sermon for pentecost 12B

Revd Dr Lance Stone, Minister, Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge

A dose of heavenly-mindedness

John 6: 56-69

Our readings from John over the past few weeks have focused on this extraordinary chapter 6, where Jesus speaks of himself as the bread of life. It is difficult material. At times John’s prose is convoluted and complex and it is with some relief that we are drawn this week by our reading towards the end of the chapter.

It’s worth remembering though what started this long discourse by Jesus. It was of course the  feeding of the 5000 that took place at the beginning of the chapter, one of the few incidents in the life and ministry of Jesus that are recorded by all four Gospel writers. You will recall how Jesus had been confronted by this large crowd which was following him and Jesus asks his disciples how on earth they are going to feed all these people. And the disciples are perplexed. ‘Six months wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little’, says Philip. But then step forward the boy with his five loaves and two fishes and suddenly there is enough – more than enough for everybody. In fact there is so much that twelve baskets of leftovers are gathered up. And we are told the after this dazzling display of power and providence that the people wanted to come and take Jesus by force to make him king. No wonder! Jesus is the hero of the moment, the man in demand.

How strange therefore that as the chapter proceeds people become more and more disillusioned with Jesus. We find them arguing and disputing with him, and by the time we reach these verses at end of the chapter even Jesus’ disciples are turning away and leaving him. Even his closest followers want nothing more to do with him. What has happened? What on earth has gone wrong? Well, the reason comes down to the extraordinary – and frankly weird – interpretation that Jesus puts upon the miracle. Just listen to what Jesus says earlier in the chapter about this incident: ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life which the Son of Man will give you’. In other words, don’t be preoccupied with physical bread that nourishes the body. You need to be concerned about spiritual food which gives us eternal life. Don’t be so preoccupied with the life of the flesh – get your life in the Spirit into gear! And maybe that in itself would not have caused too much offence, but Jesus then goes on to speak about himself as the Bread of Life, the very staple diet of true living and this is where people begin to get understandably edgy. How dare he say this? How dare he speak of himself as the very bread that God sends down from heaven to give life to the world?

Let’s put this very simply. Let’s decode what Jesus is saying. Jesus here is talking about the spiritual life. He is talking life with God that begins now and endures throughout eternity. And he is saying that he is the key to it all. He is saying that in knowing him we are put into a relationship with God, the same one he has with God. And he then uses this bizarre image of eating his flesh and drinking his blood to depict this close, binding, intimate relationship with him. He is offering to come and to give himself to us and to become as one with us as the very food that we eat becomes one with our flesh and blood. And that way we are united to God and taste of eternal life. And at this point people become restless, and embarrassed and angry. How dare he speak like this?

And maybe we can feel ourselves getting a bit uncomfortable about what Jesus is saying too. Think of it this way. Taken at face value, the feeding of the 5000 is very much a story for our times. It is one that is profoundly relevant for our 21^st century world. Just think for a moment about the basic ingredients of this incident. At its heart it is a story about sharing in a world of scarcity. There is a crowd of hungry people and there doesn’t seem to be enough to feed them with. But step forward one person who is prepared to share and suddenly there is more than enough. And what a story that is for our world. What a story for our world where we have recently been commemorating the first landing on the moon and yet we have still not found a way to feed everybody on the planet. If only people would learn to share then we would find that actually there is more than enough to go round. The scandal of poverty and want in the world is not actually because of scarcity. It’s not due to shortages. It’s a question of justice. It’s about the stock-piling of goods and resources by the rich and the powerful and the withholding of them from the poor and the weak. And the sooner we learn to share, the sooner we learn the ways of justice, the better.

That is a powerful message for today. Indeed the great thing is that when we interpret the story this way, it’s not even a particularly ‘religious’ story. We moderns who apparently find faith so difficult (or so we are told), we 21^st century sceptics who apparently cannot get our heads round the strange stories in the Bible, we can at least salvage this one. Forget the religious, spiritual bit, the message is simple and secular: learn to share and there will be more than enough to go round. Learn to share and we will solve the problems of world poverty and starvation. Whoopee.

What irritates us however is that John will not let us get away with this interpretation. He has to make it about something else. He has to take our focus away from feeding bellies and on to feeding on God. And that’s the problem with John. He insists on spiritualising everything. He is so heavenly minded. He takes a good perfectly story about human hunger and the need for bread and turns it into something ‘religious’, something to do with our relationship with God.

It’s not the first time he’s done this. Do you remember that story about Jesus with the woman at the well in John chapter 4? He comes to a well and he’s thirsty and the woman gives him water to drink and again that is a story that can speak powerfully to a world where people often have to walk miles to collect fresh drinking water. It’s about basic human needs that are as real today as ever they were. But then John has Jesus saying something about how everyone who drinks of the water the woman gives him will thirst again, but that whoever drinks of the water that he gives will never thirst again. And, oh dear, it’s like the bread all over again. A good story about human need is spiritualised into something to do with our relationship with God. And then of course what happens is that our gaze is taken off earth and transferred to heaven. And at this point can’t you just hear the indignation of our atheist friends? Can’t you just hear the sound of Karl Marx rotating in his grave? That’s the trouble with religion. It takes our minds off material needs and distracts them with talk of God, and then people become so heavenly minded that they are no earthly use. And John is the chief culprit!

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Because I want to argue that in fact what we need today is a good dose of heavenly-mindedness. I want to argue that we need to read this story of the feeding of the 5000 not as a morality tale about sharing, but as a story that diverts our attention away from the bread that fills bellies and onto the bread of life that is the fullness of God.

Let’s think of it this way. If the big problem that afflicts vast swathes of humanity is that of poverty and unjust access to the riches of God’s earth, the problem that affects the rest of this weary world is a crass consumerism that cannot see beyond the next purchase. The big problem for far too many people is not that they are too heavenly minded but that they are far too earthly minded. We buy into the lie that life consists of food and drink and clothes and goods and ever more ferocious consumption, and it is this mentality that is fuelling injustice, and exacerbating global warming, the effects of which fall heavily upon the already poor and disadvantaged. In other words the problems of poverty and hunger and injustice that afflict the ‘have nots’ of the earth are largely the flip side of the materialism and the obsessive consumption that afflict ‘the haves’.  It is because we  who have are so earthbound and so materially-minded that we create the problems of the have-nots. And it is we who are the ‘haves’ therefore that need a bit of heavenly-mindedness. It is we ‘haves’ who urgently need to hear Jesus warnings about not working for perishable food but for the food that lasts, the food of eternal life. It is we who are the fleshly ‘haves’ that need to hear Jesus say, ‘It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh can achieve nothing

There is, then, a kind of  paradox here. Jesus uses this miracle to tell us there is more to fullness of life than bread. There is also the Bread of Life, the fullness of God which is offered to us. And the sooner we in the bloated, voracious rich countries of the world realise this, the sooner those in the depleted, deprived parts of the world may begin to get their fair share.

Amen.

Tagged as: bread from heaven, consumerism, emmanuel united reformed church, haves and have-nots, john 6: 56-69, Lawrence Moore, lectionary blog, ordinary 21b, proper 16b, Revd Dr Lance Stone, spiritual hunger, the united reformed church, The Windermere Centre, world hunger