Bread and wine
1 Kings 8: (1,6, 10-11), 22-30, 41-43 NRSV text
Psalm 84 NRSV text
Ephesians 6: 10-20 NRSV text
John 6: 56-69 NRSV text
The difference between existence and Life; the difference between life and eternal life; the difference between bread that enables survival and Living Bread that gives eternal life – this is the theme of Jesus’ discourse on the Bread from Heaven (John 6: 22ff) with which we have been engaged over the past weeks. This is John’s Jesus: he is the One who has ‘come down from heaven’ to bring eternal life.
What is eternal life? In 6:58, Jesus says,
‘This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died’.
It’s a repetition of 6:50. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality is that those to whom Jesus was speaking died just as the Israelites who ate manna died! ‘The one who eats this bread will live forever’, he goes on to say. Jesus sounds as though he’s claiming to be the mythical Elixir of Life – a guarantee of living on and on and never growing old – or at least, of never dying. This is apparently the difference between bread and Living Bread.
There’s another contrast which, on a literal reading of his words, sounds both fantastical and grotesque: the bread we eat each day to sustain life is bread; the Living Bread is his flesh which we eat and his blood which we drink. Small wonder, then, that many of his disciples ‘complain’ in 6:60, ‘This is a difficult teaching! Who on earth can accept it?’ If that isn’t the biblical equivalent of English understatement, I’m not sure what is!
Eternal Life in John’s gospel
Let’s look for a moment at how John presents Jesus as the bringer of eternal life. At the outset of his gospel, he identifies Jesus’ role (as the pre-incarnate Word) in creation: everything that has come into being has come into being through Jesus (1:3). All that is and all that lives, lives (ie has existence) through Jesus, who, as the Word, is God’s living, active intention for creation. He goes straight on to clarify what it is that has come into being in Jesus – life, which is the light of all people. This is a light that shines in the darkness of nothingness (ie the primeval chaos). Yet it is also the Light that shines in the darkness of human existence. To exist is not the same thing as having Life. The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us (1:14) as Light in our darkness.
This is John’s way of talking about creation as ‘fallen’. It has fallen from its original purposes under God. It has become a place of darkness, destruction and death, rather than a place of Light, Life and flourishing. Put differently: God intends the world to be a place of Life, and we have settled for mere existence. This extends also to death. Instead of death being the natural end to life and the passing into life with God, we die as we have lived: in darkness, cut off from God and from Life. We don’t have to imagine this in terms of heaven vs hell, and of going to a place of eternal torment instead of a place of everlasting bliss; John is using a different framework. The emphasis here is not on punishment, but on missing out on Life – both here and hereafter! In Jewish theology, the greatest sin is the sin of the unlived life – in John’s terms, of ‘mere existence’ instead of ‘abundant life’. It is wasted life. John here is thinking far more in terms of death as moving from existence (which is itself a parody of what God intends by Life) into non-existence, instead of passing from Life into its ultimate fullness in and with God. Hence he has Jesus summarise his mission in 10:10:
‘I am come that they might have Life, in all its abundance!’
What, then, is this ‘abundant life’? It is the very Life of God! Jesus is the agent of God’s intention for all of creation – that, here and now, we experience the very Life of God (eternal life) which begins now and goes on ‘forever’ because death is moving into the very presence of God to carry on the Life that has already begun (hence Jesus’ statement about ‘living forever’). Eternal life is about living as God’s children, instead of as self-declared enemies of God. It is Life lived in the Light instead of in darkness.
And how does Jesus accomplish this? John’s Jesus is the One who is ‘from above’. In other words, Jesus is the means through which God’s Life ‘takes flesh’ in the world. Jesus is God incarnate – literally, the presence of heaven on earth!
Flesh and Spirit in John’s gospel
‘Existence’ for John is ‘flesh life’. It is life lived without the dynamic, animating presence of the Spirit of God. If we want to talk in Johannine terms about what has been ‘lost’, or about ‘the Fall’, we have to say that God intends human, earthly life as a union of flesh and Spirit – we are creatures, but creatures who bear within ourselves the very Life of the creator, God. The Spirit is what makes life ‘abundant’. Through the Spirit, God dwells within us – hence John’s language about Jesus ‘being in the Father and the Father being in Jesus’. What sounds to us frequently like archaic philosophical language is actually trying to express something profoundly simple: God (through the Spirit) lives within us and is united to us. There is no separation. Just as food is ingested and ‘lives within us’ (until it passes through the digestive system!) and ‘gives life to our mortal bodies’, so God dwells within us as ‘spiritual food’ which never passes through and out of us! That Life is therefore ‘eternal’ and ‘we and the Father are one’.
John uses the most basic categories of having human life to describe this unity of ‘flesh and Spirit’. In chapter 3, Jesus talks about birth: we need to be ‘born again of water and the Spirit’, he tells Nicodemus. Nicodemus’ response is incredulity: ‘How can anyone be born again when they are old?’ Jesus’ reply is, ‘You’re missing the point: you are alive, but missing out on the Spirit! You have been created to bear the very Life of God within you, but you’ve only got “flesh life” until the Spirit fills you. Discovering the reality of the indwelling Spirit is like being born again – to the New Life that God has always intended you to have!’
In chapter 4, Jesus encounters a woman at a well and talks about ‘living water’. His point is the same: no one can live without water. We need to return to the well daily because the water we drink passes through us and we dehydrate. What we lack is not the water that enables us to exist for another 24 hours, but the Spirit, who is ‘a wellspring of God’s Life that needs no replenishment’. It’s not an either-or, but a both-and; Jesus’ concern is tat they miss out on the Spirit half! This is the difference between existence and ‘abundant life’.
Flesh, blood and Living Bread: the New Covenant in John’s gospel
You can see now how Jesus extends the same theme in chapter 6: the first of the two basic requirements for life is water; the second is food – ‘bread for today’. Jesus is the Life of God in person. He is Living Bread. The image of bread, however, gives rise to an elaborate pun: Jesus will go on to die. Remember that this passage is John’s equivalent of the Passover and New Covenant in the Synoptic gospels.
‘Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.’ (John 6:54-55)
This is John’s version of ‘This is my body, broken for you … this is my blood, shed for you’. Here in John’s gospel it is shaped explicitly by the Christian practice of Eucharist. The opening verse of today’s Lectionary reading makes explicit how Jesus’ body and blood are true food and true drink: ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them’. Here we have the link with the earlier passages of Nicodemus and the woman at the well, and with the later farewell discourse at the Last Supper: Jesus abides in them. If Jesus abides in them, they abide in Jesus – and in the One in whom Jesus abides… God.
Jesus has already told Nicodemus that flesh without Spirit cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. ‘Flesh’, when it refers to our humanity, is ‘existence’. It designates the absence of Spirit. We eat ‘flesh’ (meat) because we need to consume in order to continue living and breathing. As Jesus goes on to say, ‘It is the Spirit that gives life; flesh is useless’ (6:63). Jesus, however, is truly human – human as God intended ‘human’ to be: he is ‘flesh-and-Spirit’, or Life. Therefore, ‘eating his flesh’ has the same effect as drinking Living Water: we ‘ingest’ divine Life Spirit – and are ‘born from above’.
Here, then, is John’s theology of sacrament: baptism is immersion in Living Water; Eucharist is eating True Bread and drinking True Drink – the things which mediate the Life of God. For John, the sacraments are not magical, but incarnational: just as in Jesus, Truth and Life take flesh, so in water, bread and wine, God comes to us. Earthly things – ‘flesh things’ – are filled with Spirit and we flesh-things eat, drink, are filled with the Spirit and live.
‘The words of eternal life’
It is not only bread and water that are sacramental; Jesus’ words are too. They are sacramental in the sense that they are ‘Spirit and life’ (v63). My point is that the words of the Word made flesh give Life because they are imbued with Spirit. They are the Living Words of the Living God, incarnate in the Word made flesh. And of course, they are Truth.
John’s Jesus, though, is, for all these reasons, the Great Divider or the Challenge. If he is the Word made flesh he is the Truth of God with which we are confronted. He exposes the darkness of our mere existence which passes as a poor and hopeless shadow of what God intends for creation. We cannot therefore avoid making a decision about Jesus. We either belong among ‘those who did not receive him’ or ‘those who receive him and become children of God’ (cf 1: 11-12, whose echo we hear this week in vv 66-67).
Proximity alone does not prove that we are among those who ‘receive’ him; Judas Iscariot cautions every Church member who supposes that ‘religion’ and ‘Churchianity’ is the same thing as the faith that Jesus asks of us. This is not an invitation to agonised, fearful soul-searching lest we only think we’re ‘saved’ when we’re not, however! Those who cannot cope with Jesus go away. Judas is, of course, the traitor within the camp – the one who quite evilly, deliberately and knowingly agrees to sell Jesus and the other disciples out to the authorities. There is a lot of sympathetic ink spilled about Judas and why he did what he did: the gospels are all clear that he chose quite deliberately to sell Jesus and his fellow-disciples out so that they could be arrested and crucified as insurrectionists, while purchasing his own immunity from prosecution by his betrayal.
Judas, then, represents a very particular example of three possible responses to Jesus. The disciples who turn away are one response; Judas who betrays Jesus and the disciples is one of a kind; and Peter is the third – the one that hears the words of Jesus and recognises in them the invitation to and gift of eternal life!
‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’ (vv 68-9).
This is John’s version of Caesarea Philippi and Peter’s confession. ‘We will not go away. There is nowhere else that we will hear words that give Life. They come from you alone, because you alone are God’s Living Promise and invitation!’ Word, flesh, Spirit, Truth and bread: all of these find their meaning in Jesus, the Word made flesh, who brings life in all its abundance.
‘The gospel armour’: Ephesians 6: 10-20
Our struggle is not against enemies made of flesh and blood, says Paul, but against the enemies of flesh and blood (ie of humanity). These ‘rulers, authorities, cosmic powers of this present darkness, and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’ are ranged primarily against God. These are the forces that we have let loose in the world by creating a world without God. They imprison us, and having been freed from their grip in Christ, we find them ranged actively against us.
This is a passage that conjures up two dangerously unhelpful pictures. The first is The Exorcist-type scenarios, with demonic forces invading bodies, making heads spin and faces morph into satanic masks. The second is of an army of Christian soldiers engaged in ‘conquests for Christ.
What are these forces – or more precisely, in what sense are they our enemies? Paul is not suddenly taking us on a trip into a hitherto invisible, murky world out of a horror movie. His language is descriptive and matter-of-fact, rather than rhetorical. These are the forces ranged against precisely the things that Paul has been speaking about in the epistle: against reconciliation, unity, harmony; against love and hope and the ‘signs of the Kingdom’ that the Church is supposed to be and work for. These are the forces of greed and hatred, division and destruction. They are the things that hold sway over our hearts and priorities – materialism, success, arrogance, power over others, the accumulation of wealth at the expense of others, militarism, atheism, nationalism. Their power resides in the hold they have through our political and economic systems and through the erosion and destruction of our self-esteem and psyches. These are the things that blind us to God’s love and acceptance; that drive us to operate from fear and distrust. They are the alternatives to a creative order rooted in God’s intentions for Life. They are the world of ‘the flesh’ – existence devoid of Spirit and God’s Life.
We need to be defended against them. They are enormously powerful. Paul is not a recruiting sergeant for the Crusades. He is not calling us to enlist in ‘treading down the heathen’ and stomping on the heads of our enemies. This is defensive armour.
With what are we armoured? According to Paul, with the gospel itself! Rootedness in the Good News of truth, salvation and peace – rooted in Christ, in other words – is what effectively protects us from losing our bearings. It is what protects against diluting the gospel, or against the constant temptation for the Church to become and end in itself, concerned with self-justification and the desire to clone itself in yet more lives.
We’re close to the Synoptic stories of the clash of the kingdoms here, and to John’s equivalent of the Jesus who forces stark choices: the message of the Kingdom and its taking shape in the world is always a challenge to and confrontation with all that opposes it – and God. There is no neutral territory here because the clash is not over bits that need reform or repair, but between antithetical systems. In Jesus’ practice and preaching, this fundamental clash is signalled by his insistence that the gospel is always Good News to the least first; in other words, it is about wholesale transformation from the very roots upwards. That necessarily means that any system weighted in favour of the greatest must be toppled – and with it, those whose interests it serves. ‘Flesh-life’ may indeed be a sort of ‘nothingness’ in comparison to ‘abundant life’, but its roots go to the very heart of things and will not take being killed off lying down.
The temple – heaven united to earth (1 Kings 8:1-43)
In today’s reading from 1 Kings, we have a striking affirmation of the deep connection between heaven and earth, and of Yahweh’s intention to dwell with human beings. The Temple – for all its ambiguity – stands as a ‘concrete’ statement that Yahweh is a God who intends to be present, rather than absent; a God who refuses to be shut out of human living. It is, from the first, an exercise in divine accommodation (no pun intended!); Yahweh is most naturally a ‘tent-dweller’ – a fellow nomad and camper with Israel. The Temple too easily gives all the wrong messages about God; it is too easy to confuse Yahweh the Temple-dweller with the other gods of the Ancient Near East.
Indeed, Solomon’s prayer seems to regard Yahweh’s presence as a guarantee against military defeat, famine, plague, blight, mildew, locust, plague and sickness in precisely the manner that all the other nations ‘used’ their gods! Yet despite all this, Yahweh is prepared to ‘play ball’ with the Temple project (despite not being that sort of God) for the sake of the people. It is as though Yahweh accepts that this is how people will be able to understand that Yahweh is with them – just as Jesus will later make God and God’s intentions visible in ways that people comprehend through the Incarnation.
Most importantly, though, Solomon (correctly) assumes the deep connection between Yahweh and the world – between heaven and earth – that the Temple manifests. The Temple is the ‘place of pleading’; Yahweh will hear the prayers of the people from heaven and earth will change as a result. The Temple is intended visibly to be ‘a little bit of heaven on earth’.
Flesh, spirit and armour: Psalm 84
Look at how this week’s psalm echoes the themes of the gospel and epistle. The psalmist is in the Temple, rejoicing in the nearness of Yahweh. To be there is to experience the Life of God, so that the psalmist talks about ‘heart and flesh singing for joy to the Living God’ in v2. This is what makes the Temple such a special place; it is the one place on earth where it is possible to be truly alive as God intended!
Yahweh, too, is addressed as ‘sun and shield’. To be in Yahweh’s presence is to be surrounded by Yahweh’s protection. This is not a celebration of military victory, but of Yahweh’s protection: it forms a safe haven of peace and unity and union with Yahweh.
The psalmist clearly experiences, in a rare moment, what Jesus tells us is God’s intention for all of everyday, ‘normal’ life: that human beings are intended to live abundantly, and can do so because Jesus offered himself as True Food and True Drink. We ‘eat his flesh’, ‘drink his blood’ – and find eternal life!
Amen.
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Please listen to this original song about miracles on You Tube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXERZ_gaiN0
Thanks, Jim Burns