Sermon: 14 Mar '21

Feeding of the Five Thousand

Gospel Reading: John 6: 1-16

Dear Community of Christians,

For some people, the time of the Passion is an occasion to live without daily food for several days. It is an exercise in renunciation and an attempt to make a small sacrifice oneself. In this process, one can experience how the heaviness of the physical body is less dominant, and how a certain lightness in thinking also sets in. The soul that exercises itself in renunciation can also purify itself. Our ego, our will, become strengthened by such exercises.

Is it then a contradiction to read and reflect on the feeding of the 5000 during the Passion period? In fact, these 5,000 were not fed by the little bit of physical bread and fish. It is especially important for us humans in today's materialistic world to get away from the idea that we are nourished by our physical material food.  We have no awareness of the different and difficult processes that take place in our organism when we take in food. Food is only a stimulus for our organism to open us up to the strong spiritual processes that takes place in our threefold system as nerve-sense, as rhythmical and as metabolic human beings. All three parts of our organism are active in this spiritual process. The feeding of the 5000, with the 12 baskets which were left over, is an important image for our present time.

Modern society denies all spiritual powers in our time, where we place importance on playing with numbers and statistics, which supports the creation of theses alienated from reality. 

​Our time shows us so very clearly that there is only one help. The turning of our whole human being towards the Christ power that permeates everything: the world, nature, and the human being. However, this help will not be automatically available. We humans must want it, turn to it, and actively work with it.

Rev. Ute Koenig