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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