The Crack in Everything.

John 6:35, 41-51

August 12, 2018

I.

In the gospel of John there is no account of the Last Supper where Jesus lifts up the bread and says, “This is my body.”  Instead, the Lord addresses the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper here in chapter 6, in conjunction with his provision of bread for 5000 people gathered on a hillside.  Both perspectives center on Passover, and both start with literal bread.  But in John we get Jesus’ spiritual reflections on the bread, showing it to represent himself.  He is the bread who is broken for the life of the world.

After that experience, he retreats to Capernaum, and the people seek him out and find him there.  Last week we saw how he was bringing the people along with him until finally they say, “Give us this bread always,” leading Jesus to his proclamation, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

But there are some folks there who are not so sure.  The gospel refers to them as “the Jews,” but this does not mean the entire Jewish people so much as the religious leaders, the establishment, the custodians of the reigning orthodoxy of the time.  They begin to complain because they are still taking Jesus literally and if you do that his words are unintelligible and ridiculous.

There is in the New Testament a sharp division between the people who get it, or at least start to get it, and those who don’t get it because they insist on taking Jesus literally.  Remember Nicodemus back in chapter 3?  Assuming Jesus means by “born again” that we have somehow to climb back into our mothers’ wombs, which is breathtakingly stupid?  Remember the woman at the well in chapter 4, who starts off talking with Jesus about actual water, but then is able to stick with him when he shifts to talking about metaphorical, symbolic water?

Here in chapter 6, he is trying to draw people from obsessing about the actual bread he provides on the hillside, and open their minds to see that as a metaphor for something way deeper, higher, broader, and brighter.  That physical bread points to real “bread,” which is himself and his teaching.  Just like bread feeds your body, so I will feed your spirit, is what he is saying.

But the religious authorities and their followers can’t swallow this.  They start off with, “Wait a minute, he didn’t come down from no heaven; he grew up in Nazareth.  We know his family.  Some of us went to high school with him.  Don’t give me this ‘I came down from heaven’ stuff.  Who does he think he is?”  It’s like they’re demanding his birth-certificate or something, because unless it says “Heaven” under “place of birth,” he’s obviously lying.  That’s the level of sophistication we’re dealing with here.

The gospel is incomprehensible if we take everything merely literally (like many conservatives) or historically (like many liberals).  The Lord is trying to haul us into a different way of thinking, which Paul calls having “the mind of Christ,” past this literalist dead end.  He is saying that visible, measurable, tangible things point beyond themselves to an invisible spiritual Reality that cannot be talked about in any other way than story, metaphor, symbol, image, poetry, and parable. 

II.  

Jesus’ response to their obstinate boneheadedness is to say, in effect, either you get it or you don’t.  It’s kind of like when Louis Armstrong was asked by a reporter to “define jazz.”  He said, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”  You have to have the answer inside you to begin with.  It’s intuitive; you can’t figure it out.  Jesus comes into the world to unlock the faith God as placed within everyone, which most of us are completely unaware of.  When he heals someone, Jesus often says, “Your faith has made you well,” as if to suggest that their healing was already within them and Jesus is the catalyst bringing that out and making that real for them in their bodies.

This is not something that can be directly taught.  We can’t go to school and learn how to think differently in this way.  It’s not about objective information or data.  We can’t “grasp” it.  We have to be “taught by God,” Jesus says.  He talks about it as a drawing, the way we scoop up water.  It’s an attraction like magnetism.  It is drawn out of us.  The Lord says we have to be “drawn by the Father.”  We don’t make it happen; but we have to let it happen. 

Jesus also says that he teaches in parables precisely to separate those who “have ears to hear” from those who only focus on the literal meaning of what he says.  It reminds me of how a dog, if you point to something, will be very interested in your finger.  They don’t usually have the mental capacity to make the interpretive leap to understand that your finger is actually pointing to something else.  

We have to let go of our preconceived notions, and be open to what God has to teach all of us.  That’s why he quotes a universalist statement from the prophets that “they shall all be taught by God.”  God has this knowledge, wisdom, and insight for all of us.  No one is permanently doomed by their stupidity.  But too often we do suppress and ignore this interior wisdom and hide in the prison of taking things literally.

Jesus is saying this about these religious leaders and their followers.  It’s not about the finger.  It’s not about the literal bread.  It’s not even about the manna in the Bible that the ancient Israelites ate.  It’s not about anything you can grasp and control.  Those things point to something else.  The Israelites may have had miracle food from God in the wilderness, but they still died.  

The Lord is talking about “bread” from “heaven” that when you “eat” it you don’t “die” anymore.  You live forever; you are raised up on the last day.  You emerge into the eternal now of fulfilled time.  There is something that if you receive and incorporate it into yourself, it feeds your deepest Self, which is the Image of God, Christ-in-you, by whom we participate in the very nature of the Creator.  In him we detach from the limitations and liabilities of our egocentric-personality driven existence, and fall into everywhere and all-time.

III.

When Jesus says, “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die,” I imagine him pointing to himself, to his own body, his own mortal flesh, the flesh that God’s Word became to dwell among us, the flesh indeed that each one of us has, shares, and is, and which we have in common with him.  God speaks us into existence at the beginning; God even makes our flesh and skin.  Our whole life and existence comes from God, including our physical bodies which participate other bodies in the cycles of life in God’s creation.

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” says Jesus.  “Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  He is talking about his crucifixion in which his flesh, his mortal body, is literally, physically broken in an act of terror and brutality by the Romans, but which God turns inside-out revealing the Way of true life.

Now it is not by self-preservation that we survive, even though that will arguably get us through a few mostly miserable years on this earth, after which we perish.  But it is according to Jesus’ example of self-offering, self-emptying, and self-giving that we not just survive but live forever.  On the cross Jesus becomes, in the words of Leonard Cohen, the “crack in everything” through which “the light gets in.”  

That is what he is signifying when he breaks bread.  It is his most characteristic act.  It is the act by which people who know him instantly identify him.  It is something he must have done with great solemnity and uniqueness, regularly and frequently.  Along with the pouring of wine it is the one thing he tells us to do to remember him.  It has become the one thing all Christians do by which we are recognized and identified.

When we break the bread we are remembering him, and we are remembering ourselves, our true selves — we are remembering who we really are, we are remembering Christ-in-us, the hope of glory, as Paul says.  And in remembering ourselves as Christ’s body and individually members of him.  Identifying with his brokenness, we also offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, that we may also be how his Light gets into the world.  His Light of love, peace, justice, healing, service, and joy, his Light of Wisdom and Presence and goodness, his Light of truth… comes into the world by means of this bread, the bread of his people who bear his Word.  Eating the bread means we become him and he becomes us, his mission is our mission, his death is our death, his life is our life, given now in him for the life of the world.

IV.

Now this — all of us together — is the bread that came down from heaven.  We are the Body of Christ.  We are distributed, spread out, sent into the world to identify with others, sharing in their brokenness, losses, and failures, and allowing God’s Light to shine through us, in our compassion, welcome, acceptance, and blessing, as well as in our ministries of material generosity.       

For in and as Christ we know that to live merely for ourselves, for this life only — for my self, my family, my class, my nation, my species in competition with others — is to embrace our own extinction.  It is to be weighted down with the chains of our hoarded possessions, which crush us into oblivion.  

But to live for others — all others, all people and the whole creation — without accepting division and enmity but realizing our essential oneness — is to live forever.  It is to be all-in-all as Christ is all-in-all. 

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