
Repent. In this way, we may become the true Christians, or rather, the true knowers of beyond Christianity, or whatever it would be called. We find ourselves above sin, above creation, and above the work of Jesus. We are not slow-witted like those others who need crosses and miracles. We can see. We can know. We can strip God down to His bare parts and know how He works, stealing His crown and taking His place as “god” of all.
This is what Dr. Luther described as the nakedness of God and then proceeded to warn us all that we should flee from such a thing as if from the devil Himself. Why? Because anything beyond what God has said and done for Himself is not Who God is or what He has done. It is the realm of “not God”, or demons.
This is the same thing we do to the Church. We peer into its dark corners, we spy out its inner workings, and conclude that it is just as messed up as the rest of the world and not some purified Bride that has been purchased and won. Leading to the belief that Church is worthless and not to be considered in our quest for holiness.
A theologian of the Cross believes differently. They can’t get around the cross. Where the Theologian of Glory makes the cross of Christ transparent, as if there is something more important beyond it, the Theologian of the Cross is turned back to the visible and manifest. Not, what did God mean by this act, but what has God accomplished by this act.
Instead of contemplating the invisible intellectually, we instead comprehend the visible contemplatively, that is through suffering and the cross. This ultimately means that we believe God acted how He wanted and knew what He was doing. In multiplying the loaves and fish, He was not giving away a clue to the key to life, the universe, and everything. Rather He was revealing the Key Himself: Jesus.
When Moses asks God, “Show me Your Glory”, what was it God did in response, in Exodus 33? “And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.’” (Ex 33)
Only His back! God refuses to be seen in any other way both for our protection and in order to put down any theology of glory within us. It is the cross alone which is our theology. Therefore the “back of God”, which Moses saw, was Jesus; the suffering and crucified Christ.
God presents us with how He wants things done. When He feeds the 4 thousand, He wants us focused on Himself, just as the whole incident is focused on Jesus. Jesus sees the crowd, Jesus calls the disciples, Jesus has compassion, Jesus gives thanks, Jesus breaks the bread, Jesus gives them to His disciples to distribute, and Jesus does the multiplying.
So when it comes to what He wants us to understand about His miraculous feedings, He wants us to hear and see what He does. There may have been multiple feedings, but He is not going to be a Bread King (Jn 6:15). In fact, if we continue reading St. Mark chapter 8 the Pharisees ask for a sign and Jesus gives them a Passion Prediction.
Meaning that they didn’t take the feeding as a sign, which is not all bad, because that’s not all there is. But the Sign given will be Jonah’s sign, that “the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mk 8:31).
The Feeding points to Jesus Who then takes us along with Him to the cross. It is His suffering, dying, and resurrection that Jesus wants us to use to explain the multiplication of the breads and the fish. It is not something in the bread or in the fish or in you, it is something in the Giver of all. That something is God in the flesh.
You see, Adam and Eve knew they were naked in the garden and in sin they thought it a bad thing, even though Jesus created them that way, and it was in that bare openness that God walked with them. They knew Him and shared His righteousness, shared His will. In the Fall into sin and death, they couldn’t stand that blatant openness and wanted to cover themselves and God.
And God consented. He both clothed Adam and Eve and He put a veil over His Glory. And when that veil was torn in two, at the crucifixion of Jesus, we see and believe that Jesus is both God and man, risen from the dead. That God in the flesh has come to feed us with the bread of heaven, that can’t be studied or replicated by scientism, but must be given out of the heavenly Body of Jesus.
We cannot know God apart from His Scriptures. We can get a sense of His presence in light of His creation and because of our conscience, but we cannot tell Who He is or What He wants. That must be revealed to us. We must be told that the bread and the fish point to Christ and His Church. We must be told to take up our cross and follow Christ to His Church.
That the Bride is clothed and veiled in majesty, because of Her Bridegroom's Blood. That the Bride is rent asunder by schisms and yet one with Her Lord. That the Bride does not misuse the knowledge of God through works, but depends solely on the works of Jesus: His work of the Cross.
Because we only misuse His knowledge through works, Jesus wishes to be recognized only in suffering, and through that suffering, condemn the wisdom of this world that seeks glory in invisible things, that is in things where glory does not exist. All Glory belongs to God and His glory is Jesus Christ. The Theologian of the cross hears and believes this revelation from God, even though, to the world, it is foolishness.
A fleshy God suffering and dying? An all-powerful God handing out bread? What shame! What weakness!
What care! What compassion! What humility to stand before the creatures who rebelled and give them heaven’s own righteousness, pastors to administer, and the flesh and blood of the Son of Man to eat and drink for the forgiveness of sins.
“As silver tried by fire is pure, from all adulteration;
so though God’s Word shall men endure, each trail and temptation;
Its light beams brighter through the cross
And purified from human dross
It shines through every nation”
Who speaks to you today, saying:
“In those days, when again a great crowd had gathered,
and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples to him”
In today’s Gospel of the feeding of the 4 thousand, we see Jesus hiding. Not that He is behind a tree so no one can see Him, but that, instead of doing work immediately with His own hands such as His miracles, He is doing His work mediately, that is through something or someone else. In today’s case it is a double hiding, one because He makes His disciples hand out the food He multiplied, and two, He is handing out multiplied food and not some eternal power gift.
One thing we understand from this is how we even know about God in this world that seems completely devoid of Him. This, God wants for our lives, so that we know and believe that knowledge of God must be revealed to us and that it is impossible to understand Him only through the things He created, also known as the Natural Knowledge of God.
But, the scientist in me wants to get a piece of that bread that Jesus miracled and that fish and study it. Is it different from other bread and fish in the world? Has its structure been changed, seeing as though they multiplied and don’t usually do that? Was there something special about that particular bread and fish Jesus had, that made it possible for Jesus to use it in such a way that doesn’t normally happen on my table at home?
With these curiosities leading us into the unknown and invisible, we start on the path towards being a theologian of Glory as opposed to a Theologian of the Cross. A Theologian of Glory operates on the assumption that Creation and history are transparent to human intellect, or reason. That one can “see through” what is created and what happens, so as to peer into the invisible things of God. In other words, “what’s really going on”.
We may take bread as an example. Jesus held it in high esteem so we attempt to understand bread. We have taken it apart and put it back together, so to speak. We have delved into its secrets. We know how to make it, what ingredients come together for it. We even know their chemical make-up and atomic structure, peering into its blueprint. With this blueprint, we can not only make a variety of breads, but also bread substitutes, that is bread without God.
You may not know the difference between a hydrocarbon and a carbohydrate, but your body does and if we can make your body think its eating bread simply by feeding it a chemical formulae, then we would have achieved a state where we don’t need bread, as we know it. Jesus just had to use bread because He didn’t know what we know.
And if we don’t need bread, then we don’t need Jesus. That is the logical conclusion of the Theology of Glory. That we can see beyond what God has made and discover how to make it ourselves, thus ultimate truth and ultimate knowledge become ours. God multiplied bread and fish, but so what? What was His real purpose behind such an act? Who is the real Jesus?
The problem with Glory is that you continue to run into God’s divine attributes; His timelessness, His immutability, His almightiness. If God immutably chooses people to be saved, before time even exists, then how can there be any freedom? If God is almighty, then why use bread and fish to feed people?
Thus, the standard explanation for the Theologian of Glory is analogy. That is, since God is a higher being, He can only interact with us lower life forms in certain ways. So feeding with bread and fish becomes a clue to something bigger and hidden for us to follow, like a mystery novel.
And Jesus says, guys its bread and fish and eating. What’s not to get?
Repent. In this way, we may become the true Christians, or rather, the true knowers of beyond Christianity, or whatever it would be called. We find ourselves above sin, above creation, and above the work of Jesus. We are not slow-witted like those others who need crosses and miracles. We can see. We can know. We can strip God down to His bare parts and know how He works, stealing His crown and taking His place as “god” of all.
This is what Dr. Luther described as the nakedness of God and then proceeded to warn us all that we should flee from such a thing as if from the devil Himself. Why? Because anything beyond what God has said and done for Himself is not Who God is or what He has done. It is the realm of “not God”, or demons.
This is the same thing we do to the Church. We peer into its dark corners, we spy out its inner workings, and conclude that it is just as messed up as the rest of the world and not some purified Bride that has been purchased and won. Leading to the belief that Church is worthless and not to be considered in our quest for holiness.
A theologian of the Cross believes differently. They can’t get around the cross. Where the Theologian of Glory makes the cross of Christ transparent, as if there is something more important beyond it, the Theologian of the Cross is turned back to the visible and manifest. Not, what did God mean by this act, but what has God accomplished by this act.
Instead of contemplating the invisible intellectually, we instead comprehend the visible contemplatively, that is through suffering and the cross. This ultimately means that we believe God acted how He wanted and knew what He was doing. In multiplying the loaves and fish, He was not giving away a clue to the key to life, the universe, and everything. Rather He was revealing the Key Himself: Jesus.
When Moses asks God, “Show me Your Glory”, what was it God did in response, in Exodus 33? “And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.’” (Ex 33)
Only His back! God refuses to be seen in any other way both for our protection and in order to put down any theology of glory within us. It is the cross alone which is our theology. Therefore the “back of God”, which Moses saw, was Jesus; the suffering and crucified Christ.
God presents us with how He wants things done. When He feeds the 4 thousand, He wants us focused on Himself, just as the whole incident is focused on Jesus. Jesus sees the crowd, Jesus calls the disciples, Jesus has compassion, Jesus gives thanks, Jesus breaks the bread, Jesus gives them to His disciples to distribute, and Jesus does the multiplying.
So when it comes to what He wants us to understand about His miraculous feedings, He wants us to hear and see what He does. There may have been multiple feedings, but He is not going to be a Bread King (Jn 6:15). In fact, if we continue reading St. Mark chapter 8 the Pharisees ask for a sign and Jesus gives them a Passion Prediction.
Meaning that they didn’t take the feeding as a sign, which is not all bad, because that’s not all there is. But the Sign given will be Jonah’s sign, that “the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mk 8:31).
The Feeding points to Jesus Who then takes us along with Him to the cross. It is His suffering, dying, and resurrection that Jesus wants us to use to explain the multiplication of the breads and the fish. It is not something in the bread or in the fish or in you, it is something in the Giver of all. That something is God in the flesh.
You see, Adam and Eve knew they were naked in the garden and in sin they thought it a bad thing, even though Jesus created them that way, and it was in that bare openness that God walked with them. They knew Him and shared His righteousness, shared His will. In the Fall into sin and death, they couldn’t stand that blatant openness and wanted to cover themselves and God.
And God consented. He both clothed Adam and Eve and He put a veil over His Glory. And when that veil was torn in two, at the crucifixion of Jesus, we see and believe that Jesus is both God and man, risen from the dead. That God in the flesh has come to feed us with the bread of heaven, that can’t be studied or replicated by scientism, but must be given out of the heavenly Body of Jesus.
We cannot know God apart from His Scriptures. We can get a sense of His presence in light of His creation and because of our conscience, but we cannot tell Who He is or What He wants. That must be revealed to us. We must be told that the bread and the fish point to Christ and His Church. We must be told to take up our cross and follow Christ to His Church.
That the Bride is clothed and veiled in majesty, because of Her Bridegroom's Blood. That the Bride is rent asunder by schisms and yet one with Her Lord. That the Bride does not misuse the knowledge of God through works, but depends solely on the works of Jesus: His work of the Cross.
Because we only misuse His knowledge through works, Jesus wishes to be recognized only in suffering, and through that suffering, condemn the wisdom of this world that seeks glory in invisible things, that is in things where glory does not exist. All Glory belongs to God and His glory is Jesus Christ. The Theologian of the cross hears and believes this revelation from God, even though, to the world, it is foolishness.
A fleshy God suffering and dying? An all-powerful God handing out bread? What shame! What weakness!
What care! What compassion! What humility to stand before the creatures who rebelled and give them heaven’s own righteousness, pastors to administer, and the flesh and blood of the Son of Man to eat and drink for the forgiveness of sins.
“As silver tried by fire is pure, from all adulteration;
so though God’s Word shall men endure, each trail and temptation;
Its light beams brighter through the cross
And purified from human dross
It shines through every nation”
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