John 6:25-69, selections
This is a hard saying, who can stomach it?
An Episcopal priest whose writing I enjoy wrote a story once about a class of first graders making their first communion. She described the beautiful white dresses and gloves, the boys in their blue blazers, the parents, proud and tearful as they guided their children to the altar. One by one, the celebrant went down the line of worshippers, placing bread in their cupped hands, tipping the chalice toward upturned, shining faces, murmuring, the body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ… it was a hushed and holy moment, up until the point where one little girl, really listening, saw the cup of blood moving toward her lips and pushed it away in horror, saying Yuck! You keep it, I don’t want any blood!
And that’s what happens in this long, familiar, and mostly lovely discourse on Jesus as the Bread of Life in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John. The words about Jesus as the Bread of life are considered so central to the Christian faith that the lectionary invests four long weeks on these stories of the feeding of the 5000, Jesus walking on the water, and the nourishing metaphor of Jesus I am the bread of life– the eager followers drinking in each word.
But in the next instant, like a badly edited movie, the plot twists abruptly: the eager followers are baffled, offended: who does Jesus think he is? Is this not Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? The charismatic leader becomes obscure and difficult: no one can come to me unless drawn by the Father– not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God. And then, even the comforting metaphor of life-nourishing bread takes a horrifying, cannibalistic turn: those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me. Whoever eats me will live because of me. Now maybe it’s metaphor, and maybe it’s not; but whatever Jesus meant by it, surely he went too far. This is a hard saying, the disciples observe, plainly, flatly revolted—who can stomach it? And just like that, a story everyone thought everyone understood becomes something else altogether, and no one knows what to do. . . except, maybe, to quietly slip away.
We don’t know what to do with the unexpected and unwelcome graces of God. The affront of God’s justice. The unpredictability of God’s presence. We are those followers who now, out of poverty, have learned to live with more than enough. Who have, out of our need to understand and to know, have made everything the same. We are too long at the fair, too familiar with our faith, too dependent upon security, sufficiency, and the comfort of sameness… not only have we ceased to be surprised, we have ceased wanting to be surprised; indeed, we are bored.
It’s like those commercials and news snippets I keep seeing as we dance through a national health care or insurance reform debate. Blah, blah, blah-blah-blah… .insurance reform, universal health care…. WAIT FOR IT! Woman yelling from the back of the room, “YOU’RE TRYING TO RUIN OUR COUNTRY WITH SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! I WANT THINGS THE WAY THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN! I WANT MY AMERICA BACK!” Cut to the news analysts… spontaneous or staged, blah-blah-blah…. Wait a minute, what were we talking about? What do we want? What do we really need?
If we are honest, we might admit that we would rather have the security of a god who is predictable than a god who is real. Having tasted the wonder bread of Jesus, we would like the disciples prefer to have this bread always rather than the flesh and blood Jesus, the living, dynamic, unpredictable presence of the divine. The ancestor stories that the disciples, the crowds and the Jews reference when they are asking Jesus to give them more, and more of the same, is the old and best story of the Hebrew slaves’ exodus from Egypt. It was a story that formed a people’s identity; indeed, it forms it still. It was a story about the generosity and the unpredictability of God. . . it is a story about the self-centeredness and predictability of God’s people. When the people were hungry, manna from heaven. Thirsty? Water from a rock. Tired of that same-old-same-old manna? (how soon we go from desperately grateful to tiresomely expectant) Quails fly by, meals on wings. We call, God delivers.
The community of the gospel of John was no different, and that is one of the things that is off about this story—trying to wake us up, it models the very flatness of a story told so often that no one is listening any more.
The characters in this story are flat, uni-dimensional. Where is Peter, Salome, Aquila, Thomas, blind Bartimaeus, individuals with problems, potential, and stories of their own? Here, we have stock characters, arrayed in a Greek chorus: The Disciples. The Jews. The Crowd. Everyone plays their dreary part, asking far too much, listening far too little, so that the living Jesus must resort to graphic and theologically radical language in order to awaken them to the fact that they are not telling the same bedtime story for the seventy-fifth time, they are newly, and dangerously, in the presence of the living, unpredictable, wild God.
Jesus is not a vending machine. God is not a 911 call, hello, what is the nature of your emergency? And you? You are not Simon Peter, King David, Sarah or Abraham or everyChristian. You are a unique soul, formed in the image of God, bearing the living and particular Christ presence in your own body, tailored to your own particular and beloved shape. What God needs to do for you is not what God did for your neighbor, or your ancestor. So faithfulness is not about believing God will do the same thing for you in any given situation that God did for you, your father, or our ancestors in faith a thousand times before, but rather, opening our minds, our hearts, and our hopes to a living relationship that will walk alongside us as we work and pray our way through whatever circumstance confronts us.
In away, it is about insurance, about growing up, losing the coverage we had and becoming self-insured. . .
This is not easy. I know this, not just because of my own life, but because I am privileged to walk alongside some of yours, and I listen as you feel your way through a change in circumstance, an illness, a divorce, a strike, a career change. God doesn’t always respond as we hoped or expected. . .the way God shows up to answer our urgent prayers can even be missed, if we are relying too much on an old way, or an older story.
You all know the story about the man whose boat was sinking and who prayed to God to deliver him… .