There
was a time, in a galaxy not so far away, when bread-machines were all the rage.
They were on everyone’s Christmas list, and they still sell fairly well, I think . . . you can find whole web-sites
devoted to bread-recipes and bread-machine
recipes, and there are folks who swear by their bread machines, and others who
think they’re sacrilegious . . . and bread is like that, it evokes strong
feelings in a lot of people, strong sense-memories of wonderful times and
meals, memories of going to grandma’s house and smelling the bread, of romantic
times, a loaf of bread a jug of wine and thou . . . for me I think about simple
breakfasts of cheese and marmalade and hot French bread served to Pam and I in a
hotel near the Eiffel Tower . . . but in Jesus’ day, bread was a matter of life
and death, and it’s in a way redundant when Jesus says “I am the bread of life”
because bread is life in the ancient
middle east . . . it’s kind of like saying “I am the life of life,” isn’t
it? Or maybe he means more like “I am
the basis of life,” just as bread is the basis of life in the ancient middle
east . . . or “I am the essential
ingredient of life” . . . Of course, it doesn’t help that he qualifies the saying with another
peculiar statement: “whoever comes to me will never be hungry” – and how is that like bread, if I eat bread for breakfast I’m getting a mite peckish long about lunchtime . . . and
what about this “whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” stuff? Since when did bread quench your thirst?
Well,
we can think of today’s reading as a meditation upon this saying, a meditation
by way of explanation . . . exactly what does he mean when he says this? In
what way is Jesus the bread of life? Well, the religious authorities – whom John
rather pejoratively calls “the Jews” – when the religious authorities hear
about this, they begin to complain – and another way to translate it might be
“to mutter” – they began to mutter about it among themselves “Isn’t this
Josephs’ boy, whose father and mother we all know? I mean, we did business with his daddy, we were served Seder by his momma, how
dare he say ‘I am the bread come down from heaven?’ Who does he think he is, the Pope?”
I
ask you . . . what would you think if some local kid ran around
saying “I am bread of life, sent down from heaven.” Or to put it in more new-agey terms, “I’m
Gaia, mother earth, source of all being . . . whoever comes to me shall never
perish, but become one with my subterranean parents?” I think we’d start edging toward the door,
fingering our cell-phones, thinking “now just what was that number for the sanitarium . . .” So I don’t think Jesus’ neighbors can
necessarily be blamed for thinking “Oy vey . . . what do we have here . . . a
nutzer?”
Like
them, we judge the truth or false-ness of a claim – I am bread of life, I am
mother earth – by human categories, by what we’ve experienced, or by what we’ve
been taught. And since the
enlightenment, since rational materialism has become the order of our day, it’s become nearly impossible
to step outside the borders of the observable, of what has been shown
scientifically, of what we “know to be true.”
How can this be? We know that bodies can’t rise from the
dead, we’ve never seen water turned to wine, it’s against
the natural laws of the earth, and the best minds in our
techno-scientific-consumer culture say that it couldn’t happen, therefore the
miracle stories must be symbolic, some “primitive,” “superstitious” way of
expressing the divinity of Christ, and because bodies don’t rise from the dead,
the resurrection must have been some kind of transcendent epiphany in the disciple’s minds . . .
Maybe
that’s why Jesus doesn’t make some long, drawn out argument or explanation about
how he can say that he is the bread of life, come down from heaven . . . he
knew that in the closed world of his audience, in the belief-system that they
were immersed in, there was no way to “argue” them into believing that he was
the bread sent from heaven . . . only if they ceased their complaining, their
muttering, their bandying back and forth of their really logical arguments
about how this couldn’t be so, how that law – for them Torah, but for us maybe
a law of physics – how this law or that theorem made it impossible, only if
they ceased all that muttering and complaining would they be open to belief.
And
how do they come to that belief, what is the motive force? Put another way, if they can’t come on their
own, by listening to logic, how then do they come? “No one,” Jesus says, “No one can come to me
unless drawn by the Father who sent me . . .”
It is God – whom Jesus calls Abba, Father – it is God who draws a person to the Son.
And further, it’s written in the prophets – Isaiah for one – that they
shall all be taught by God. In fact, everyone who has heard and learned
from God will come to Christ. And of
course this opens up that old can of worms that separates us from the Baptists
. . . New Testament scholar Charlie Cousar calls it the “mysterious paradox of
believing. On the one hand, invitations
are given to which humans can respond.
On the other hand, those who respond are drawn by the divine power, for
nothing else can produce faith.”[1] As Jesus himself
put it, right before our passage, belief is the “work of God.”[2]
So
it sort of wipes out – or at least it should
wipe out – that feeling of superiority some Christians have, kind of like we’re
God’s people and you’re not, because if it’s up to God, then it’s not up to
us. Our belief, our faith is God’s work, not ours . . . whatever
holiness – in the original sense of set-apart-ness – whatever holiness we have comes from God, not us . . . and of
course that wasn’t particularly good news for the religious authorities of the
day, who gained power and influence in part because they were a people separate from everybody else . . . but
if they shall all be taught by God –
everybody, the Jews, the Samaritans, the Iraqi’s, everybody – if they are all taught by God, how can anyone claim
special treatment? The answer is, of
course, they can’t . . . they couldn’t in Jesus’ day, any more than we can today.
But
there is compensation . . . as a final elaboration on what it means that he is
the bread of life, Jesus tells us about it . . . and we know he’s serious
because he uses the formula “Very truly I tell you,” more familiar to us in the
King James as “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, whoever believes – and here we
have one of those pesky participles “believing” again – whoever is believing,
whoever is in a state of belief – which is, remember, the work of God – whoever
is in a state of belief has eternal life.
And put this way, we remember that the Johannine conception of eternal
life is not just life after death,
but those who are believing have it now, it’s something that can be enjoyed in
the present . . . and Christ is the bread of that life, the bread, the
nutrition, the foundation of that
eternal life . . .
Your
ancestors – who, by the way, grumbled in the wilderness just like you’re doing – your ancestors ate manna?
That other bread that came down from
heaven? Well, they died. This – and I can
imagine he’s pointing to himself now – this is the bread that comes down from
heaven so that you may eat of it and not
die . . . and now we come to it, to the final, gasp-inducing point . . . how is
Jesus like bread? Because if you eat of
him, you shall be sustained, you shall not die.
And to recapitulate and punctuate and accentuate it all he sums it up:
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever;
and – you heard correctly – the bread
that I give for the life of the world – not
just Jews or Samaritans or even Presbyterians, but the world – is my flesh.”
And
we can almost hear the Jewish crowd – including religious authorities and his
own disciples – let out a collective Whoosh,
because this was pretty heady stuff . . . if you eat of my flesh you will
not perish, you will not die in the wilderness of your own sin, but you will
have eternal life. But not only was it
pretty heady stuff, but it was pretty blasphemous
stuff as well, and besides all that, just plain old, downright yechhy . . .
eating his flesh, gnawing through bone and sinew and gristle and heart . . .
it’s no wonder some folks called the
first Christians “cannibals.”
Of
course, John’s readers had no trouble identifying this last line as
Eucharistic, as having to do with the Lord’s Supper, with Communion . . . and
neither do we, here on the other side of the resurrection, on the other side of
that last supper . . . and of course the equation of bread and Christ’s flesh
hints of the mortality to come, the death of the one we call Lord and master .
. .
And
now we can see a final significance to the bread imagery in this passage, a
final distinctive feature . . . not only does it refer to the heavenly origin
of Christ, to the bread come down from heaven, but it alludes to the very
earthly, very earth-y nature of his
flesh, rent and torn on the cross. In a
sense, the world – human-kind, those captured in the thrall of sin and of evil
– ate his flesh on Golgotha, just swallowed him right up there on the cross, but
the result, paradoxically, is life for all . . .
And
every time we eat from his flesh, and drink from his blood we do it all over
again, we reenact that original consumption there on the cross . . . I know
that it’s not good Reformed theology, Calvin’s probably spinning in his grave
right now to hear me say it, but there it is . . . when we eat the bread and
drink the wine we are ingesting our guilt, we are incorporating it right into
our corpuscles, into our molecules . . . the Eucharist is a kind of a
confession, an acknowledgement of our part in crucifying Christ . . . we absorb
it, own it, make it part of us.
What’s
that you say? You don’t like all this Dostoevskian talk of guilt
and consequences? You don’t believe
in all this stuff about collective responsibility? I wasn’t on
Golgotha 2000 years ago, no one related
to me was on Golgotha 2000 years ago, to sum it up, I wasn’t there when they crucified my Lord. And that’s fair enough . . . let’s take
collective guilt off the table, just for argument’s sake . . . but don’t we
crucify him over and over again daily?
Don’t we kill him all over again when we deny his place in our
lives? When we relegate him to an hour
or two on Sundays, and maybe a Wednesday-night supper? When we shove him into our private lives,
into the private sphere, and don’t
allow him to influence how we live in public?
Don’t we crucify him when we make all our decisions – like the religious
authorities – based on human
categories, based on what’s expedient, instead of what’s right? Seems that way to me . . .
Only by eating our guilt, only by
incorporating our falling short of what God has intended for us into us, so that we are as familiar with
it as we are the little pinky on our left hand, will we be truly
liberated. Because it’s only through the
full knowledge of our complicity in and bondage to the structures of evil that rule this world that we will know
how to defeat them in our own lives and communities. You gotta’ know something’s there before you
can avoid it.
And
so, when we ingest the bread sent down from heaven, when we eat the flesh sent
from God, like Adam and Eve in the garden, we are eating knowledge. Only unlike that
golden-delicious apple, unlike the gossamer-flake wilderness manna, this knowledge is a saving knowledge. As the
prophets wrote, we shall all be taught by God, and this is the nature of the teaching: that we ingest, literally and
figuratively, the Word of God, the Word made flesh which dwelt among us, and
through that word, the truth will dwell in us and set us free, and we shall have eternal life. Amen.
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