A Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock
Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58
For the last four weeks, our gospel lesson has focused on the image of Jesus and bread. As we have moved along this gospel trail, many of us feel the weighty challenge of the bread that Jesus claims to be. Truth to tell, these readings can leave us bewildered and a bit disoriented. So, as one would do on a hiking trail, let’s review the gospel markers that have brought us to this point.
It all started a month ago, when we began this bread-trail experience with the story of the “Feeding of the 5000”.1 Jesus took the offering of five, rough barley loaves and two fish and inexplicably met the hunger of the multitude – not to mention creating an abundance of leftovers. The following Sunday, the gospel continued this Jesus-bread-hunger theme with his startling proclamation that he and his life are the bread that does more than fill empty bellies. More poignantly, he is the God-bread that confronts and satisfies the gnawing hunger of the soul.
In the third Sunday gospel, we encountered the people who have been fed with the miraculous bread of abundance but who still hung around Jesus to demand more proof, more “signs” before they cast their lots with him. At which point in last week’s rendition, Jesus deep-dives into the sign and symbol of his “bread”, saying clearly: “I am the bread of life”. This is not like when the Hebrew ancestors needed food in the wilderness and God provided the surprising manna for their temporary deliverance. No, “whoever eats of this bread [the bread ‘I am’] will live forever;” and to drive his point home, Jesus says, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”2
And then in today’s lesson (as you heard), Jesus does not let up on this shocking trajectory but rather doubles down: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them … so whoever eats me will live because of me.”3
Aside from the fact that all this “eating” and “drinking” can sound like bad-mouthed teens trash-talking on the street corner, it is also mid-August. It has been hot. Many of us have vacated our normal routines for other restorative places and experiences, and hearing these “bread” passages in John starts to push us beyond our attention span. In this context, what Jesus says is too hard, too obtuse, too demanding, to the extent that after a month, we are prone to give up and settle for interpreting what Jesus says literally; or (for most of us in our Anglican/Episcopal sophistication) spiritualize the Lord’s statements to the point of symbolic toothlessness.
Whether or not we can ask questions (or are even interested in asking questions) about the meaning of Jesus’ bread proclamations, as I say, I think most of us throw up our hands. However, I want to propose something else as an avenue to understanding. I propose Christmas. I will explain.
This past spring, I happened across the name of Padraig O’ Tuama. O’ Tuama is a relatively young Irish poet and theologian. (If you are interested, you can google “Wikipedia” and find out more about him and his work, which is what I had to do.) Nonetheless, what caught my initial attention in the reference to O’ Tuama was his simple, literary and theological statement: “I don’t believe in God as a character. I believe in God as a story.”
Quite honestly, I copied that statement down months ago in hopes of meeting once again over a beer with Tracy Kidder (the Pulitzer Prize winning author and more significantly the husband of our Fran Kidder). As a writer of clear and compelling characters and one who knows a good story when he sees one, I hope to chat with him -- or any of you -- about God as story and not simply as A character. This is to raise the question with all of you: What’s the God-story? More specifically, what place in this God-story do Jesus’ bread proclamations play? What is their role, their place? As I say, my own answer to these questions is “Christmas”. What do I mean by this?
If we pay attention to John and what he conveys in the Fourth Gospel, we can begin to understand my “Christmas” reference and start at the beginning. Specifically, the words of John’s Prologue stand as some of the most significant expressions in both human literature and in biblical faith; and we would do well not to limit encountering them merely in the weeks before Christmas. Nonetheless, that association of John’s Prologue and the birth of God’s Christ are the key (I think) to the God-story and (in my perspective) to what Jesus and the “bread” are about. Listen to a central part of the story.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of [all]. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it …
… The true light that enlightens every [one] was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came into his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who receive him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born not of blood nor of [human] will but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father.4
That is Christmas. The defining label for this crucial event is “Incarnation”. Around here, we speak of God’s Incarnation, of God’s creative, life-giving Word, in softer terms, speaking of “Emmanuel: God with us”. And in a very real sense, “God with us” is the essence of the story that is God.
Last week in my sermon, I used the image of a telescope, with its purpose to see things that are farther away more clearly and more intimately. That’s Christmas! God with us. God’s own “Word”, the one that in its speaking created all life itself. It is Jesus, the incarnate, enfleshed, the human “image of the Invisible” who brings the God-life to us on our own terms. The consequences of this manifestation of the God-life on our human terms is what is at the heart of Jesus’ discourse about him being the “bread of life”. It is what Christmas is all about. The issue at hand, the issue of Christmas, the profundity of Incarnation is that the entire purpose of Emmanuel is for us to have what Jesus presented. Hence, the description of eating and drinking his life and the God-willed prospect of our being changed to be like him.
In this, I was reminded of two examples of this type of ingesting. One comes from what scholars have noted throughout human history: namely, that there are parallels in ancient literature that suggest the image of eating the teacher’s person or body as a symbol for the absorption of the teacher’s message. Our first lesson today from Proverbs echoes this notion, personifying God’s Wisdom not only as female but (more to the point) as both the hostess and the food of the “way of insight”.5
This brings me back to my college days, sitting in the main University library. As a student, I was beginning to realize deeply in my gut that there was more to learn than I would ever be able to absorb, how much less that I might understand. In this profound recognition, I vividly recall sitting at one of those rectangular, wooden, study tables and gazing across at the card catalog. (You can tell by my reference to a “card catalog” that this event occurred in the ancient days.). That notwithstanding, gazing at that wooden cabinet with all its drawers full of cards that in a sense represented the information, the knowledge, and much of the wisdom that the University had to offer, I was quickly overcome by the sensation of wishing that I could swallow the entire thing in one gulp. At that moment, I wanted to have, I wanted to be what that card catalog contained and what it signified. That I had the very same experience as a Divinity School student once again spoke to my awareness of my need to be fed by what I may call “Wisdom” – that which provides the experience, the knowledge, and the maturity to live what needs to be learned.
Jesus is the Wisdom of God. Jesus is the incarnate experience of living on God’s terms. Jesus is the knowledge of God, the intimate, creative, and life-giving awareness of unconditional love. Jesus is what we are called to be -- but not in one gulp.
As with Christmas, the Wisdom and Life of Christ comes initially in terms of a very small, vulnerable package – an infant with whom we can grow and learn. But God is still present. The tragic fact is that once the Lord grew into mature manhood, we killed him. As wobbly human beings, we evidently can’t take the full impact of encountering the divine life that Jesus embodied.
Therefore, there is nothing more important than what Christmas brings. Emmanuel: God with us – but not all at once but (for our sakes) gradually. In terms of what we have met in John’s sixth chapter, with all Jesus’ talk about his life being God’s bread, we are to “eat” this bread – consume into ourselves and have what Jesus is and what Jesus offers.
By the way, the Greek behind this “eating” does not allow for spiritualization or turning the entire scene into a poetic metaphor. In Greek, the word is esthio, and it describes the “chewing” or ‘gnawing” humans do to eat.6 The point, I believe, is that John has already presented Jesus as God’s “Word”, God’s Logos, and God’s Wisdom: that life experience and that knowledge that we need to live. So, to eat Jesus is to learn from him and obey him, and to be transformed by him -- not just to learn or even to be fed but to participate in the very presence of God in the world.7
Presence. To what extent do we value being present to folks in our life? How much more is being present to God? What does this presence take? What difference does it make? Those are the questions God answers in Christmas. “Emmanuel: God with us” is a sign of God’s abiding love. We are invited to take that life which Jesus is – to eat it; to chew on it; to be changed by it so that we can become what God intends for all of us to be: namely, what we see in Jesus.
So, even in mid-August, Jesus is our Christmas Bread. Thanks be to God. Amen.
1. John 6:1-21
2. John 6:35, 41-51
3. John 6:56-58
4. John 1:1-5, 9-14
5. Proverbs 9:1-6
6. Another term trogo that is often used to depict the “gnawing”, but the difference between the two words is one without a distinction.
7. Andrew McGowan. Andrew’s Version: Thoughts on the RCL readings, Proper 15, 13th after Pentecost
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