To Whom Shall We Go?

John 6:60-71.  (May 24, 2015)

I.

Jesus has finally gotten through to his hearers so effectively that they almost all abandon him.  On the one hand we can wish that this is all a misunderstanding, because they insist on taking him literally when he talks about the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  But on the other hand, I think they may be understanding him all too well and simply deciding that what he is saying, even if taken figuratively, is crazy.  I mean, you don’t have to believe he’s talking about cannibalism to realize that what he is saying is very demanding and utterly contrary to our normal way of thinking.  

He says it more explicitly in chapter 12 about how those who love their lives in this world lose them and those who hate their lives are the ones who gain eternal life.  It is not easy, attractive, seeker-sensitive teaching.  We don’t see this kind of thing on too many church message boards.  It is like Bonhoeffer states so bluntly in The Cost of Discipleship: “When Jesus calls us he bids us come and die.”  It is a far cry from what I saw on one church message board last week: “Join us for coffee!”  Jesus never says, “Join me for coffee.”  Just so you know.

I read something by Frederick Buechner the other day about how when preachers read from the Bible the people hear what they are conditioned to hear: safe, moralistic, boring, familiar, and superficial, not to say trite, words.  If they’re paying attention at all.  I have sometimes worried that if people really heard what Jesus and the Scriptures are saying, few if any would come back for more.  Most of us might even walk out.  Were it not for ignorance and denial who would show up?

Sometimes I wonder if it’s not the people who don’t come to church who have really understood Jesus.  And the rest of us are only still here because because we are not fully comprehending what he is saying.  It’s like, okay maybe we don’t take him literally, but instead we’re ignoring him altogether, choosing to focus on being nice together.  And having coffee.

Maybe we should turn this place into a Starbucks.   

And the literal piece is itself still a huge roadblock for people.  It’s not just the eating of his flesh and drinking his blood, but all the rest of what people think are just fairy-tales, at best, and at worst, prescriptions for mass-murder.  Ever read the book of Joshua?  

We live in a time when people are leaving churches in huge numbers.  And we’re sort of between a rock and a hard place because we say people leave because they haven’t heard the gospel, therefore we have to do a better job at that… but I wonder if people also leave because they heard the gospel and don’t want anything to do with it.  It’s too costly, too demanding, too expensive, too time-consuming, too much of a commitment.  And they don't see what they will get out of it… which means they haven’t really heard the gospel at all, in my view.  We talk about eternal life, and people might as well respond: “Really?”

II.

So Jesus turns to his remaining followers, and even they are grumbling in confusion and anger because this once popular, growing movement has just had its leader commit PR hari-kari and alienate everyone in Capernaum… and that’s supposed to be their home base!  

“Does his offend you?” he asks.  I think they are more offended by the fact that Jesus’ deliberately annoys people and refuses to be diplomatic or gentle for the sake of keeping this movement together, than by what he is actually saying.  

Jesus says, “Well, if I am such an embarrassment and so offensive maybe you would rather that I just went home.  Shall I go back to my Father?  “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?”  Could you all do better without me? 

At this point the disciples may be thinking that, yeah, we could do way better without you, Jesus.  Maybe you should go back to heaven and let us take care of this business down here.   I think we can communicate a bit more effectively than “whoever eats me will live forever.”  I ask you.

The church has made this choice repeatedly over the centuries.  Christianity is a great and attractive, powerful, wealthy, successful religious institution, and most of that worldly success has occurred because they ditched Jesus, relegated him to “heaven,” and took on the world’s values and practices.  The church does way better when Jesus is in heaven and not down here messing everything up.

Then Jesus says, in effect: “Look.  I know this is difficult teaching.  But my point is that ‘It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.’  I am talking about bread and food and flesh, just like I talked about living water and being born from above.  But this is a way to break your minds open so you can receive the Spirit.  In order to welcome the breath and life of God into you, you have to move through and then beyond the material, the physical, the ego-centric, the literal, the historical, the temporal.  Not to reject or escape them, but to embrace, include, and grow into a higher, wider, and more inclusive place.”  

“The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”  Jesus’ words point beyond and within themselves to something at once infinitely higher and infinitely deeper and infinitely broader.  For his words are more than the way the air vibrated when he spoke them, in Aramaic; and they are more than the marks of the letters on a page in Greek or for us in English; and they are more than even the ideas that appear in our brains when we hear or read these words.

Jesus’ words point us to the fundamental coding embedded within and beneath everything that is; they reveal that everything is finally and literally made of God’s overflowing love in creation.  

III.

Remember that way back at the beginning of this gospel, God speaks the whole universe into being by means of the Word; the universe is the sort of crystallization or condensation of God’s Word, conveyed by God’s breath or Spirit.  And this Word finally “became flesh,” it materializes in an even more direct way and emerges in matter as a human being who was sent into the world.  And that human being, the Word, speaks words, the words of the Word.  And these words become our connection to the Word, and thus to everything the Word spoke into being.  Those words are the essence of the truth because they are reality itself.  That’s what Jesus means when he says, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

And if we abide in these words by doing them, by embodying them, by letting them shape us and inform us, by trusting these words implicitly like we trust gravity, then we start to share in their reality, we become real, we become awake and alive in ways we could never imagine outside of these words.  Then we move away from the tension and conflict and contradiction and collision and out-of-synch-ness with everything, which characterizes our experience of the world in our normal, ego-driven, self-centered, dark  existence.  And we begin to emerge into the world as it really is, as God originally spoke it into life, and we discover it a place of peace, justice, equality, beauty, communion, wildness, and goodness.

Because they create a pathway to the Word Jesus’ words open up reality for us.  And we discover that, in a sense, we never really left the Garden of Eden.  It’s still there all around us.  But we in our blindness and fear, our ignorance and shame, our pain and anger — all brought upon ourselves — have spawned this other, imaginary but very effective, world of enmity, conflict, greed, selfishness, and violence.

The Word comes into this very twisted existence and says, “It doesn’t have to be this way.  In truth, it isn’t really this way at all.  We’re projecting this hell ourselves, all of us, but we don’t have to.  What we are doing profoundly contradicts our very nature that we are doing this.  We are choosing to subsist in one great lie.  Turn to me!  Turn to the One who reveals our true humanity!  Turn to the living God of love!  Turn to the One who saves and heals, and live!  We’re supposed to live in joy and peace forever!

But the message mostly doesn’t get through.  We read that: “Many of [Jesus] disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”  So Jesus asks the 12 who are left: What about you guys?  Do you want to go as well?

And it is Peter who says what’s what.  “Where are we going to go?  You have the words of eternal life.”  You have shown us the way to life and truth and goodness and joy.  We can’t go back.  We can’t decide now to go back to being blind, addicted, lost, and broken people.  We’ve had a glimpse of what’s real!  “We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God!”

IV.

People left Jesus because all they saw in their blindness was the price tag.  They perceived what it was going to cost them to follow him.  Basically, they would have to give up their whole lives, everything that gave them comfort and security, every allegiance and loyalty, every tradition and habit, every relationship, and even their whole way of thinking.  All that would have to go.

What they did not see was what they receive in relationship with him.  Only Peter and these other eleven perceive the benefits of following Jesus.  They see it because they know him and have been close to him for over a year.  The only way to know what Jesus is about is to get to know him.  It is to live the life he gives us to live.  It is to follow his words and teachings.  It is to be in relationship with him and others who follow him.  It is to gather with other disciples on a regular basis around the Word, and sharing how we put that Word into our thoughts, words, and actions.

That is the only way to get to the place where Peter is here, realizing that belonging to Jesus, believing and knowing that he is the Holy One of God, that God’s love is the center and fullness of all that is, that he has and gives the words of eternal life, is the only place to be.  It is the pearl of great price or the treasure found in a field.  It is easily worth your whole life, and you wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Heard from outside, taken literally, Jesus’ teachings, especially what he says here in chapter 6, are nonsense.  But heard from within, from a situation of belonging, from among the body of disciples, from the heart, these words connect us to the truth in such a way that they give birth to eternal life in us.  In these words we live forever.

And our job is to live in those words in such a way that we create a community together in which this happens.  A community of acceptance, forgiveness, welcoming, inclusion, healing, and love.  A community where people may meet the Lord Jesus, the Word of God, and so come to live in the world where he reigns forever.

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The True Food of Eternal Life.

John 6:52ff.  (May 17, 2015)

I.

It is still the day after Jesus miraculously fed the 5000 people.  He is in the middle of an intense conversation with some who were there and a few of the religious leaders who must have heard about it.  Mostly they are talking about bread, with the people insisting on taking Jesus literally, while he is trying to open their minds to understand it in a more figurative, symbolic, and spiritual manner.  You remember that last week Jesus said, “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.”

At that point he was talking in advance about his own death and resurrection, and what will become the Eucharist or the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  This will be the primary way he gives us to remember how he gives his life for the life of the world.

The religious leaders are trying to figure out what he means, so they discuss this among themselves.  “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  It sounds like a question revealing their own insistent obtuseness, like they’re still trying to take him literally.  But I wonder if they aren’t understanding more than we give them credit for.

In the book of the prophet Micah and elsewhere economic oppression is described in terms of cannibalism.  Micah rails against the leaders of Israel that they tear the skin off the people and the flesh off their bones, they break their bones and chop up their flesh and drop it in a stewpot to eat it.  The image of devouring and consuming is used to accuse the leaders of acting towards the people like predatory animals.  The leaders live off the people’s labor, they chew up their life, they suck the blood out of them, and leave them for dead.

This is something that these people knew about.  They lived in an oppressive situation conquered by the Romans, and under the rule of Rome’s clients and lackeys.  The whole point of colonialism and imperialism from the beginning until today is to extract wealth from the conquered people by any means necessary.  So, using high taxes and prices and interest rates and fees, and just plain forced labor, the rulers did just that.  It is easy to see how people would come to use cannibalism as a metaphor for this behavior.  The rulers may not have been literally carving people up and eating their flesh, but they were certainly systematically draining away their life.

Seen in this light, the questions the religious leaders raise about Jesus may not have to do with whether we can literally eat the flesh of Jesus’ body, but rather how and why would a teacher talk about himself in this way, as the exploited, consumed, devoured, victim?  A teacher might say, “I give you the bread of life,” as a way to talk about their teaching.  But Jesus says “I am the bread of life.”  He is saying that he himself is here to be consumed.  What good does it do to talk about one’s self in terms of this kind of abnegation?  Even if Jesus is identifying with the poor and the oppressed and the exploited, what does simply sharing in their lot and dying with them accomplish?  How does anyone win by being consumed, devoured, eaten alive?

II.

Jesus doesn’t compromise or pull back one bit.  In fact he continues to push the envelope even further as he has for this whole chapter.  He continues: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.”  Jews were not allowed to consume blood at all, not even animal blood.  So, in talking about drinking human blood this whole thing gets even more offensive and challenging.

The Lord continues: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life…; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.…  whoever eats me will live because of me.  This is the bread that came down from heaven… the one who eats this bread will live forever.”  And I imagine him pointing to himself whenever he says “this bread.”  

Jesus is speaking of a “true” nourishment that gives one “eternal life.”  He is using food and drink, eating and bread, and flesh or meat as metaphors for this.  But this true nourishment is in several ways different from nourishment for our physical bodies. 

Physical food nourishes physically.  When I eat a potato or an apple or a piece of chicken, the nutrients in that food are going to feed the cells of my body whether I think about it or not.  I can be watching TV or having an intense conversation while I am eating.  I will still be physically fed.  In the hospital people are fed intravenously without even being conscious. 

But when Jesus talks about the true food of eternal life, he doesn’t mean something we can eat that will make our physical body live forever.  There is no such thing as something we ingest that gives us eternal life without our having to think about it.  There is no drug or even mushroom that will automatically give us this eternal life.  

Even the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper does nothing automatically.  A person may eat the bread, but it they do not have the right attitude in their souls, it means nothing to them.  It could even be counter-productive, as the Apostle Paul warns.  It could actually damage them within if they were to take it cynically, superstitiously, in arrogance and self-righteousness, or if forced.        

The true food of eternal life requires the free and active participation of our soul, that is, our mind, our heart, and our will.  If our soul is  elsewhere, then the Sacrament is just a small piece of bread dipped in grape juice.  It’s barely a decent snack.  

To be fed in the soul requires attention and presence.  How we feel, what we are thinking, what we are hoping for and desiring, in addition to the words that are said and the actions done… these all matter and make the difference when we are considering the true food of eternal life.  Our inward disposition is what opens us up to receive this kind of food.

III.

The Sacrament is just the beginning of it.  But as a visible sign of an invisible, interior reality, the Sacrament points beyond itself and reveals an attitude we have to cultivate towards all of life, all things, and every experience.  The way we act towards this Sacrament is the way we act towards Jesus.  That’s what he means, in part, when he talks about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  When we come to the Table we are coming to him. 

Jesus Christ is the Word of God.  Therefore, the way we act towards him is the way we act towards God.  God created the whole universe by the power of the Word and Spirit, so in still another sense the way we act towards God will be reflected in and expressive of the way we act towards everything that God has made.  Which is to say, everything.  This act of coming to the Table should be the model for how we act towards everything: the gratitude, with humility, with openness, and seeing the living presence of God therein.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”  Purity of heart means that one’s soul is focused and consistent.  It means we have the same attitude of love towards everything: from God, to God’s creation, to humans, to particular people, to ourselves. 

If in the Sacrament we are conscious that we are consuming and thereby becoming God… if we realize that we are actually chewing and swallowing Jesus, and therefore God, and that God is thereby becoming us… and that we are a part of this mutual self-offering as we give ourselves up to this food which has given itself up for us… then we start to see God.  Then we “discern the Body,” as Paul says.  Then we become “partakers of the divine nature,” as Peter says.

The Lord gives himself up for us, but in eating him we are also giving ourselves up to him.  We are usually not conscious of it but we are always giving ourselves up to whatever we put in our mouths.  We are becoming whatever we eat and drink.  

God designs the whole creation as a mutual self-offering in love of one for the other.  It is an expression of the circle-dance of love that is the Trinity, which overflows into nature and the circle of life.  That’s the way it’s supposed to work.  And it is this continual self-emptying which Christ embodies when he takes on our flesh, our meat-existence, our mortal, physical nature, and embraces it with love.

In the Sacrament we are also giving ourselves up to his death, which is to say, our own death; we are letting his sacrifice in love become a part of us.  We ourselves become infected with his self-emptying and so inspired to participate in him by participating in his giving of life for the life of the world.  

IV.

But.  If our inward disposition is all about what we get, if it is extracting, gaining, feeding, and destroying, if it is all about dominating, robbing, sucking, and squeezing all the life out of something purely for our own benefit or satisfaction, that is, if we approach the Table, that is, if we approach life with a dominating, cynical, cruel, self-righteous, self-centered, possessive, killing, and annihilating attitude, without thankfulness, without humility, without appreciation, without seeing the presence of the God of love… then we are agents of death and servants of the Evil One.

Jesus chooses, in the very manner of his death, to identify with the losers, the exploited, the dispossessed, and the oppressed.  Crucifixion was a punishment reserved by Rome for political crimes.  It was the consequence of being seen as trying to upset the extractive, dominating regime of the empire.  When Jesus says “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” he is placing himself firmly among those whose flesh and blood was being actively devoured by the powers that were in charge.  He is standing with those whom the empire would consume, chew up, and spit out.

That is exactly the image depicted on the crucifix: God in Christ lifted up in sacrifice, intentionally offering his life for others, consciously giving his life for the life of the world, purposely taking away sin by reconciling God to people and people to each other.  Where others see a pointless death of unspeakable brutality, we see the One we eat weekly and whom we seek with all our hearts to emulate and to be.  Where others see a lynching victim and react in horror and fear, we see in the same picture the depths of God’s love.  We can see in this different way because we know he is not some hapless other.  He is who we are because we have eaten him.

In this creation, we are all both consumers and consumed.  We can treat that as dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, get-it-while-you-can, and dive into the fray with Objectivist ferocity, killing and devouring, stealing and hoarding, with no care for anyone but me and mine.  We can eat our burgers with no consciousness that this was once an animal.  We can look at a beautiful mountain and plan only to destroy it to grab the coal within it.  We can look at another and see only their benefit to us, and strive to exploit, rape, kill, or do whatever else is necessary to realize that profit.  We can see the whole world as objects to be manipulated.  And we can therefore perish in the catastrophes that such godless behavior has always drawn down upon itself.

V.   

Or.  We could choose to live forever.  By realizing that we only have life when we live in cooperation and harmony, in reciprocity and mutuality, in balance and sharing in the blessed and very good world that God has made.  In deep gratitude.  In profound humility.  In selfless and self-emptying generosity.  In astonishing joy.  In unwavering trust.  And in divine and overwhelming love. 

To eat the bread of the Sacrament is to participate in the life and love of God.  It is to finally realize that God’s blood, shed on the cross, has sanctified again the whole place.  So that now we may see that the whole place is charged with the life of the One who made it, redeemed it, and sanctified it.  Because of what we experience at this Table our eyes are opened to the living Presence of God everywhere.

At this table, in this bread and in this cup, we are eating the flesh and drinking the blood, that is, we are receiving the life! of God, and with full hearts, open minds, and strong wills, we are offering up what we have received, who we are, for the life of the world.             

+++++++  

I Am the Bread of Life

John 6:35-51.  (May 10, 2015)

I.

Jesus continues his conversation with people who witnessed the feeding of the 5000.  They have been talking about bread, with Jesus getting metaphorical and symbolic, and the people pretty much still talking literally about actual bread you can physically eat.  

To help them get the point Jesus says flat out: “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.  Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.  I have said to you that you have seen me, yet do not believe.”  

Well, they clearly do believe that he can do miracles.  They have seen that much for themselves.  But the people have not been able to make the interpretive, imaginative leap that the Samaritan woman made, back in chapter 4.  She came to understand that “living water” was not regular, physical water, but Jesus’ way of talking about the Spirit that wells up within us to eternal life.  These folks seem unable or unwilling to make a similar jump and realize that Jesus isn’t to be taken literally, but the “bread” he refers to is himself and his teaching.  This is beyond them.  

It is not an either/or choice, as if we are to take Jesus either literally or spiritually, and they are mutually exclusive options.  No.  Jesus in this case starts with actual bread that fed hungry people.  But that experience is supposed to drive us beyond to a higher understanding.  Just leaving it at the literal level doesn’t work, as we see in the rest of this reading where Jesus pushes it and pushes it until understanding it literally is either ridiculous or incredibly grotesque and violent.  Finally, he says, “The bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Which, of course, makes no sense to them at all, and which, taken literally, is cannibalism.

How many of us are caught in a literal faith?  It is not because we are unintelligent.  I think it is because we are modern people who have been taught a certain opinion about what truth is.  In short, we have accepted the understanding that truth is whatever is literal, historical, empirical, measurable, repeatable, and verifiable.  According to this reasoning, a parable like the Prodigal Son either really happened to a specific historical family, or it is a lie.  

To me this is absurd.  I was an English major in college.  I know that works of fiction convey far deeper levels of truth than many supposedly factual accounts of events.  I also was a Philosophy minor.  Which means that I know that even the most objective, eye-witness testimony to something that actually happened is nevertheless twisted and biased by the observer’s individual perspective.

This is one of the reasons why modernists, and scholars like those trying to nail down the “historical Jesus” can’t stand this Gospel.  Jesus will not be packaged into their reductionistic categories, and then used to sell their lame books.  With the story of the feeding of the 5000, whether it “really happened” or not is beside the point.  The point of the story is to reveal to us the Bread of Life, who is Jesus Christ, whose teaching and Presence brings life to the world and to you.

II.       

This whole difficulty with the literal and the figurative and spiritual gets Jesus to reflecting on why it is that some people don’t understand him, and some do.  Some are able to get their minds beyond the literal bread, and see that to which the bread is pointing.  But for some, on the other hand, this seems impossible.

Jesus says that everything that the Father gives him will come to him, and anyone who comes to him he will never drive away; and that he will lose nothing of all that God has given him.  These are the ones who come to him because they are drawn by the Father who sent him.  They see him, and believe in him; they have eternal life, and he will raise them up on the last day.  It sounds like some kind of predestination in which the Father gives some people to Jesus.  And like most presentations of predestination, the “some” always necessarily includes us. 

So the first question for us to ask about our own situation might be: Are we God’s gift to Jesus?  What would that look like, to think of ourselves as God’s gift to Jesus?  What would it mean to act like that?  Wouldn’t we be absolutely and uncategorically at the Lord’s disposal?  Wouldn’t we be the most enthusiastic and energetic disciples imaginable?  Wouldn’t we be willing to change and endure any kind of discomfort or difficulty for his sake and for the sake of his good news to the world?  Wouldn’t we be laying our whole lives down at his feet such that Jesus would give thanks to God for us?

Is Jesus giving thanks to God for us?  Is Jesus saying, “Woah, Dad, you outdid yourself this time; these people you sent me here in [Tinton Falls / Atlantic Highalnds] are just amazing!  They listen, they pray, they study, they are tireless in serving others, and they actively invite people to get to know me!  They love and forgive one another with their whole hearts, they welcome strangers, and they even tithe plus!  This whole area knows they are my disciples because of their visible, active love!  Everyone thinks of their church as a beacon of blessing and generosity!  Thank you so much!”?

Or does Jesus look at us more as kind of fixer-uppers?  People so far gone that it will be hard for even him to do something with?  

For that matter, are we God’s gift to anyone?  In this business I have to do the occasional funeral, which often involves trying to find something good to say about the deceased.  The bare minimum is to say, “He loved his family.”  But what if even that is a stretch, given the evidence?  What if people can’t find anyone to whom we were God’s gift?  Let alone Jesus!

III.

Jesus says that he is not in the world to do his own will.  And the people whom God has given him are not sent to him so they can do their own will either.  We who claim to be disciples are not here do to what we want; we are not here for ourselves; we did not come here of our own will but we know ourselves to have been sent.  By God.  Into.  The world.

We are not here to get a little something for ourselves, or to make something of ourselves; we are not here for the sake of what we want.  What we want has been twisted and perverted by our egos and by society, by our fear and our pain, our traditions and institutions.  Heck, even advertisers know how to make us want stuff.  

The ones God gives to Jesus are the ones who come to know that it’s not about them.  These are the ones who know they have to lose their closed, little, sleepy, shadow lives in order to gain the true life of God.  And because it’s not about them they don’t get hung up over their craving for that literal bread with which to feed their literal bellies, and their minds are able to stretch to see and believe and be fed by the spiritual bread of Jesus and his teaching. 

When Jesus talks like this, it confuses, disorients, alienates, frightens, and angers the religious authorities.  They charge: “He calls himself ‘the bread that came down from heaven.’  But we all know where he’s really from.  We know that his father was Joseph.  He didn’t come down from heaven at all.  He only came down here to Capernaum from Nazareth.  Who does he think he is?  you don’t need his figurative ‘bread.’  The real bread you’ve been buying from us is just fine.”

I mean, look at what the powers that rule our world today have done to bread.  This substance that fed people for thousands of years and is the very basis of civilization itself, has been in just a few decades reduced to a mass-produced, minimally nutritious excuse for food.  Indeed, industrial  bread often has the healthy parts of the grain removed, and various chemicals added.  It gives us a lot of empty carbohydrates that over time cause diabetes and obesity.  And for the sake of increased profits, factories engage in processes resulting in extra gluten…  and we know how well that’s working out.

This is what always happens to the values, traditions, institutions, and leadership of the establishment.  For the sake of their own preservation, profit, and power, they adulterate originally good things, and turn them into ever more effective means of separating us from our true selves and from God.  This is what Jesus means elsewhere when he warns his disciples about “the leaven of the Pharisees.”  They had taken God’s good law and twisted it into an oppressive, self-serving, nationalistic, fear-driven, way to control people.

IV.

Jesus responds to these people, basically, by saying: “Whatever.  If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.  You’re out of the loop.  I don’t expect you to understand.  It is not in your interest to get what I am saying.  But those whom God sends to me, who see what I am doing and trust me, they will have this bread, they will have me and my teaching, and live forever.  And I will raise them up on the last day.”

Jesus is always challenging our normal, ego-centric, self-serving, literal, domesticated, comfortable, convenient ways of thinking and acting.  He is always calling us from death to life, from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, and from despair to hope.  He is always calling us out of our sleepwalking existence, our of our living death, to wake up, that is to see and trust and live forever!

He paraphrases two of the prophets here, who predicted that in the fullness of time God will teach all the people directly, in their hearts, from within.  To be taught by God is to be sent by God.  Jesus repeats this pattern: we come, we see, we believe or place our trust in him, and we receive from him eternal life.  It sounds pretty simple.    

But showing up itself is remarkable.  Just to be present takes discipline and courage, because we have to emerge from our shells and grow out of our old selves.  We have to leave behind our old habits and expectations, we have to be totally open to the new, surprising, wild, undomesticated reality that is Jesus Christ.  We have to know ourselves to be drawn or called or given by God, that this is not something we choose to do of our own initiative, so we are not merely physically there, but know Jesus’ presence with our whole heart and mind and strength.  

Then we have to see.  Our minds have to set aside rationality and literal meanings, and move from physical bread to the “bread” of his truth that we know within.

Then we have to believe, which means actively trust in what we are seeing, with the conviction that it is not only real but the realest thing we have ever met.  That is, we have to eat the bread, we have to embody the teachings and life of the Lord, we have to take him into us, which is the ultimate act of trust because we are turning our body over to him.

Trusting means knowing ourselves to be fed by him, which is to say, our lives are shaped and energized and empowered by his mission, his words, his teaching, and his love.  If he is our bread, he becomes us; his life becomes ours; who he is becomes who we are just as surely as the nutrients in the physical food we ingest literally become the cells of our bodies.  If he is our bread then we become him; we become the one who comes down from heaven; we become ourselves the bread, the teaching, by our words and example, that gives his life, God’s life, to the world.  That’s our mission. 

When we believe or trust in Jesus Christ, the One whom God sent into the world, the very Word of God by whom the world was created who gives his life for the life of the world, then we also receive eternal life.  

We live forever.  We never truly die.

IV.

You will notice how this describes what we do in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which this chapter expounds.  We come to the Table, we see the ordinary bread a sign of Christ’s living Presence.  Then the act of faith is when we put it in our mouths.  When we do all this it is itself the visible sign Jesus himself gave us by which to remember and participate in him, pointing to the invisible reality of a deeper healing and transformation within us.

And this is the new life.  The Sacrament points beyond itself, showing us the structure of transformation, the way to eternal life.  We come, we see, we believe, and we live.

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Give Us This Bread Always!

John 6:22-34.  (May 3, 2015)

I.

So the crowd Jesus fed apparently camps out on the hillside, and in the morning they awake to discover that Jesus and the disciples are gone.  But they know he was headed for Capernaum, so some of them get in boats and make their way up the coast in search of him.  The last we heard, they were intending to make Jesus king by acclamation.

When they finally locate him, they ask, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”  “How did you come here?” might have been a better question.  I mean, Jesus went up into the mountains, and his disciples took their only boat in the other direction to Capernaum.  Yet here is Jesus now, in Capernaum.  He could not have walked the rugged terrain that distance; and, since they were already astounded by the bread miracle, he doesn’t tell them about walking on the lake.  They probably couldn’t handle that.

He doesn’t answer their question anyway.  He just says, “You are looking for me for the wrong reasons.  You do not recognize the signs I am doing as pointing to larger, spiritual truths; all you seem to care about is feeding your faces with that bread from yesterday.  I have not come to set up a chain of bakeries!  You have to get over the literal understanding of what I am doing.  Do not work for this physical food that perishes.  But work for the spiritual food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”  

Obviously Jesus understands that people need to eat.  He showed this on the hillside by feeding the 5,000 hungry people in the first place.  But this is not the end of the story.  Feeding people is important, but it’s just the beginning.  It is not an end in itself; it is a sign pointing to a larger, higher, more profound, and greater reality.

Sometimes we can get lost in the basics, in our physical needs and desires.  I suspect we are biologically hard-wired to focus on locating and consuming food.  So that even now, when at least those of us in this room probably do not have to worry about getting enough food, we still crave it.  If anything we are perpetually putting ourselves on diets and exercise regimes because we consume too much.  If food is available there is something in us that tells us to eat it because… you never know about tomorrow.

We have developed an economic system that is very good at producing food for consumption.  But because we have not allowed ourselves to consider the spiritual meaning of food, and because therefore we have not connected our ways of producing and distributing food with ideas and practices of justice or equality, we end up benefiting a few fortunate people, who have their needs met and more, while allowing a few billion others to live in chronic hunger.

The spiritual always bears fruit in the social.  One cannot be both selfish and spiritual.  True spirituality is never a collapse or implosion into our own ego.  It aways finds a deeper connection to God, the creation, and other people.  Therefore Jesus says not to work for regular food but for the food of spiritual life which comes from God.

II.

To their credit Jesus’ questioners at least pretend to be tracking with him here, and they ask what they have to do to do the works of God, the work that will get them the spiritual food.  You will notice some parallels with the conversation the Lord had with the woman at the well in Samaria two chapters ago.  Then as well they started literal and quickly moved into the  spiritual, metaphoric, and symbolic speech that is the only way to communicate what Jesus is talking about.

Jesus replies that the work of God is to “believe in him whom [God] has sent.”  And this is of course where it gets sticky, and where we tend to invent easy and superficial ways to satisfy this requirement.  For we founder upon the meaning of the all-important word, “believe.” 

I have a close friend who is a Methodist pastor from India.  He tells me that there are Hindus who come to America to teach yoga classes.  When they go back home they raise money by testifying that everyone who comes to their class has actually converted to Hinduism, because, they say, chanting “Om” is actually a confession of faith.  (This reasoning makes me a Hindu, by the way.)

Christians engage in this kind of foolishness as well.  I have another  friend who used to be a fundamentalist; he once told me that in his former church evangelism consisted of getting people to repeat a specific sentence about Jesus.  Once people did that, they were officially saved.  

I suspect that Jesus means something more than the recitation of a verbal formula when he says that the work of God is to believe in the One God sent.  Merely saying “Jesus is Lord” doesn’t make one a Christian any more than saying “Om” makes one a Hindu, or saying “There is no God but God” makes one a Muslim, or reciting the Shema makes one a Jew.  

We have a nasty habit of reducing faith to a word or phrase that expresses a cognitive opinion about something, in our case Jesus.  As if all Jesus wants is for us to say the right words, and have the right doctrine in our heads about him.

For Jesus, “to believe” means more like placing your whole-hearted trust in something; it means acquiring a new way of thinking and seeing; and most importantly, it demands a radically different and transformed way of life in terms of actual behavior.  Jesus is always telling his disciples not what to say but what to do.  “Keep my commandments.”  “Love one another as I have loved you.”  “Follow me.”  And so forth.  

Jesus uses the word “believe” to sum up this whole character of a changed life.  Certainly what we think and say is an element of that.  But it has also to be reflected and expressed in what we do, or it isn’t happening.  Jesus brother, James, learned this as “faith without works is dead.”  Clearly misunderstanding and underestimating what Jesus means by “believe” was a problem from the beginning.

III.

Jesus’ interlocutors seem willing to believe in him, but they want another sign.  I find this amazing since they had witnessed the spectacular sign with the bread on the hillside the day before!  I guess it’s like, what have you done for me lately?  They need another sign today.  They remind him that in the Torah God provides miraculous bread for the people every day (except the Sabbath).  It is as if they are saying, “We’ll believe whatever you want if you can do that thing with the bread on a daily basis.”  (Clearly they really liked that bread.  Must’ve been sourdough….) 

One miracle, one sign, is never enough.  Things like this?  They need constant reinforcement.  People forget.  Then people who hear about it what to see for themselves.  If we base our faith on supernatural phenomena we’re sunk.  The miracle would have to happen all the time, which would make it not really much of a miracle.  It would become routine.  And Jesus would be spending all his time proving himself with amazing miracles, which would have to get increasingly amazing to satisfy people who are easily jaded.

That would drive him into the devil’s temptation about fame, from the other gospels.  He performs these signs to open up the consciousness of his witnesses.  Because of them, they are able to see all around them the constant and continual miracles of God in everything that God has made!  It is not about the literal bread; it is about seeing through the sign to the new reality the sign points to and reveals.

I have said this before.  In this area we are kind of like dogs.  If I approach a dog and stick out my arm and finger and point to something, the dog will most likely express great interest in my finger.  Ah, a finger!  Maybe it has peanut butter or, even better, liverwurst, on it!  It certainly warrants a good sniff!

It does not occur to a dog, usually, that the finger is pointing somewhere else and that it should turn its attention in that direction.  So it is with these people and the signs that Jesus performs.  In this case, they remain obsessed with the literal bread he gave them on the hillside.  What do we have to do, what do we have to believe, so we can get some more of that bread?

I get the impression that the Lord, in dealing with humans, must have done a lot of eye-rolling.

I mean, he’s done wine and now bread.  Maybe they were waiting for him to conjure some cheese or something.

IV.

Then Jesus, perhaps restraining himself from saying, “Forget the bread already!”  says, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.”  He’s not really talking about actual bread anymore.  He is referring to the teaching, the words, he is giving.  He will make this explicit later in the chapter.  

Remember he is dealing with people who had been taught to base their faith on the Law of Moses.  Jesus’ opponents lifted up Moses as the central figure in the Bible.  Throughout Jesus’ ministry there is this subtext going on about the place and status of Moses and the Law.  Jesus contends that the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders are getting Moses all wrong.  They reduce Moses to a legalistic control-freak for whom it is all about obeying the letter of the Law.  Such an approach suited the leaders of Jesus’ time, as it does for leaders of every time because leaders are always looking for some way to keep people in line and under their control, compliant and busily working to produce wealth for the elite.

Jesus says that Moses refers to him.  That is, Moses is anticipating and welcoming the incarnate love of God who is coming into the world.  Jesus comes to fulfill, not negate, the Law of Moses.  He fulfills it by writing it on people’s hearts by the Spirit, and revealing the heart of the Law itself, which is God’s love.

So when the Lord says it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven, he means that the divine Word comes from God, not Moses.  Moses refers to and points to the Word, who is the One who comes from God, the One sent into the world by God.  Moses, and all the Scriptures, convey the Word of God, who is Jesus Christ.

Get your attention off Moses!  Look at the One to whom Moses points.  The bread, that is, the teaching, of Moses, comes from God.  Jesus Christ embodies, incarnates, that teaching, that truth.  This is the bread of God, the Wisdom from on high, the true and good commandment, which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.  It is Jesus Christ.

And we don’t follow him by just talking about him.  We don’t believe in him by only thinking about him.  And we certainly don’t do either one by treating him as our private religious possession, as the leaders were doing with Moses, using him to exclude, control, coerce, judge, and condemn people.  The Spirit blows wherever, says Jesus.  The Spirit is wild and undomesticated.  The authorities and leaders don’t manage God at all.

The bread from heaven, the new spiritual manna, the teaching and example and witness of Jesus, in whom the Word becomes flesh and emerges from within the good creation itself, gives life to the world.  His teaching gives life to the world because following it puts us in harmony with the creation and the One who gives it life.  Not to follow his teaching of non-violence, generosity, humility, simplicity, honesty, healing, forgiveness, and blessing, is to fall into eternal death.  It is not to live or even be.  It is to sell out to the powers that have usurped authority in this world.    

V.

The people from the crowd finally say to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”  Are they really still on about the bread?!  Or maybe some are beginning to get it? 

But if we do get it, then that request is the very heart of faith.  It is what we should be saying to the Lord all the time: Give us this bread always!  Give us this teaching, this Word, this good news, this light and life!  At the end of this chapter Peter says he is staying because Jesus has the words of eternal life.  Give us this bread, give us yourself, always!

We have to crave the Lord’s spiritual bread, we have to hang on his every word, we have to keep his commandments and love each other as he has loved us, by giving his life for his friends.  He gives us this Sacrament of bread and wine to remember him by.  It embraces our physical, biological, organic need for actual food, and transfigures it, extending to become spiritual food that grounds and interprets our reception of his teaching and his life.

May God give us this bread always: our daily bread for physical sustenance, this Sacrament of his Body and Blood by which he becomes us, his teaching of love, and his life, poured out for the life of the world.

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Jesus Against the Market (Again)

John 6:1-21.  (April 26, 2015)

I.

Back before Easter we were looking at chapter 5.  At the end of that chapter, Jesus is answering his critics who were complaining about his instructing a lame man whom he healed to get up and carry his mat… on the Sabbath, which they considered to be illegal according to the Law of Moses.  Jesus responds that if they really believed Moses they would also believe him, because Moses was writing about him.

Jesus has been making a point of separating himself from the old religious institutions of his people, especially as they were corrupted by self-serving and paranoid leaders.  But on the other hand Jesus has also been showing how he is in continuity with the old religion, and fulfills it.  He fulfills, rather than rejects or destroys it.  He reveals its deepest and truest meaning and purpose.

Jesus does not come to destroy.  He comes to integrate, include, and fulfill.  Here we will see how he does this with the basics of the old religion, revealing its true essence, and driving it to a higher level.  He is showing us that true change and creativity are not about destruction of the tradition, but growing in, through, and out of what has gone before.  Like the way a sprout emerges from the seed, thus the faith of Jesus emerges from the former religion in the same way.

In this story, Jesus crosses a sea and goes up a mountain.  In this case it is the Sea of Galilee, also called Tiberias.  Mentioning this other name is a subtle reminder of the people’s situation.  Tiberias was a Roman emperor.  Rome’s penchant for renaming features of the local landscape to honor themselves is typical of all empires.  This practice is one of many ways it gets shoved in people’s faces who is really in charge.  If you rename things the theory is that eventually the indigenous people forget that this ever belonged to them at all.

(New Jersey is an example.  Our State is named after a British island by one set of conquerors, which island itself was named by another set of conquerors, the Romans, after Caesar.  New Jersey in Latin is Novo Caesarea.  Nobody remembers the original name the indigenous people had for this area, or the name the Celts had for that island.  By renaming things empires propagate the myth that there was no one and nothing here before their “civilization” arrived.)

The reference to the emperor should remind us of Pharaoh’s oppression, which was the context and inspiration of God’s activity with the Israelites.  This whole series of acts undertaken by Jesus here is designed to remind us of Moses, who also crossed a sea — the Red Sea —  and went up a mountain — Mt. Sinai — so God could give him the Law.  Jesus is the new Moses, the prophesied prophet from Deuteronomy 18:18.  Jesus fulfills the Torah.

And, in case we haven’t yet figured it out, the text informs us that this is all happening at “Passover, the festival of the Jews,” when the people commemorated these very events, their ancestors’ liberation from Egypt.

II.

Another thing this story has in common with the Exodus story is the crowd of people.  The crowd keeps following Jesus because of his reputation as a healer.  Jesus’ ministry is always public and populist in the sense that serving, healing, liberating, teaching, and feeding the people is happening all the time.  Indeed, it is significant that the crowd follows Jesus, instead of going to Jerusalem, for Passover.  The people are beginning to realize that Jesus is the new Temple, the place where reconciliation, healing, and atonement happen.

Jesus comes to this mountain and sits down at the top with his disciples.  And the people start gathering around him on the grassy slope leading down to the lake.  

Then Jesus turns to Philip, one of the disciples who was from this locale, and asks what turns out to be a rhetorical question.  “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”  It is a normal, logistical question that any leader might ask of a staff person in overseeing a large gathering.  And it assumes a normal participation in the establishment economy.  This is an assumption we all make without thinking.  If we want something, especially if we are not at home, we must buy it from someone.  Jesus is saying, in effect, “Is there a Panera or something around here?  A deli?  Where can all these people go to buy some food?”

Philip replies that the disciples do not have enough cash on hand to provide a meal, or even some bagels, for this many people.  It would cost, I don’t know, $10,000?  To feed 5,000 people?

Overhearing this conversation, Andrew helpfully pipes up that there’s a kid over here whose mom packed a lunch for him, which amounted to 5 barley rolls and two dried fish.  “But what are they among so many people?” he asks.

The problem appears to be scarcity.  Scarcity of food, and scarcity of money to buy food.  Jesus does not declare a lunch break and send everyone off to fend for themselves in the market.  He doesn’t say that if you brought something fine, if you have money you can go buy something, but if you did neither of those things, you’re out of luck.  

No.  First, he has everyone sit down in the grass together.  He forms a community, which can only happen when we stop moving around and stay in one place with some other people for a while.  You need to look around and see who you are with.  You need also to establish some contact with the earth; you need to establish a place, a situatedness.  Nothing can happen while people are moving around and talking.

Then Jesus receives the food from the boy, and he thanks him; and presumably he also thanks God from whom all blessings flow to begin with.  And he starts to distribute the food to the people.  If you do the math this would be one barley roll and less than half a fish for every thousand people.

III.

Now, this story, along with the crucifixion and the resurrection, is the only one that appears in all four gospels.  It was an incredibly important and seminal story for the Jesus-movement.  It formed part of the basis for our regular sacramental act of the Lord’s Supper. 

And yet here, at this moment, none of the gospels tells us what we most want to know.  Which is, what exactly happens here?  It’s like we’re missing a page of text or something.  We want details!  How does he do this?  One second we have a few rolls and pieces of dried fish, and 5,000 hungry people, the few seconds later we have 5,000 satisfied people and  twelve baskets of leftovers.  How does this happen?  The gospels don’t tell us.

On the one hand, some interpreters have tried to explain it rationally.  They say that everyone really had food with them and that Jesus’ example was that they should share with each other.  I get that.  It’s not what the text says; but it preaches, sort of.  Others maintain that Jesus simply and miraculously caused bread and fish to materialize out of thin air.  That has been the traditional explanation.  But the text doesn’t say this explicitly either, probably because we are not to get lost in the magic of the action itself.  Like the water that became wine, all we get is a report of what it was, and a report of what it became.  It doesn’t go behind the curtain of how.

This action connects Jesus to several events in the Hebrew Scriptures.  First, God provides miraculous food for the Israelites in the wilderness in the form of manna, this bread-like substance that falls from the sky.  And second there are these cases with the early prophets, Elijah and Elisha, including the one we heard earlier.  In these stories we also do not get a picture of the physics of it.  We just know that the food, or in one case a bottle of olive oil, does  not run out.  There is more than enough.  It looks entirely inadequate to us, but God makes it last and last.

So also here on the mountainside.  The food is distributed.  The people receive as much as they want, until they are satisfied.  And they collect 12 baskets full of leftovers.  The 12 baskets symbolically mean there is enough to feed not just the 12 tribes of Israel, but the whole world.  12 indicates fullness and completion and wholeness.  The baskets of fragments from this meal are themselves a sign that we are to take this message and this food to a hungry world.

This sign forms a pair with Jesus’ first sign, the turning of water to wine at Cana, back in chapter 2.  Then he provides wine; here he provides bread.  Thus we have the two elements of the Sacrament he gives us to remember and participate in him.

IV.

Once the people realize what has happened, they want to make Jesus king.  This is what a king is supposed to do: provide for the people.  But Jesus rejects this as the temptation that it is.  He will not be reduced to a super bread man.  So he disengages from the crowd and goes further into the mountain by himself.  In effect he is saying what he said when the devil tempted him in the other gospels: “People do not live by bread alone.”  It’s not just about the bread; what he has done is about more than that. 

Jesus does not want to be made king by the people.  His supreme kingly act will not be the wielding of secular, coercive power.  It will be when he is lifted up on the cross, under the inscription, “The King of the Jews.”  It is not by giving physical bread to the people that he will demonstrate his monarchy.  That was what the Roman emperor did.  That was the whole basis of empires in the first place, the conquest by war of more and more land for the cultivation of grain to feed a burgeoning population.

Jesus Christ gives us more than that.  He gives us his — that is, God’s — life, and he gives it by means of absorbing and suffering violence, not by inflicting it.  He gives it by service, not by bullying.  Indeed, Jesus is allergic to the kind of behavior that passes for “leadership” among us.  Just when he has, by the world’s standards, won; just when he has gained the highest approval rating; just when he is poised to be given power by the people… Jesus disappears.  He practically runs into the hills to pray.    

Since it’s getting dark, the disciples decide to return to their base up the shoreline in Capernaum without Jesus.  So they get in their boat and shove off.  On the way the wind kicks up so they have to row rather than try to sail against the wind.  And they see someone coming to them, apparently walking on the water.  They are terrified.

But then the person coming on the water speaks to them.  It is Jesus.  And he simply says “I am.”  In English this comes across as “It is I” (or in some translations, “It’s me!” which I still can’t stand), which loses the impact of the words “I am.”  Those words are from an experience that Moses had with God at the burning bush, where God self-identifies with those very words: “I am.”  When you said “I am” in those days people understood you to be saying “I am God.”

In other words, the Lord is saying: “I am not just a magician who can conjure wine and bread; neither am I just a king wielding earthly political power.  I am the Word of God by whom the whole world was created.  I am the Lord of creation.  Therefore, do not be afraid.”  Jesus Christ is the God of love, and perfect love casts out all fear.

They receive him into their boat, and they turn into the shore at Capernaum, finally home.

V.

The first thing to realize about this story is the way Jesus rejects any market-based approach to feeding people.  He knows that the market is what creates scarcity and unfair distribution.  The market is not what God intends.  Instead, the people gathered together around the Word, sitting on the grass, in expectation; that is what sets the table for a miracle.

When we gather around the Word and reflect and express his generosity, his sharing, his openness to God, his trust in the Spirit, and especially his gratitude for what little does emerge… this is what allows something new and unprecedented to happen.  

For the good news is that God the Creator is in charge of heaven and earth, sky and sea.  A strong wind, a strong Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is blowing.  This may make our seas rough and difficult.  But the One who created all things remains strong and stable, appearing with a message of good news that casts out our fear, and carries us home.

That’s the second thing to remember here.  God in Jesus Christ may be trusted.  God is love and love is at the heart of all things, including us.  It is love that feeds us, as we are gathered together, when we are open to the miracle and expecting the amazing.  And it is love that keeps us safe and delivers us to the harbor.  We are fed, and we are led, by the love of God in Jesus Christ.

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