Last week, we dipped our big toe into the “Bread
of Life” discourse from John, and this week we’re going to dive right in and
paddle around a little bit, and Alert Readers will have noticed that the
lectionary passages from last week and this week and the next – by which time
we might all be sick of bread – that
the lectionary passages overlap. Last
week’s passage ended up with verse 51, and
this week’s passage begins with verse 51: “I am the living bread that came
down from heaven. Whoever eats of this
bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the
world is my flesh.” Our passage ends with verse 58, but next week’s includes that verse and the two
preceding it as well. And although it’s
partially a strategy of the very modern creators of our lectionary to remind us
from week to week what this long passage is all about, it also reflects in an
important way the structure of the speech itself, both in what must have been its
original form, but especially in the way the John has edited and structured
it. Jesus restates the same basic
premise again and again – I am the bread of life, I am the bread of life – but
also adding to it, refining it as he rolls along through the speech. And each time he adds something new, John
pauses for a little crowd-reaction shot . . . Thus we get I am the bread of
life, come down from heaven, and then the crowd grumbles, saying how can he be
from heaven, we know where he lives,
we know his mom and dad, we played stick-ball with him back in the day, shot
some hoops out in the driveway, how can he say
he’s from heaven?
Well, Jesus does a little explanation – although
as usual in John he doesn’t directly answer their questions – and then restates
his thesis, adding oh, by the way, this bread I told you about, the bread
you’ve gotta eat to get eternal life?
Well, it’s my flesh . . . and
immediately John cuts to the crowd who’re saying “Holy guacamole, how can this
man” – note the this man, to emphasize
his mortality, and maybe diss him a little bit – “how can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
And they’re disputing among themselves which, by all accounts, is a
polite euphemism for what they’re actually
doing, the Greek translated here as disputing has violent overtones, as in
they’re duking it out, as in his statements have cause a violent reaction – more about that
next week – and then we’re back to Jesus, back to the speech, and another one
of his elliptical answers . . .
But before we look at those words, let’s
look at the crowd, shall we? John has carefully presented Jesus’ speech so
that the crowd plays an integral part
in the proceedings, so they’re a character
in our drama, so maybe we ought to think about who they are and what part they
play . . . the crowd that Jesus is addressing is the same crowd that got fed in John’s version of the feeding of the
five-thousand . . . remember? A little
boy with five loaves and two fish saves the day, and that same crowd is so impressed that it tries to take Jesus by force and make him king . . . seems more
like a mob to me . . . and then,
you’ll recall, the disciples set out in a boat without him, and he walks across
the water to catch up, and that same crowd,
that was fed the miraculous bread, the same crowd that tried to force him to be
king, piles into boats and comes after him, wanting to know how he got there .
. . and the bread discourse begins in fundamental misunderstanding, about the
nature of Jesus’ mission, and more pointedly, about the nature of belief . . . the
crowd thinks it followed him because
of the signs they saw, but Jesus knows it was because of the bread they ate . .
. but the crowd keeps on asking for a sign, and Jesus explains no, it’s the
bread, which of course is from God, it’s God
who is the author of your belief, not because you have seen signs . . .
No
one can come to me unless drawn by God . . . it has nothing to do with your
volition, like you saw a sign or something and were convinced, it’s not something you can reason about, it has to do
with God . . . this is the work of God that you believe in the one God sent
. . . and so this crowd is the same one who were fed the miraculous bread, who
misunderstood the nature of his mission so much they tried to use violence to
make him king, who misunderstood the nature of belief so much they thought it
was because of signs, of flashing lights and showy miracles . . .
But who are the people in the crowd? Well,
we know there are insiders – people like the twelve, who consider themselves in the inner circle – but there are also
more casual followers, shepherd-on-the-street types, inquirers, seekers, drawn
to what they had heard, and whom they’d heard it from . . . and there are also
undoubtedly some local religious authorities, perhaps some local synagogue
officials and the like.
In other words, the crowd listening to
Jesus’ speech is a lot like . . . us. Some of us
are devout, some of us consider
ourselves insiders, like the twelve . . . others of us aren’t so sure, we’re
seekers who, though certainly Christian, have our doubts about some of the
things Jesus is saying, some of the stuff he’s asking us to do . . . and there
certainly are some religious authorities here as well, some of us professional
Christians whose charge it is to hold interpret the law and prophets and gospel
just so . . . so, when we read this discourse, when we read this speech,
perhaps we shouldn’t read it so much from above,
so much from the standpoint of somebody who knows the score, but from below, as
if we Christians were the crowd . . .
Let’s try it . . . let’s imagine we are the
crowd. John said that they disputed
among themselves, fought among themselves, saying “How can this man give us his
flesh to eat?” And certainly, we can
feature that . . . we’ve fought for two millennia
over just what it means to eat Christ’s body . . . and Jesus says “Truly I say to you: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
And we say . . . yechhh! This is even worse than before, now he’s
talking about us drinking his blood like so many middle-class vampires . . .
our nice, clean Calvinistic theology – something about being lifted into the
presence of the risen Christ – seems a lot more . . . tidy than this . . . this is messy and dirty and not-at-all
Reformed. This business about eating of
his flesh and drinking of his blood is just about as hard to take for this 21st
Century crowd as it was for the first century one . . .
And as if to shock us even more, as if to point up the messiness,
the untidiness of it all even
further, Jesus switches verbs on us . . . before, he was using a polite verb
for eat, the standard one for people sitting down for a meal, but now he
switches to one that’s much more harsh, much more earthy, even though our English translation is still simply “eat,”
it has the connotation of chew or gnaw or chomp . . . “Those who gnaw, who chew
on my flesh and who drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up
. . . for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink, and we get that, we
get that they are true in the deepest sense, true not only in the sense of
“really . . . no kidding,” but true as in most
real, bringing sustenance at the deepest level of our body . . . unlike the
bread of the world, unlike all the things that claim to feed us, Christ’s flesh
and blood are true food and drink . .
.
We are bombarded today with all manner of
advertisements, all manner of promises to make our life easier, to meet our
deepest needs . . . everything from television to personal computers to fast
food . . . car commercials show happy shiny people riding in their SUVs, all
with model good looks and killer hair-do’s . . . toothpaste ads show
gleaming-mouthed young adults cavorting, and the message is clear – these
things will solve your problems, they’ll get you the woman or man of your
dreams, you’ll have 2.4 wonderful kids and a country home, and all your needs
will be met . . . but we know,
listening to Christ in the hot Galilee sun, that only his flesh is the true
bread, only his blood is the true drink, and only they can bring true fulfillment.
As a matter of fact, when we eat Christ’s
flesh and drink Christ’s blood, we abide
in him and he in us . . . and the concept of abiding or “dwelling-in” is important in John’s Gospel . . . in
another metaphor, Jesus likens this relationship to a grape-vine . . . I am the
true vine, he says, just as his flesh
is the true flesh, and just as the
branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless
you abide in me. This abiding is a
close, intimate relationship, a nourishing
relationship . . . without it, we cannot produce fruit, either in our lives or
the lives of others.
Last week we explored some of the
Eucharistic implications of all this, some of the Lord’s Supper connotations, but
that can’t be the whole story, it can’t be the only context, because if it were
just about the physical act of Eucharist, which we practice once a month in
this sanctuary, then that would raise troubling questions, not least of which
is the nature of salvation, the requirements
for it . . . is belief necessary, as Jesus himself emphasized earlier in this
speech, and which he said comes from God, or is it necessary only to take the
Eucharist, as this passage would imply?
In fact, both are intertwined, inseparable in this passage – see Jesus
and the fourth evangelist’s overlapping of theme and content – and inseparable in
Reformed theology . . . belief is indeed required for salvation – which,
remember, is here and now according to John as well as in the future – belief
is necessary, but, as Christ said, that is the work of God . . . and the
communion with Christ that is at the heart of the Eucharist – that mystic,
sweet communion, as the hymn says – provides grace, sustenance, and nourishment
for the abiding-in Christ – and Christ abiding-in us – that is the reality of salvation in the Gospel of John.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,
was incarnate among us, walked and talked and lived among us . . . it says
so in John’s sweeping, beautiful prologue, and so we should relate every
mention of flesh in his Gospel to that first
mention of flesh, and so if we ingest his flesh, if we take it into ourselves
so that it becomes our flesh, we take
in the Word of God, we incorporate him so that he abides in us, and we in him,
wholly analogous to those ancient prophets – God has put God’s word into our
mouths no less than he did Jeremiah when he touched his lips, or Ezekiel, when
God fed him the Temple scroll, bite by tasty bite . . . they internalized the
Word so they could proclaim it, just as we have done to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus
Christ . . .
Brothers
and sisters, we come to God, like that crowd came to Jesus on the mountain,
hungry and thirsty for something authentic, something real . . . and like that first century crowd, we at
times misunderstand our own salvation, we do not get the very nature of our
belief . . . we want signs, a king who does flashy things for his subjects, a
Christ of the glitter and glitz . . . but instead of flash we get flesh, the
flesh and blood of the incarnation, that mysterious emptying out of God-hood
from our God . . . the world gives shallowness and superficiality, things that
stay awhile then evaporate like the morning dew . . . Christ gives true food and true drink, and we who have partaken of him, we who have eaten that
flesh and drank that blood will never, never hunger and thirst, but have
eternal life. Amen.
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