Jesus is travelling throughout small villages of ancient Palestine. He is an intimate man, touching people’s lives. People begin following him. In Sunday’s Gospel it is recorded that more than 5,000 people have been with him all day. He is concerned with the ever so intimate need of getting “food for them to eat.” It is a great task which a small boy with a few “loaves and fishes” helps Jesus make happen. All 5,000 “had their fill” with “fragments left over.” In response, the people proclaim Jesus’ greatness, “This is truly the Prophet.” They “were going to come and carry him off to make him king.” Jesus was not interested and so “he withdrew again to the mountain alone.”
The people believed they had found something great outside themselves. They were linking that greatness to things past, old prophets, old kings. The era was calling for something new. In 1961 Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) proposed that between 800 to 200 B.C. a great turning happened in human history. Jaspers called the era the First Axial Age. He believed it moved humanity beyond tribal sovereigns holding us back and into great intellectual and religious sensibilities. He hypothesized that the foundations of all our great and current civilizations were laid, from East to West; India, China, Greece, Israel. In part, Jaspers understands the greatness of that age but he does not seem to understand much of its greatness is still tied to backward things. According to Jaspers, among the people of the Axial Age for Israel were its prophets. But the prophets kept exalting an old War Lord, Yahweh, as king and kept calling the people backward to his great tribal sovereignty. It can be proposed that, to a degree, all the prophets of Jaspers’ Axial Age were doing the same thing. For example, Socrates was bound to Athens and choose execution/suicide as he would not betray his great tribal sovereignty. He feared it would be said of him, “you are doing what only a miserable slave would do, running away and turning your back upon the compacts and agreements which you made as a citizen” of Athens. (Crito) Jaspers proposed an Axial Age of great men but missed the greatness of a small man, Jesus. He missed the greatness of the subsequent small men and small women who from a small but intimate witness created something new. Jaspers mistakenly placed Jesus backward in time as just another great king of an old age, “If there is an axis in history, we must find it empirically in profane history, as a set of circumstances significant for all men, including (Jesus and) Christians.” Jaspers is mistaken about Jesus, as were the people of the crowd around him, as are many Christians today; all want to drag Jesus backward into an old age of great kings. We ourselves, likely when feeling small, daydream of being king for a day to accomplish great things. But that is not our greatness as intimate peacemakers who touch people’s lives. We continually create a different Axial Age, a different great turning. It happens every time we turn our gaze to one small face or to 5,000 and see a brother and sister to love. It is in such turning eternal greatness unfolds. It is the same when we gaze upon our own face. The greatness of a Buddha, or a Lao Tzu, or a Christ is not in their being a great king. It is as in their being a person who can live without acclaim but cannot live without being a caring spirit. Ours is a caring spirit who participates with other caring spirits in that which is great and in that which is small.
“You hold the real treasure within yourself – a soul that is grown and renewed… We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, the great deed of power. But the external consummation is not… necessary. So long as our being is sensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit in all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own small efforts… Whether the power whose influence you feel remains… to a small circle, it is already a great deal – it is in fact the essential thing – that this power should be born in you.” (Pierre Teilhard – Letters From a Traveler)
Prayer: Spirit, i am filled with passion toward all.
Question: How is the power for smallness and for greatness being born in me?
July 29, 2018 Gospel John 6:1-15 Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time