The sun has finally arrived and with it the season of picnics. This week I am returning to St. Nicholas Church, Fyfield where we will be considering the most amazing picnics ever!

I wonder what the most amazing picnic you have ever experienced might be? Perhaps you have been to events where picnics are required: outdoor concerts such as Last Night of the Proms, or Shakespeare at the National Trust, or maybe even a school sports day or church family day out. On several occasions I have turned up to such events with a few sarnies in a tupperware container and a large bag of crisps to share, maybe some strawberries and a bottle of pop, a picnic blanket folded up under my arm, to be bedazzled by others’ much grander fares. I have seen picnic set ups with tables and chairs, table cloths and even candelabra, cake stands displaying French fancies and Victoria Sponges, smoked salmon sandwiches, posh vegetable crisps in glass bowls, ice buckets containing bottles of bubbly, and maybe even a barbecue on the side!

My most memorable picnics have been the simple kind, a basket containing fresh bread, a selection of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of wine kept cool in the river. These picnics were memorable because of the simple quality of the food, but also because of who I was with: a simple picnic makes a great first date! No matter how deluxe or how rustic, no picnic could ever be as memorable as the ones Jesus served up.

Our gospel passage today comes just after Jesus has fed over five thousand people from one small offering of five barley loaves and two fish. To put it into perspective, that’s ten times the population of Fyfield fed on much less than the tea tent the Fyfield Fete had to offer!

Understandably, the people want more. They want more bread, the freshest most heavenly bread they have ever sampled, more soft white flakes of fish which melted on the tongue; they are hungry, but they do not know what they are hungry for, only that Jesus is the only one who can provide it for them, no-one else has ever come close: no religious leader, no Roman authority, no position of status, no wealth or well-being can even compare with this taste of heaven.

It is not the food, Jesus tells them, or the miraculous side show, the signs and wonders. They ask what they must do to receive the food Jesus promises that will never run out, perhaps thinking of the Widow of Zarephath whose last morsels never depleted even as she set her mind to sharing her last meal with Elijah, or the miraculous story of Hannukah when the temple lamps never burned themselves out despite the oil having run dry. To be fully fed, is to believe in the one whom God sent, it is to believe in Jesus.

The people still need persuading. Jesus is asking them to change their allegiance from the religious leaders to himself, the religious leaders who wield power and who have pitted themselves against Jesus. Perhaps they are comparing the miraculous meal they have shared just the day before with the stories of the wonderous food of Moses’ days. Moses who is supreme, second only to Yahweh himself. They are looking for proof, for evidence that in following Jesus they are making a wise choice, a safe choice, despite the inherent danger in Roman occupation of siding with one who claims to be the Messiah.

Yes, Jesus acknowledges, there was bread from heaven in Moses’ time too, but it wasn’t Moses who provided the bread. Just as with the encounter the day before, it was God’s continuous creation and care which fed the thousands, which continues to feed God’s people. If they are able to believe in the Manna of Moses time, why can’t they believe that in their own time and before their very eyes, and still tantalising their tastebuds, and filling their bellies, was also a gift from God, an act of God even? Jesus is asking them to make the leap of faith that the one who created the heavenly bread yesterday is the one of created it in the wilderness too.

Perhaps we have similar difficulties in our own faith journey? Perhaps we can believe in the historical Jesus, there is after all more verifiable evidence of the man Jesus than there is of Julius Caesar, but struggle with acknowledging the resurrection? Or even that the resurrection happened too, but that is a miracle for the Bible stories, for history, Jesus isn’t really alive today, is he? Jesus can’t miraculously feed the hungry now, or bring life in the ways he promised then, or can he?

Jesus tells the people then that they need to believe not just in the miracles, the food they have tasted, but in Jesus himself. It was a huge step to take then, just as it is now. We are called not to have belief in the manifestations of faith, the beautiful church buildings, the status of being ‘Church of England’ in an English speaking country, the rituals of Sunday mornings, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, but Jesus; and not just a faith in Jesus which is a nod in his general direction, a ticket for heaven, or a love of the liturgies, but a living faith which fills us, feeds us with joy and hope and purpose, and brings us closer to heaven.

Click here to read the gospel passage. To read about Moses and the Manna in the wilderness, click here.