John Shearman's
 Liberal Lectionary Analysis

Rev. John Shearman

 INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE

[A more complete analysis follows this brief summary for church bulletins.]

[ Note: October 8, the second Monday in October, is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Alternatively in the USA, Thursday, November 22. Many Canadian congregations celebrate on the Sunday preceding that date. These lessons are taken from the RCL Year C listing for Thanksgiving.]

DEUTERONOMY 26:1-11. This apparent reminiscence cites a sermon delivered by Moses before the Israelites crossed the Jordan into Canaan. It gives details of the celebration of the harvest and the giving of its first fruits as a thanksgiving offering to God for delivering them from slavery in Egypt.

PSALM 100. Sung to the tune, Old One Hundredth, the Scottish paraphrase of this psalm still sounds the joy of Thanksgiving across the centuries.

PHILIPPIANS 4:4-9. In prison a perhaps waiting for a death sentence, Paul still is able to encourage his Philippian friends to rejoice and pray, knowing that God alone can give them – and us – the peace that is beyond comprehension. Then he urges them to engage in the kind of personal conduct that will bring his readers that peace.

JOHN 6:25-35. In words attributed to Jesus in response to a demand that he reveal a sign as to who he was, he reminded his audience of the manna which fed the Israelites during their wandering in the desert. Then to everyone’s astonishment he claimed to be the bread of life come from heaven. No one who comes to him will ever hunger again. Almost certainly this refers to what we know as the thanksgiving sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

DEUTERONOMY 26:1-11. This apparently imaginative reminiscence cites a sermon supposedly delivered by Moses before the Israelites crossed the Jordan into Canaan. It gives details of the celebration of the harvest and the giving of its first fruits as a thanksgiving offering to God for delivering them from slavery in Egypt. However, while the Book of Deuteronomy may have had some earlier sources, most of the text did not reach its final stages of composition until the end of the 7^th century BCE and possibly later. This passage forms a small part of the detailed elaboration of the covenant stated in the Decalogue in Deut. 5:6-21.

Being an agricultural festival, it is highly unlikely that the celebration of the first fruits occurred before the Israelites entered Canaan. Yet all Semitic peoples, including the Canaanites, did have similar festivals. The sacrifice symbolized that though all creation and its products belong to the deity, the grateful offering of the first produce of the harvest to the deity freed the remainder to be used for human consumption. It was thus a redemptive sacrifice. In ancient Israel, the festival was celebrated in the spring on the fiftieth day following the cutting of the first sheaf of grain. From this came the tradition known in NT times as the Festival of Weeks, or Pentecost. Originally, it also marked the beginning of the new year.

Thanksgiving celebrations had a much wider connotation. Thank offerings of many kinds had been known in Israel and in other cultures from earliest times. Frequently a festive meal was associated with the sacrificial offering. One can easily see why the English practice of celebrating harvest home services and the later North American custom of marking a special Thanksgiving Day had ancient sacred roots.

PSALM 100. This is the thanksgiving hymn par excellence. Every word and phrase evokes praise to the providence of God rooted in divine love. Sung to the tune, Old One Hundredth, the Scottish paraphrase of the psalm still sounds the joy of Thanksgiving across the centuries.

Worship need not always be orderly or softly spoken. A joyful noise dedicated to God can be an effective expression of faith acknowledging that we are indeed in the presence of God. As the contemporary styles of gospel rock reveals, the younger generation may well find a service mainly of such popular music more worshipful that their parents and grandparents to whom it sounds blatantly noisy.

The true foundation of worship lies in the free acknowledgment that God is the creator of all, including humanity, and that all things belong ultimately to God.

While being likened to sheep in a pasture may not appeal to modern minds, the metaphor would have been very meaningful in ancient Israel.

During the period of the Second Temple, entering the temple with thanksgiving and praise held a primary place in public worship. Daily and especially on the great festivals, a choir of Levites has the special task of leading the procession into the temple courts singing the traditional hymns of praise while the people responded antiphonally. All elements of worship were designed to express faith in God and to reiterate dependence of God’s steadfast love for God’s people and God’s enduring faithful to every generation. Our own worship services can do no more.

PHILIPPIANS 4:4-9. For many this is the highpoint not only this letter but of Paul’s correspondence with the congregations he had founded. In prison a perhaps waiting for a death sentence, he still is able to encourage his Philippian friends to rejoice and pray, knowing that God alone can give them – and us – the peace that is beyond comprehension. Then he urges them to engage in the kind of personal conduct that will bring his readers that peace.

It conveys both a meaningful sense of joyous worship and an urgent word of encouragement to the Philippians to maintain their commitment to the Christian life they had learned from Paul.

A few days after the end of World War II many congregations, especially in Great Britain where the war had been so tragically endured, services of thanksgiving solemnly expressed the people’s gratitude that the conflict had ended. The mood of the nation found expression in gentle rejoicing rather than in earlier raucous celebrations of victory in street demonstrations. Peace had been won at great price which no one could ever forget. A similar mood finds expression still in annual Remembrance Day services.

Writing close to thirty years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, so also Paul sought to bring to the Philippian congregation an awareness of the cost paid for their redemption (vs.7). Such an awareness can one evoke a prayer of supplication and thanksgiving in us too. Prayer, however, is meaningless unless followed by actions. Paul makes that emphasis abundantly clear in what can be regarded as the ethical mandate for the Christian individual and community. Whoever follows this path will surely known the peace of God.

A young teenager had been spending an idle summer with her friends, riding their bicycles hither and yon in search of ever more excitement, by no means all of it worthy. One day on her way to join her playmates, one of those girls thought of Paul’s words in Phil. 4:8. As the words surfaced clearly in her consciousness, she felt a strong urge to turn back home. She found other pursuits for the rest of the summer. Many years later she recalled with peace and gratitude that she alone among the small group had not only been able to pass their next year in school. She was also the only one who completed high school and went on tot further education. Coincidence? Perhaps, but she never thought so.

JOHN 6:25-35. This reading shows a special way in which John handled the miracle of feeding of the five thousand. For John, miracles had much more to them than seeing unnatural events occur and benefiting personally from them. This one led to a discourse by Jesus about being the bread of life. Many scholars believe that John used this discourse in place of the narrative of the Last Supper in the other three Gospels. John completely omitted that pericope from his version of the Passion. This discourse is a homily on the meaning of the sacrament.

The passage makes three significant points: The miracle was another of the signs identifying Jesus as the Messiah/Christ, the Son of God. In vs. 27, Jesus claims to be the Son of Man, which by this time had acquired a Christological connotation which it did not have in the Hebrew scriptures of Ezekiel and Daniel. He also bears the "seal" which the Father has set on him. The Greek verb spragizein used in this instance occurs also in 3:33. In both cases the verb refers to the well-known custom of stamping one’s personal signet on wax sealing a document, product or vessel to validate its ownership and authenticity in much the same way that modern silver is hallmarked. Ephesus, a noted commercial centre and the probable place from which the Fourth Gospel came, the custom would have been well known. Here it symbolized trustworthiness, i.e. Jesus is the one person who can give eternal, spiritual life because God has set his seal upon him.

Somewhat ambiguously, however, the passage points beyond Jesus to God who is the source of all life. The miracles Jesus performs are "the works of God" recalling the "mighty acts" of the Old Testament. Believing in Jesus, the Christ, is the only essential divine work because God alone is the source of all life and power including Jesus’ power to perform the miracle of feeding the multitude. The manna Moses gave the Israelites in the desert came not from Moses but from God. Then John has Jesus’ interlocutors ask reverently for this "bread from heaven" which opens the way for Jesus to launch into his discourse, "I am the bread of life."

Finally, by placing particular emphasis on this statement, John identifies Jesus completely with God. This is a more spiritual and theological reflection on the both the miracle and the person of Christ than one finds in the other Gospels. It comes close to defining the Trinitarian view of the person and work Christ. Writing from the viewpoint of a Jew in a thoroughly Hellenistic cultural milieu, John had not yet gone as far as his successors the Greek Fathers would go in defining the abstract Trinitarian hypostasis of Christ. He still maintains the Hebrew sense of spiritual life in the context of daily existence in the world where bread is eaten for physical sustenance. Yet, it also looks beyond the materialistic element of a few loaves and fish to the divine, spiritual source of life itself. The purpose of eating the bread of life (i.e. believing in Jesus Christ) is to live spiritually in the world here and now while waiting for the eschaton yet to come. But that carries us beyond the immediate passage to the remainder of the discourse (vss.35-58).