So. Here we are in our second sermon in the Bread
Discourse. The last one ended with the
iconic “I am the bread of life. Whoever
comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be
thirsty.” And this reading begins with the same verse, then skips a few . . . The
architects of our lectionary evidently thought it important enough to include
it two weeks in a row, and it makes sense: it is the foundational saying of this
whole section of the Gospel, and an important revelation about the nature of
Jesus’ identity. As we saw last week, the
central importance of bread in the ancient Middle East makes it a stunning
metaphor—bread represented life to its people, and so it's almost like Jesus is
saying “I am the life of life.” He is
life squared, life to the nth degree.
This
section of the discourse is theologically dense—sorry about that!—as it builds
on the section we read last week. It's
doubtless partly because the audience has changed: last week, if you'll recall, Jesus’ audience
was a crowd who’d followed him cross the Sea of Galilee, to catch up with him
in Capernaum. Jesus used their search
for him, and their rather grouchy questions when they did find him, as an excuse to contrast good, old, fragrant, solid bread, like the manna God gave their
ancestors in the wilderness, or that provided the crowd in the feeding of the
five-thousand, for that matter, and the bread he is, the bread of life.
John
calls the bunch that Jesus addresses in today’s
segment Jews, and whenever you see that word in John, it means the Jewish religious
authorities. It's not like the crowd
last week wasn’t composed of Jews, it was. But the complainers are theologically more sophisticated, and Jesus takes the
opportunity to expand on the bread metaphor in greater depth.
They’re
complaining (literally, murmuring or muttering) about Jesus for a specific
reason: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?
How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” And where have we heard that one before? We heard it
a couple of weeks ago, when we looked at Mark’s version of the sending of the
disciples, when Jesus came into his own home town, and the folks he grew up
with were scandalized—simply scandalized—at
his teaching in the local synagogue. Remember? They said essentially the same thing: “Is not
this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses . . .” etc.,
etc., but here, in this case, we’re not in Nazareth anymore, Toto, we’re in
Capernaum, on the other side of the Galilee Sea, and how would the religious
authorities in that place know a poor
carpenter from a tiny little village?
Be
that as it may, the religious authorities, supposedly the more sophisticated of
the lot, make the same mistake as Jesus’ home-town friends and neighbors: they
judge who he is by categories they already know, ones with which they are
familiar, and cannot think outside the narrow confines of that box. Jesus is a mortal man, born of mortal parents
. . . How could he be this bread come down from heaven?
It
might have been even harder for these
people because, after all, they were
the experts, perhaps rabbis and scribes, well-versed in the law. They knew every jot and every tittle, could
quote great swaths of the Torah, and could be as rigid as any of today's
inerrancy-believing fundamentalists. In
fact, as theologian Raimon Panikkar points out, having a written scripture can
lead to a dry, brittle religiosity if we aren’t careful. Faith is reduced to a dry consideration, a
fervent pouring-over of texts looking
for pin-dancing angels and support for whatever one’s particular opinion might
be. It's a problem many religions have, of course, but it
seems more prevalent in the “people of the book:” adherents of Judaism, Islam
and Christianity. We can see by this
story its work in Judaism, and in the endless debate over whether or not the
word “jihad” in the Quran justifies mass murder. But it's just as prevalent in our faith, when
we’ve used scripture to justify slavery, among other things—after all, Jesus
never condemned it and Paul told Philemon to be a good little slave.
Well.
The religious authorities in Capernaum were just as blinded by scripture as we
can be today, and they had the extra, added problem of worrying about someone
usurping their power, as many do today as well.
So they mutter amongst themselves, and Jesus calls them on it—“don’t complain
amongst yourselves,” he says, then he proceeds to preach, and what he says has been at the core of many a theological debate over the years.
First,
he says “no one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me” and this
strikes at the heart of how one becomes a
Christian, how one becomes “saved.” It
seems to encapsulate quite neatly the idea of “salvation by grace alone,” that nothing
we can do or say or indeed, even be,
can ensure our being made right with God.
And of course, this bolsters we Presbyterians’ argument about election:
being drawn to Jesus doesn’t seem to leave much room for our free will.
But
in what manner does God “draw” people to Jesus?
Well, he says, it is written that God shall teach them, and everyone who
has heard and learned from God comes to Jesus.
Note the everyone: everyone who
has heard and learned from God the father comes to Jesus. Everyone . . . Again, there doesn’t seem to
be a lot of room for choice . . . And
that’s a scandal in these days of idolatry of the human will, of free will, if you like. How can one even think that God wouldn’t give us a choice in things? I mean, doesn’t God love us too much for
that?
And
there may be some wiggle room in this
. . . The Greek word for “to hear”—akuow—can mean the simple catching of a sound—as
in I heard a noise—but it can also have a deeper connotation, one of understanding, assimilating. Similarly, certainly not everyone who hears something learns it, but the
scandalous fact remains: nobody can come to Jesus unless God wants them
to. No one can come to him unless drawn by God, and certainly, even if we don’t have free will in this, God certainly does. And of course, the question of the ages is
this: if some people do not have eternal life, does it mean God doesn’t want them to?
But
wait . . . there’s more! If it’s God
who draws people to Christ, then it's not us. We don’t have a say in
who God draws to Jesus, either in what we do or do not tell them, or in how well we advertise, how well we attract
them and keep them coming back. And
that’s a liberating thought, as legitimately a part of the Good News as
anything else we preach. We can sit back
and relax, content to spread the gospel in thought, word and deed, and God will
do the heavy lifting.
Of
course, there’s a flip side to this as well . . . God draws anyone to Jesus
that God wants to, no matter what we
think, no matter how we interpret the Bible, no matter who we decide is
worthy of ordaining, allowing into our congregation, or marrying. God
draws to Jesus, and thus bestows everlasting life, upon everyone who has heard and learned from God, no matter what we think. And to paraphrase Billy Graham, I think we’re gonna be awful surprised
who that is.
Jesus
is the bread of life, come down from heaven, come down from the abode of the
divine, and a second great theological truth is in that “come down” part. It harkens back to John’s prologue once
again . . . The Word, the messiah, the Son
of God is made flesh and has dwelt among us. Here is no absentee landlord, no infinitely
separate God, Jesus came down from
heaven, became one of us, walked our roads, ate our food, died a death that
was, after all, not so much different
from our own. As Paul said, Christ Jesus
emptied himself of God-hood and dwelt
among us.
And—according
to the man himself—he became bread, the
most common, everyday thing around, and yet absolutely necessary and
vital. “I am the living bread that came
down from heaven,” he says. “Whoever
eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the
life of the world is my flesh.” That’s
what we enact every communion Sunday, and that’s where we leave off this
week. Next week, we take up this
question of eating his flesh, the bread of life, something that most of those
who hear this—including his disciples—just can’t get their heads around. Be there or be square.
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