You Are What You Eat (John 6:51 - 58)

Thus beginneth the third sermon on the Bread Discourse from the Apostle John.  And lo!  Our reading repeateth once again the final verse of last week's passage: “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.”  And lo again!  Those self-same Jewish religious authorities, whom John calleth “the Jews”, that last week responded to the first sentence—I am the bread come down from heaven—with grumbling, respond to the second sentence, the one about the eating of his flesh, by disputing amongst themselves.  And lo a third time!  That has been a cause of disputing ever since.  Because Christian religious authorities like to dispute every bit as much as Jewish authorities do.  Indeed, next week we’ll see some of Jesus’ own followers doing some disputing, and of all people, you’d think they’d get it, but no: it's so hard for them that some of them actually give up the whole thing, they leave off following Jesus altogether.

But that’s next week. This week, we look at the way some theological types reacted—rabbis and scribes and such, people who were experts in their religion, and they are puzzled, and arguing among themselves: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  And once again, we see them grappling with something outside their frame of reference, outside their normal knowledge base.  And we also see them being quite literal, which of course carried over to the organized theologians and theologies.  Just how can this man give us his flesh to eat, anyway?

Well, of course, Jesus’ comments about eating his flesh were connected by the earliest theologians to the Lord’s Supper which, after all, Jesus had commanded them to observe.  And in Matthew, Mark and Luke—but not John—Jesus actually tells the disciples what he means as he takes the bread and says “this is my body, broken for you.”  But in our passage, the religious authorities had no such teaching from the Christ to guide them, so they were left to scratch their heads in puzzlement.

But even with Jesus’ taking the bread and the wine and demonstrating just how this man can give us his flesh to eat, this passage remained a contentious one for theologians and other ne’er do wells . . . Like the earliest commentators, most relate this passage to Communion, even going so far as to say that this is John’s version of the institution, which he doesn’t literally include.  In the fourth century, John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, wrote that as is “characteristic of those who greatly love,” Christ “brought his body down to our level, namely, that we might be one with Him as the body is joined with the head.” The literal reality of this coming-down of love means we can do more than just “look upon” him.  Rather, those Christ feeds can “fix their teeth in His flesh and to be commingled with Him.”

Although most folks associated this passage with Communion, there was at least one theologian—a fellow named Martin Luther, you may have heard of him—who denied it, and with gusto.  He thought that Jesus’ use of the flesh-eating metaphor in this passage was a way of jarring us into thinking creatively about that whole incarnation thing.  He wrote that those who hear this are “to investigate what He was driving at with this peculiar speech. What could He mean? Is one man to devour the other? Surely this cannot be the meaning. Then let them deliberate and reflect on the matter, and ask what He did mean.”  According to Luther, we shouldn’t read the words as “my flesh,” with the emphasis on flesh, but as “my flesh,” as in Jesus’ flesh is not like ordinary flesh.  And with characteristic, Luther-ian rambunctiousness, he preached that this flesh is not “the sort of flesh from which red sausages are made,” nor is it “flesh such as purchased in a butcher shop or is devoured by wolves and dogs,” nor “veal or beef found in cow barns.”  Good to know.

Maybe wanting to shock them into thinking explains why he doesn’t answer their questions straight out, he doesn’t roll his eyes and say “no, you idiots, it's a metaphor.”  Instead he doubles down, he continues to hammer it home: “. . .   unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” and “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day . . .” And finally, reading it with Luther’s emphasis “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”

Zowie.  Talk about rubbing it in.  I can imagine the religious authorities’ heads almost exploding at that.  But John’s congregation, the outcast Jews who heard his gospel read aloud in each other’s homes, would have had no trouble understanding the metaphor.  They would have remembered the first chapter, where John said that Jesus is the Word made flesh who dwelt among us.  So? you say, what does that have to do with eating his flesh?  Well, they also would have recalled that a common thing that happened at the commissioning of prophets was that they ate the scroll, they ingested the word of God, and it thus becoming a part of them.  So perhaps John’s audience would have viewed this in part as a call to prophesy, a call to proclaim the Word, which Jesus embodied and which they were asked to eat.  And of course, because you are what you eat, does that imply that they became the Word as well?

Well.  Jesus says that his flesh is the bread of life, not the bread of prophecy, and those who eat it, will live, and eternally, at that  . . . thus, the ante is about as high as it gets: it’s life itself.  But what does eternal life look like?  What is its shape, it's warp and its woof?  By what is it characterized?  He gives us a hint when he speaks of abiding, and this is what advances his argument beyond where we ended up last week: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”  They abide in me and I in them . . . This life, that is in some way eternal, is characterized by a mutual abiding, a mutual indwelling.  Those who eat of Jesus’ flesh and drink of his blood abide in him, and he abides in them.

What is this abiding, anyway?  What does it mean to abide?  Well, on the simplest level, of course, it means to dwell, to have one’s abode.  But it also has the sense of staying, of remaining.  The last line of the film The Big Lebowski is “The Dude abides,” implying that the main character—the Dude—is  steady, sturdy, immovable . . . that he abides implies that he sticks with it, come what may. Another sense of the word is of waiting, of patience. Another is tolerance . . . When someone says I cannot abide that, they mean that they can’t tolerate it . . .

And I think Jesus means it in all of these senses . . . When disciples—and that’s us!—abide in him, it is an indwelling, for sure, but it is also secure, stable . . . Our abiding in Christ implies a tolerance on our part of things we don’t understand—and there are a lot of those things in Christ as well as life—as well as things that go against our world view . . . When we truly abide in Jesus, we are patient, we wait upon God, and what does Isaiah say? “Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

But there’s another side to this, of course: Jesus said “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.” Jesus abides in us, within us, as we go abut our business, as we go abut our daily lives.  And he is stable, he is patient with us and tolerant of all our foibles, he is in it for the long run . . . His love permeates us and fills us with its presence.  John Chrysostom had it right: in Jesus, the love of God comes down and fills us if we ingest the Word of God, if we let it . . .

But how do we do that, how do we eat of his flesh and drink of his blood?  Well, our ancestors in the faith knew that to deepen our walk, to strengthen our journey, spiritual practices are essential . . . Prayer . . .  contemplation . . . immersion in Scripture, the Word written . . . Meditating upon the presence of Christ in everything and every person we meet . . . Although it is God who does the filling, these practices open us up to it, they empty a place in us so that it can be filled by God.

There’s one more thing I want to talk about, and it's looming over this entire portion of John’s Gospel . . . We often talk about the incarnation as in the past, as over and done with.  It began in that stable, surrounded with God’s creation, with sheep and cows and doves, and it ended when the disciples watched Jesus ascend on a cloud.  But it is clear from these verses—and that other great metaphor, where Jesus likens this abiding to a vine and branches—it is clear that the incarnation never ended, that it is happening even as we speak.  Jesus is here, among us, abiding in you—in Betty and Bill and Brad and Dot—and in me.  Wherever else Jesus is, he is here, abiding, embodied, incarnate, in us.  Amen.

iness, a remaining in place.  nt omeone?  Well, on otdiness, a remaining in place.  nt omeone?  Well, on otdiness, a remaining in place.  nt omeone?  Well, on otdiness, a remaining in place.  nt omeone?  Well, on otdiness, a remaining in place.  nt omeone?  Well, on ot

A Particular Incarnation (John 6:35, 41-51)

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.

Sweet Mystery of Life (John 6:24 - 35)

I’d like you to sit up straight with your feet on he floor.  Your spine should not be rigid, but not slouchy either.  Think of your head sitting comfortably, supported by your spine.  Sit with your hands by your side, loosely, or clasped softly in your lap.  Now, I ask that you close your eyes . . . Close your eyes and steady your breathing.  Feel your breathing, feel it filling your lungs, then let it go, not forcing, but letting it out deliberately, neither slow nor fast, but just right, comfortably.  In and out, in and out.  See if you can feel your breath filling your being, first in the sinuses behind your face, then spreading out, to fill your body.  Imagine as you breath—in and out, in and out—that you can feel it filling your shoulders, then your torso and thighs and calves, in and out, in and out.

Now.  Do you smell the bread?  Can you smell the heady, yeasty, delightful aroma?  With each breath it fills you up, then empties you . . . Don't be greedy . . . Keep your breathing slow and steady, in and out, in and out, savor the bread . . . Did you know that when you smell the bread, you are inhaling minute particles of the loaf?  Molecules of bread, and as you breath them in, some of them remain in your lungs, and I wonder if they absorbed into the capillaries surrounding the alveoli, those tiny sacks where oxygen enters the blood.  Perhaps not, they are likely too big, but I imagine they are absorbed, anyway . . . but I know that just breathing the aroma of baking bread nourishes us, fulfills us , if not in body then surely in soul . . . In and out, in and out . . .

Now: imagine you are in a dusty mid-eastern town, imagine that you’re in Capernaum at the break of day, and the smell of bread permeates the place, inundates it, you can smell it wherever you go.  Every woman in town is baking their day’s bread in the cool of the morning, before it gets intolerably hot, so that they don’t pass out before their open oven doors.  Women are the keepers of bread, the keepers of life . . .

Bread is a staple in the ancient Middle East—you can open your eyes now—it’s a staple, or rather the staple, it is so important.  In a village like Capernaum, on the north bank of the Galilee Sea, it is supplemented by fish, at least in season,  so there’s a faint, fishy smell wafting up from the harbor, a ripe undercurrent to the overwhelming odor of morning bread.

It’s early yet, but you have been up for hours, going about your work; for you and many others in your village, it will end only after sunset.  Suddenly, there is commotion from the harbor: boats have pulled up at the quays, boats filled to the gunwales with people.  Their voices pierce the morning quiet like the shrill whinny of donkeys, and they’re getting louder as they approach you up the winding path from the harbor.

Suddenly, there is a man awaiting them, quite an ordinary-looking man, of average height and average build, with the same dusky skin as you . . . Indeed, he has the same general features as the newcomers: though they are strangers, they are clearly members of the tribe . . . you have heard that he has come from across the sea, that he arrived late one night on the wings of a storm, and that he is staying at the house of Peter’s mother, although you know him by his birth name of Simon.  And suddenly you put two and two together, and you know who this man is: it’s Jesus of Nazareth, mighty in word and deed, who healed the Royal official’s son right here in Capernaum, when he wasn’t even here!  And involuntarily, you look over and see the house with the patched roof, through which the paralytic was lowered and healed by this very man.  Oh, they know Jesus of Nazareth very well here in Capernaum, and now here he is again, waiting calmly for the approaching crowd.  A strange, wild joy creeps over you as you sidle in closer; you just know something is about to happen.  And that overwhelming yeasty odor hangs in the air, and you breath it in and out, in and out.

The crowd halts in front of Jesus, and a gentle smile crosses his lips.  The first words are from the crowd: “Rabbi, when did you come here?” And you are a bit shocked, to tell the truth, it's kind of rude, especially to someone of Jesus’ stature.  The crowd seems on edge, irritated, even, and it’s clear that they have a history together, Jesus and the crowd, and you wonder why they speak that way to him?  Did he refuse them some favor or another?  Some service?  Or maybe he gave them the slip somehow, and they really want to how he came here, but that doesn’t explain the tone . . .

Be that as it may, you expect Jesus to scold them for their rudeness, or at least answer their query, but what he says mystifies you: it has nothing to do with the question.  “You aren’t looking for me because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”  And you’re thinking: what does this mean?  What signs?  What bread?  Except you know about bread, because it’s odor caresses you still.  Jesus continues: “do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which will be given by the Son of Man, upon whom God has set his seal.”  And his speech grows more mysterious, more incomprehensible still, because what kind of food endures forever, for eternal life?  What is this eternal life, anyway?  Everybody dies, every body turns to dust, some at a younger age than others, and you reflect on all the women and men you know who have passed on, most of them well before their allotted 40 seasons . . . You have heard that some wealthy landowners live sixty, even seventy years, but they don’t work in the brutal sun, or go down to the sea in tiny boats, at the mercy of the storms.  Life could be brutish and short for the men and women of Capernaum.

And because of this, Jesus’ words give you hope: what if there was this eternal food, this everlasting bread?  Jesus was a man Who was clearly in the favor of God . . . he’d healed the officials son from afar, and the paralytic man as well . . . Who knows what he can do? If there were such bread, perhaps the village women wouldn’t die so often from overwork, or from having one too many children.  Perhaps those children wouldn’t die so often from malnutrition, or from common infections . . . And so you are overwhelmed with excitement, because you know what Jesus has done in the past, but the crowd asks “what do we have to do to perform the work of God?”  What can we do to insure we get this everlasting bread, what can we do in return for this everlasting food?

But Jesus says “This is the work of God: that you should believe in him whom God has sent.”  But you see that it is not enough for the crowd, they want to make sure the get their money’s worth, to insure that they are not being deceived: “Ok,” they say, “what sign are you going to give us, so that we may see it and believe you?  What are you performing?”  And now you are incensed, your back is up, so to speak . . . they want him to prove himself, to perform like one of the trained monkeys passing tradesmen sometimes bring. “Moses gave our ancestors manna to eat in the wilderness,” they say, and the unsaid question hoping in the air: what are you gonna do?  And you steady your breath, breathing in the aroma of bread, in and out, in and out . . .

But Jesus remains calm, and reminds them that it wasn’t Moses who gave them the manna, but the Lord God almighty, it’s the bread of God that comes down from heaven that brings this true and everlasting life.  And your breath catches in your throat, and a light begins to dawn within you . . . your heart lifts up and a glow seems to surround Jesus as he stands in front of you and the crowd.

But they are still thinking solid, earthly food, bread that can last forever, like an eternally excellent harvest year, where there is plenty of grain, or like endless water drawn from a well, without a drought to slow it down.  “Sir,” they say, and at least they’re being polite, “Sir, give us this bread always.”  And then Jesus says it, and with this, you think, he says it all: “I am the bread of life,” he says, “whoever is coming to me will never be hungry, and whoever is believing in me will never be thirsty.”  And suddenly, the scent of bread in the air becomes overpowering, and you are carried away on its fragrant currents.  Amen.

Sign Weaving (John 6:1 - 21)

Biblical Storyteller:  After this . . .

Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . You know what drives me crazy?  Other than the Roman Empire, that is . . . What drives me crazy is how you chop up a perfectly good piece of literature these days.  When I wrote the thing—yes, it is I, the disciple that Jesus loved—when I wrote the thing, I wrote it to be read straight through, or at least in larger chunks than this.  And so I wouldn’t have to tell people what the this was that this comes after.  But today, with your awful habit of coming to church once a week whether you need it our not, and reading from something you call a lectionary, books and letters that were meant to make a coherent whole get chopped into bite-sized chunks like so much gefilte fish.  And I won’t even mention the scattering of my gospel, crum-like, throughout the reading cycle.  I mean, how disrespectful can you get?  If you just had to stick to a three-year cycle, why couldn’t Mark have been the odd man out?  Or better, Luke?  Those Gentiles wouldn't know the difference anyway . . .

*sigh*. So what comes before this episode is long teaching of Jesus in which he accuses his audience—Jewish religious authorities such as scribes and Pharisees and the like—of not loving God, which is a cold, bold thing to do to a bunch of holy men.  And let me tell you, they were not happy about it.  They were already chomping at the bit to silence him, if not one way, then the other . . . And at the end of his teaching, he brings Moses into the picture, claiming that he wrote about Jesus, but since none of his oh-so-august audience understood that, they must not believe in Moses, who is only the first and greatest of the prophets . . .

So, you see what I did here, don’t you?  I took the end of Jesus’ speech, where he mentions Moses, and followed it up with a story about bread in the wilderness . . . pretty neat, if I do say so myself . . . I’m drawing a comparison between this bread, and that mana in the wilderness episode, to be  sure you don’t miss the connection between Jesus of Nazareth and Moses of Egypt (and points North).  Go ahead, read . . .

Biblical Storyteller:  You mean "tell the story." 

 

After all that, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick.

Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.
 
When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.”
 
One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”
 
Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.
 
When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.
 
When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”  When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

That’s our Jesus . . . He’d do anything to avoid earthly power, up to and including going up on a mountain.  Which he does twice in quick succession.  Again like you-know-who, who went up to the mountain and came back down with some commandments, some rules for gentle living.  Which were ok for their time, and certainly do still apply—though I'm not sure courthouse walls are the best place to put ‘em—but those were different times, and besides.  Jesus said that he’d come not to abolish the law, exactly, but fulfill it.  And as far as I’m concerned, Jesus said it  and I believe it.  Maybe that’s why I’m the disciple he loved . . .

Anyway. Mountains are pretty special places.  Besides being closer to God, the air seems rarefied, more pure, somehow.  Maybe that’s why so many cool things happen on them. People are always getting epiphanies, revelations, messages from the Almighty of one sort or the other.  Abraham received a command to sacrifice his son, his only son, on a mountain and Moses got those ten commandments.   Elijah met God on a mountain, and the disciples saw Moses and him on one.  And so it's not really a big surprise or anything that Jesus spent a lot of time on a mountain.

But there’s a something I’m trying to point out here.  All those examples, the people receive something from God on the mountains . . . visions, revelations, commandments . . . Mountain tops are places where the Lord communicates with folks, where God gives them something.  And when Jesus goes up into mountains, he does too.  He gives a whole sermon on a mount . . . he communicates that vision of him replacing Moses and Elijah there . . . and now here he is, giving the people their daily bread on another mountain.  And what I want to point out is that if God gives stuff to God’s people in the high places, and Jesus does the same, then what does that say about him?

It’s like I told you before:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”  Jesus was—is—a divine being, we call him Son of God, because like a Son, he  inherited all his authority and power.  And so he could heal Jairus’ daughter and make the hemorrhaging woman clean.  He could rebuke the elements like recalcitrant children and bring them peace.  And he could bring grace—in the form of nutritious bread and fish—to hungry people.  And make no mistake about it, what Jesus gave on that mountain was grace, nothing but.  Everything we have is due to the grace of God, we get all things from the Lord.  So we can add one more authority, one more ability to our laundry list: he had authority over life and the law, over the chaos of creation, over the spirit world, and now he had the authority to confer the grace of the Lord.  Surely, he was Son of God most high.

You know, over the years I've been amused at all the stuff written about how Jesus did the signs—what you call miracles—that he did.  It's like in this day and age of rocket ships and hair dryers, there can’t be anything supernatural going on.  So all kinds of theories have been floated—everything from supernovae to swamp gas—to explain what he did as so-called natural phenomena.  And this feeding of the 5,000 is no exception: there are some who staunchly defend it as a true miracle, that he used supernatural powers to multiply the loaves and fish like, well, like Moses did with those locusts and frogs.  Others have tried to de-bunk it, saying that Jesus’ example softened the hearts of all those present, and they brought out all the food they’d squirreled away and the multitudes were fed.

Well, I was there, and I’m here to tell you . . . I have no idea how he did it.  I wrote it just as I saw it: “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.”  And that's it, that’s all I saw.  No puff of smoke as loaves appeared out of thin air, no rustling of cloaks as people grudgingly fished bread out of their underwear.  Jesus took the loaves and fish, handed them out, and there was enough.  Period.

And I kinda like the mystery of it all, you know?  Was it a miracle or guilty consciouses? Magic or smoke and mirrors?   It’s mysterious, as it should be, like God’s own self.  And the thing is . . . it doesn’t matter!  The answer to “did he or didn’t he” is he did, no matter how it came about.  Jesus distributed the loaves and fish and there was as much as they wanted.  And actually, there was more, twelve basket loads left over.  Like with the water and the wine, this grace was abundant, ebullient, overflowing.  Unlike that manna-in-the-wilderness trick pulled by Moses, where there was just enough.  Just sayin’ . . .

Biblical Storyteller:  When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.
 
The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified.

But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.

 

This really happened, you know . . . I know a lot of people say we were disoriented in the fog, that we were near the shore, and he was walking along the shore, but that’s not the way it happened . . . It was dark, the sea was rough, and suddenly, there he was: walking—no, almost gliding, across the sea toward us.  And I admit it: it scared the living daylight savings out of us, me included: we thought he was a spirit, the shade of some drowned fisherman, come to haul us down to a watery grave.

 
Ok, I know it sounds dramatic, but that’s the frame of mind we were all in, there in the wind and darkness.  We were all primed to believe the worst.  Then we heard those words: “It is I,” and we were no longer afraid.  And it's a funny thing about those three words—actually, two in the Greek in which I wrote it—at the time, the other disciples and I thought nothing of it, it was just Jesus identifying himself.  But since then, a lot has been made of its similarity to what God told Moses at the burning bush: “I am,” God’s self-disclosures, meant to say that God is all of being, or undefinable, or whichever theory you like.  And the thinking goes that this was Jesus’ disclosure of his divine nature, and that might have been so.  Surely, you can translate my Greek that way,  but that’s not the way I meant it.  Here we were, scared to death, shaking in our boat--hah!—and it was meant to reassure us:  “It’s me.  Don’t be afraid.”  That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Looking back on that episode, I think the real shame was how we didn’t recognize Jesus when he walked across the sea.  You might say we never did recognize him: not when he turned the water into wine nor when he fed those five-thousand souls.  We didn't know him when he raised up ol’ Lazarus or when he told that paralyzed guy to take up his mat and walk. We certainly didn’t know him when we walked the Palestinian roads, laughing at some stupid joke Peter told, like how many Phrygians does it take to stable a donkey.  In spite of all the hints, all the speeches, all the signs, we didn’t know who he was until it was too late.

He’s still around, you know . . . He’s still here, waiting to be recognized . . . Just like he told us, back in the day, he is in me, he is in you.  He’s in the mainstreamed beggars you pass on the street and the gang-bangers down in Over the Rhine.  He’s in bakers and bankers and depressed home-makers, in dope-smokers and over-paid CEOs.  And yet I sometimes think that in spite of all that, in spite of all the years to digest and cogitation on what Jesus clearly said, people are no better at seeing it today than we were back then.

That’s the good news, of course: that he is among us, in Spirit and in flesh . . . Just as he promised, his Holy Spirit is blowing in the world, and where it works we cannot predict, but we can see the results, all around us, if we but look.

Road Rule (Mark 6:1 - 13)

There are two major, interrelated questions that Mark seeks to answer in his gospel.  First, just who is this fellow named Jesus, whose life and ministry have had such enormous effect upon those who follow him?  Last week, we read a passage that dramatized this.  Remember?  Mark said that “Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, ‘John the baptizer has been raised from the dead . . . But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.’”  Of course, Herod thought he was the former, John the baptizer back from the dead, and this began Mark’s famous flashback that we explored last week.

The second question is a two-parter: what is the nature of Jesus’ authority and what is its source?  Obviously, this question is of vital interest to a faith in the throes of establishing itself: if its leader‘s authority is over a set of Tupperware, nobody’s gonna put much stock in him.  Similarly, if that authority is handed down from some carpenter in a two-bit sheep town, it doesn’t exactly inspire obedience either.

Well. The questions have already had a good workout in the two episodes previous to this one.  In the first, Jesus demonstrates authority over creation, the same creation that God originally made with a puff of divine breath.  We see him sleeping in the boat, unconcerned and nonchalant, and creating order from the sea, that ancient symbol of primordial chaos.  Thus, he has some of the same authority as God the creator, and so, hmmmm . . . where do you suppose it came from?

In the second episode, he demonstrates authority over life, by healing the hemorrhaging woman and raising up Jairus’ daughter, and the law, by making the woman clean.  Further, he demonstrates that this authority prefers the outcast and forgotten, by healing her first, and that it is exercised in relationship, by touching her and calling her daughter. Both of these ways are opposite to the ways of the powers that be.

And so, as this story opens, we’ve seen that Jesus exercises authority over creation, life and the Torah.  And by now, it ought to be obvious from whom Jesus receives that authority: one cannot confer authority one doesn’t have, can one?  And John doesn’t have authority over creation, life  and the law . . . Neither does Herod, nor the Emperor.  Only God has that kind of authority, so that’s where Jesus must have gotten his: from God.

And now, Mark tells us about Jesus coming home, and as is his custom, he sits down in the synagogue and begins to teach.  And that’s when all you-know-what breaks loose among his home-town acquaintances: “Where did this man get all this?” they ask. “What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”  And once again, they are again asking Mark’s primary questions: “what kind of authority is this?  Where did it come from?  Who gave it to him?”  Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary?  We know that he didn’t get it from them . . . We see them every day in the marketplace, watch their kids for them when they need it, we know they don’t have it . . .

They define Jesus, define who he is in their minds, by their relationships to him, by that part of him that they’ve seen.  Some know him as Mary’s son, whom they baby-sat when his parents were busy.  Some know him as James’ big brother, who bossed him around as big brothers are wont to do, or his little sister’s protector, who kept the bullies away.  Each knows him as he relates to her or him, and and since he relates to each one differently, he seems a slightly different person to each.

But Mark makes it clear that they don’t get who he is at his heart, they don’t understand his core identity as son of God, which, in the long run, is the only one that matters.  And so they don’t believe him, they don’t believe he has the authority that he is demonstrating. Further, they take offense at him, and the Greek word use here is skandalon, from which we get the word “scandal;” it’s the same word Paul uses to say that “the cross is a scandal to the Jews,” and it has the connotation of a stumbling block to their faith, that it causes them to somehow lose it, or make it weaker.  And it makes you wonder just how strong their faith was to begin with, if something someone else does causes it to weaken . . .

It reminds me of the people who take offense at something or another and it causes them to leave the church, or maybe just a particular congregation of the church.  Maybe somebody says something to them they don’t like, maybe the pastor walks by them in the hall, maybe she says something in a sermon they don’t like, and they leave the congregation because of it.  Of course, they could’ve chosen to ignore it, they could’ve chalked it up to differing opinion, to the other person having a bad day—it really is all about the other person when that stuff happens, you know—or they could’ve decided that it’s ok for the pastor or anybody else, for that matter, to have a different view, but they don’t, they walk out.

The thing is, our translation of that Greek word—to take offense—is accurate, because it really is an active process, it doesn’t just happen to you, you take offense, it's an action you choose to do, you have a choice.  And that’s exactly what Mark is saying here: Jesus’ homies take offense, they choose to be offended by Jesus’ actions.  And why?  Not because of what he says, not because of what he wears, but of who he is.  Or more accurately, who they think he is, or even more accurately, who they know him to be.  Because he is Mary’s son, he is a carpenter, he is the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon . . . But he’s more.  And it's the “more” that they do not understand.

They reject him, and does it bruise his very human  feelings?  Is he hurt by the rejection, does he protest in plaintive bewilderment that he’s the same Jesus he ever was, the same carpenter and son and big brother?  If so, Mark doesn’t let on, he just tells how Jesus quotes a proverb about hometown prophets before he leaves his hometown for good.

And does he shake the hometown dust off his feet in protest of his reception, does he model that behavior for his disciples?  It’s clear that Mark wants us to relate these two episodes, Jesus’ visit to Nazareth and his sending of the twelve . . . he sends them two by two, out among the highways and the hedges, to preach the gospel of repentance.  But first, he gives them some of his authority, authority over unclean spirits, that has been passed down from God.  And with this, Mark adds one last kind of authority that Jesus has inherited from his eternal parent.  In the calming of the seas, we saw his authority over creation, in the healing of the two daughters, his authority over life and law, and now over the spirit world.

And as he sends them, he commands them to rely on the kindness of strangers: to take no bread to eat nor even a bag to keep it in, lest they be tempted.  They are to take no money for their belts, wear sandals on their feet, or put on more than one tunic.  I’d say it's lucky it's always warm in Palestine.

All they are allowed is a staff because the rest is to be provided by the locals where they go to preach the gospel: they are to enter a house and stay there for the duration of their visit, thus having a stable base of operations, and, perhaps, the network of friends and introductions provided by their host.

This passage, and versions in Matthew and Luke, was ground-central for Francis of Assisi, who observed that in his time, by the 13^th Century, the church had become bound up in the trappings of the powers that be, ensconced in wealth and power.  He, and his companion Clare, took to the roads, to the highways and hedges, without any support, with no money, no extra clothing, and only a staff and their fellow disciples for company.  And when they hit the road, a funny thing happened: they found places where God was obviously at work, and they joined in, they helped out.  There was none of this not created here syndrome that afflict many congregations, they saw where God was active and became involved.

The thing is, they took the Gospel to the people, they did not expect the people to come to them.  They didn’t sit in a gilded cage, or even an air conditioned box, and wait for folks to show up.  They did what Jesus told them to do, what he commanded and modeled.  Perhaps it's time we modern disciples thought about doing the same.

The good news here is that, even today, Jesus follows his own advice.  Back in the day, he took the Gospel to the people, out in those highways and byways, those towns both big and small, far and near, and he hasn’t stopped yet.  Through his proxy, the Holy Spirit, he comes to us where we are, no matter who we are, as the living, comforting presence of God.  Amen.

 

Power Politics (Mark 6:14-29)

Mark—the author of our tale—was a sly old dog.  He is famous—in pointy-headed biblical studies circles at least—for creating associations by placing different stories side by side.  He knew that by juxtaposing two episodes from Jesus’ life, he could create new meaning not present in either.  Remember the stories of the hemorrhaging woman and the synagogue official’s daughter?  They were probably originally separate tales, floating around campfires and house-churches like narrative baubles, but by embedding one inside the other, Mark was able to relate them together in a way that pointed up both the differences and similarities between the unclean woman and the synagogue leader.  And using the ancient Semitic literary trick of putting the most important thing in the middle, he was able to subtly imply who he thought was more important to God.  The last shall be first and the first last, indeed.

This week, we’re going to look at this familiar tale of a dancing girl and the King of the Jews in light of what is placed before it in his narrative.  And this where Mark is so sly: he structures it like a flashback, with Herod hearing about what Jesus was doing, and then reminiscing about what he did to John the Baptist.  And it’s clear what Mark is up to: he’s identifying Jesus with John the Baptist, he even has old Herod say so:  “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”  And so on a meta-level, the level of Mark’s theology, we’re being asked to compare John and Jesus.

And one of the theological things Mark is trying to do is delineate the person of John the Baptist from that of Jesus the Christ.  Herod thinks John’s been resurrected and is now out in the countryside working miracles and doing good things; but at the end of the story, Mark is careful to say that John’s disciples hear about his death, take away his body, and lay it in a tomb.  Just like they laid Jesus in a tomb, but in Jesus case, that wasn’t the end of it, he really was resurrected.  But here, John’s disciples lay him in a tomb, and there’s no sign of him getting out on his own.  John was no Jesus.

And that is one of things happening on our meta level, in Mark’s theological agenda, and we’ll get back to that level in a minute, but first I want to go to the first level, the first lens in our Gospel reading glasses for a few minutes, and look at what actually happened with the decapitation of John.  It’s an interesting thought that a Jew like Herod would believe John had been resurrected.  A lot of Jews didn’t believe in the possibility of it, and in fact the thought of a reanimated corpse made their skin crawl.  That Herod thought of it so readily is an indication of the state of mind he was in, and Mark dutifully reports it, because it certainly plays into his agenda of comparing John to Jesus . . . but it could be that Herod had a guilty conscious, as well, and I can see it now:  Herod thinks John has been resurrected, and is coming for him, arms outstretched like in a bad zombie movie, dead eyes boring into his.

And I’ll bet Herod was shaking in his boots, because what he’d done to John wasn’t very nice, and he knew it. He knew that John was a righteous and holy man, but that couldn’t have carried a lot of weight, because he arrested him anyway because he didn’t like what he was saying. And here’s where I want you to see that it’s the same as it ever was, as David Byrne might say: speaking truth to power will get you thrown into the pokey, we see it all the time: it’s most obvious in other countries high on Amnesty International’s list, where being opposed to those in power will get the key thrown away, but here in the land of the free it can happen as well . . . remember the use of the FBI by President after President, of both parties, to harass and prosecute people of dissenting political opinions?  Actresses, Viet-Nam War protesters, Civil Rights workers—Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prime target in the 60s—all were harassed and investigated and wire-tapped for speaking against the official policies of the United States government.  And don’t even get me started about the NSA . . .

The point is that it’s not a U.S. government thing or a Nicaraguan government thing or even a Russian government thing, it’s a feature of those in power to suppress those whose opinions they don’t like.  And here John was speaking truth to power, he was voicing God’s displeasure at what that government was doing, the sole government of Judea being one Herod, self-styled King of the Jews, who had him arrested for pointing out the Torah, the Jewish law of the land.  “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”

I want you to notice a funny thing about our text.  It begins by saying “Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias . . .” and note that it clearly states that “Herod himself” had sent men who arrested John, and in the Greek it’s even more clear, Mark puts the “himself” first, so we can hardly miss it . . . this first line asserts it was Herod, no question who did the arresting, and put John in prison on account of Herodias.

Then it gives the reason: because John had been telling Herod “It’s not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”  And again, that’s clear enough: as we’ve said, it’s dangerous to speak truth to power.  But look at what comes next:  Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him.  Say what?  Hold the phone: all of a sudden, blame has been shifted away from the ruler, the one with all the power, the one who had John arrested, for Pete’s sake, to another, a person with no power whatsoever . . . and wouldn’t you know it.  It’s a woman who gets the blame.  Like Sarah and Abraham with Ishmael, Jezebel and King Ahab with Naboth, and Bathsheba of David—it’s the powerless who gets the blame, and there weren’t many less powerful in ancient Palestine than women.  The story starts out being all about the guy in power, Herod, who historically, at least, was not known for his gentleness with people he didn’t like.  And all of sudden, the story shifts the blame to Herodias.  Herod doesn’t want to kill John, no, that couldn’t be it, because he thought he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him.  But you notice he doesn’t turn him loose . . .

This isn’t the only time in the scriptures where the powerful slip into the background, and just kind of fade away . . . Ahab demands that Naboth sell him his vineyard, and goes into a pout when he won’t, and Jezebel devises a plan to get it for him, and we know what happened to her . . . the name of Jezebel became synonymous with a wicked woman.  But it’s Ahaz who gets his way … And in the story of Sarah and Haggar, Abraham fades into the background, strangely passive, while Sarah in her jealousy drives his son—who he’d had with a woman Sarah herself pressed upon him—to seemingly certain death.

All of these stories, perhaps especially this one of Herod, should remind us of the final days of Jesus, where the brutal Roman ruler Pontius Pilate, who ate Passover rabble-rousers for breakfast, declares he can find no fault in Jesus, and throws the blame upon the crowd.  It should remind us of the ultimate scapegoat, Jesus Christ, who was executed to keep the peace at Passover—as Caiaphas himself said—so the Romans wouldn’t destroy them all.

 And in these stories where blame is affixed, the powerful are never the ones at fault, are they?  They always kind of fade into the background, they always take a back seat when the dirty-work is done, and in today’s story this was intensified by later interpreters.  Herodias’ daughter—also called Herodias, according to Mark—was identified as Salome by the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, and she supposedly danced the dance of the Seven Veils, and, uh, inflamed Herod and he promised her anything, anything, and we have visions of a sweaty ruler, with a hint of incest to spice things up, promising her anything for her favors, and it’s been elaborated by Oscar Wilde and Hollywood, and none of that is in scripture.  Mark says simply that she danced, and when he refers to her, he uses a Greek word that implies “little girl,” and the picture is not some wanton woman, seducing the king, but of a little girl, doing an innocent dance which pleases the king, and he makes this oath before all his courtiers, maybe jokingly, as one would promise the moon to a cute little girl, only his wife gets her to do the dirty deed.  And once again, the story lets Herod off the hook: He was deeply grieved, he was greatly saddened, but what else could he do?  An oath was an oath, especially one made in front of all those guests.  And so, he’s let off the hook: honor—and remember this is an honor/shame society—honor demands that he cut off the head of John the Baptist. Too bad, so sad.

And so strong is the myth-making machinery that it’s been intensified over the years, and sex, the favorite diversionary tactic of monarchs and politicians the world over, gets totally inside our passage to divert us away from the real lessons of this passage, namely that (1) speaking truth to power can be dangerous and (2) the powers that be get off the hook and powerless scapegoats—here, as often, women and children—get the blame instead.

Scapegoating is a favorite spectator sport in human societies, and it’s always the least powerful that get blamed.  The Jews in Nazi Germany, the Native Americans in the early days of this country.  At present, so-called “illegal aliens” are being scapegoated for our economic woes.  But the cool thing about our Gospels is that it lays all of this bare.  Mark’s version of the story of John and Herod, which we read today, still scapegoats Herodias, but it is clear if you read it closely that it’s the one in powers’ fault, it’s really all Herod, all the time.  The Gospels are subversive that way, they tell the “sub-version” as Walter Brueggemann likes to say.  They dutifully recount the official tale—Herod not at fault, evil woman Herodias to blame—but make it clear how it really went down.

At the heart of the Gospels is just such a story, just such a “sub-version”—the powerful San Hedron, the Roman rulers treated Jesus just like another scapegoat, just like another guy they can shift the blame onto, to keep the Jerusalem crowds in line, to give ‘em a place to focus their anger other than themselves.  And so they killed him, and he would’ve been just another in a long line of innocent victims, of blameless scapegoats, except for one thing:  he didn’t stay in the ground, did he?  He didn’t stay in the tomb where—like John—he was laid . . . unlike John, he rose again, a sign and symbol of God’s victory over the scapegoating powers that be.

And that is our hope as well.  That through Jesus Christ, we are freed from bondage to structures and mechanisms of sin, we are liberated from being scapegoats to the powers that be.  Our hope is that through Christ’s resurrection, we will be as well, and that God’s kingdom, where there is no more scapegoating, no more oppression, no more war, is coming and yet—in the person of Jesus Christ who, remember is in our hearts—is already here.  In the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God did something new, God showed that the innocent scapegoats, the blameless lambs, will inherit the Kingdom of God.  And Hallelujah for that.  Amen.