pentecost 11 Year B

1Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 3-14 NRSV text
Psalm 111 NRSV text
Ephesians 5: 15-20 NRSV text
John 6: 51-58 NRSV text

 

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). This is the culmination of the “Bread of Life” section. It has been a complex section – complex, rather than complicated. John has explored different aspects and implications of the image through a series of misunderstandings. It began in 6:26, with Jesus telling the crowd that they were looking for him only in order to have full bellies, whereas he was offering eternal life. John then uses the question about manna in the wilderness (6:31ff) to emphasise the theme of “bread from heaven”, picking up one of his key themes about Jesus being “from above”.

At this point (6:41), Jesus’ opponents (“the Jews”) appear in the narrative. There’s a certain artificiality about their appearance. Until now, the story has “worked”: there’s a crowd who has been fed miraculously in the wilderness, who has also realised that Jesus performed some sort of “teleporting” miracle from one side of the Lake to the other, and this leads fairly naturally into a discussion about physical vs soul hunger, and comparisons between what has happened to them and what happened to the proto-Israelites in the wilderness. Suddenly, though, “the Jews” appear in the narrative – as though Jesus were in Jerusalem or a synagogue. Their appearance signals something important: there’s a serious theological dispute in progress here!

“The crowd” are the hangers-on and would-be followers of Jesus. Jesus doesn’t “dispute” with them – he teaches. He speaks to them as possible followers. The issue is that they need to see in him much more than the miracle worker who will keep their bellies full: they need to see him as the Living Bread who satisfies the soul-hunger that mirrors starvation of the body. “The Jews”, however, are Jesus’ opponents (see the section on The role of “the Jews” in John’s gospel in last week’s post). They have already decided that the are not going to be followers of Jesus. They are his “persecutors” (5:16) who are seeking actively to kill him (5:18). Their opposition is rooted in their refusal to recognise Jesus’ authority and the truth (grace and truth) he proclaims, and justified by appeal to the established religious norms and traditions. Hence their appearance in the narrative signals that John’s Jesus is about to engage in a theological dispute, centred on the person of Jesus himself.

It is centred on the person of Jesus because this is precisely what Jesus offers: himself! He is the Bread of Life. His flesh is given for the life of the world. He is the true bread that comes down from heaven. And so the dispute is divided into two parts. In last week’s section (6:41ff), the first dispute is over the “came down from heaven” bit. Jesus’ authority is vested in his origin: he knows what he is talking about! So now, in v51, he repeats the claim in order to deal with second part: “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”. This leads to the second “complaint” of “the Jews”: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (v52).

 

Bread, flesh and the Eucharist
John’s is not only the most overtly “theological” gospel, it is also the most overtly “churchy”, in the sense that it is a sustained presentation of the Christian Church’s gospel – it’s message of salvation in Jesus Christ. To that extent, it is unapologetically a “post-Easter” gospel: John’s primary intention in presenting a “life of Jesus” is to draw out the meaning of it all – the “grace and truth” to be found in Jesus. It is furthest away from what we would understand as “biography”, and most expressly reflects the context of a post-Easter, established Christian community. We find, then, precisely what we might expect: things which are implicit in the synoptic gospels (eg Christology) are made most explicit in the Fourth Gospel.

We have seen how the Eucharistic shaping of the feeding story (which is present in the synoptic tradition) is deliberately heightened in John’s account. And here, in the dispute about “how can he give us his flesh to eat?” the answer is quite explicitly Eucharistic: we “eat his flesh and drink his blood” (vv54-5) through the Eucharist! This is where it all comes together: Jesus is the Living Bread which has come down from heaven to give Life to the world. How is Jesus “Living Bread”? By giving his life on the cross. But why “Bread”? This is a strange image! Bread is something which is eaten. And that’s the point, isn’t it? We “eat his flesh and drink his blood” (remember: Jesus talks about satisfying hunger and thirst – being food and drink in 6:35) in the Eucharist. This is what gives eternal life! Far from being a passage that makes it apparently easy to distinguish between the so-called “physical” (body hunger) and the so-called “spiritual” (soul hunger), John’s gospel is almost disgustingly “bodily”! It’s not only “the Jews” who recoil from Jesus’ words in vv53-57: just ask any vegetarian how it sounds to them!

In fact, just ask any good low-church memorialist what they think! The high sacramental theology here is a real problem for them. I know – because I was one! It was this passage, in fact, that made me realise a non-sacramental understanding of Communion just wouldn’t do. You’ve got to do an awful lot of insupportable spiritualising gymnastics to avoid the clear sense of what Jesus says here in John’s gospel: there is a direct connection between eating Eucharistic bread and receiving not only bodily nourishment but eternal life; between eating the bread and literally (sorry, sacramentally!) being fed on the body of Jesus, which is life for the world. Put it this way (or at least, I did): whatever the disputes we may have about how the sacrament “works”, the sacrament is more than mere symbolism (“eat this bread and remember what it symbolises: Christ’s sacrifice”). Furthermore, however we may want to argue about “what happens” at the moment of consecration, whatever does happen is what makes it “eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood” as Jesus says we do, here in this passage! What John is playing on here with mischievous delight is the fact that non-Christians – particularly Jews – mistakenly thought of the early Christians as cannibals, who feasted on their saviour’s body and drank his blood. That was the rumour in the local inter-faith meetings – and John lays the blame for its origin squarely on the lips of Jesus himself!

 

Sacrament, Incarnation and salvation
It’s a novel position for me to find myself in at this point, banging the drum for a highly sacramental view of Communion. But then, John’s theology (and that of his Christian community) is highly sacramental! The Eucharist is the means by which we (literally) ingest salvation. God – or at least salvation – is present in the bread and wine. Eating and drinking is the means whereby we “abide in Jesus” (v56), “live because of him” (v57) and “live forever” (v58).

That is not the same thing as saying that much high-church Eucharistic theology is right, though – or at least, that it is “biblical” in the sense that John’s community is sacramental! To say that John’s community has a “high” sacramental theology is not the same thing as saying they are “spikey” as we understand high church theology and practice! The Christian Church has struggled over sacraments. Christians have killed each other over how Jesus is present in the Eucharist. The Feast of Life for the world has been the cause of bitter, deadly wrangling. Christian division over Eucharistic theology means that Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians will not share Communion with Christians of other denominations. It means that huge amounts of energy are spent over trying to “solve the differences” between understandings of the feast that expresses our fundamental shared union and identity in Christ. “High-Church” people refuse to recognise the validity of other practices. “Low-Church” Christians accuse their “higher” brothers and sisters of “selling out to superstition”. The Eucharist becomes the outward, visible sign of an inward, invisible refusal to recognise shared Christian faith! We would do well to look more closely at John’s view of the relationship between sacrament, Incarnation and salvation.

Unlike extremely “low” understandings of the Eucharist, John’s community has a real theology of sacraments. They convey grace – the “grace upon grace” that we receive in Jesus, who is the Word made flesh (cf 1:14; 16). John doesn’t buy into a distinction between receiving salvation through faith alone (“belief”) rather than through the sacraments. Look at Jesus’ words in 6:47: “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life”. So salvation comes through faith – but then Jesus goes on immediately to talk about “eating bread” – his flesh! And that is the means of eternal life! On the one hand, then, it appears that salvation is through the person of Jesus (low church), while on the other, it is through the sacraments – ie the Church. This latter position is the reason for the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus - “there is no salvation outside the Church!”

John doesn’t buy this “either/or” because of Incarnation! Jesus is the Word made flesh – the sacrament! Jesus is heaven come down to earth – the presence of God in earthly, created things. He is “the Bread come down from heaven”. Therefore salvation is nothing other than Jesus. It is Jesus who is the Bread that gives life to the world. But just as Jesus was God’s sacramental, saving presence among us as a human being, so Jesus continues to be God’s sacramental, saving presence among us in bread and wine. To eat and drink, believing, is part of whatever we mean by “saving faith” – or whatever Jesus means when he says “whoever believes has eternal life”. “Believing” is a whole-life-involving matter. It is following. It is believing. It is eating and drinking. The point is that all of these involve and are part of being drawn into the life of Jesus and therefore into the very Life of God. Our encounter with Jesus in the sacraments is no less a saving encounter than is conversion – or daily discipleship of Jesus! To try and make those sorts of distinctions is to do violence (in John’s terms) to the fact that Jesus is God in human flesh, come among us to save us – to transform every aspect of our lives, daily!

This means that there is no place for a theology of the Eucharist that treats it as “the Church’s possession”. When we say, liturgically, “This is the table of the Lord”, we are criticising any church-attempt to “take over” the Eucharist and control it. When we make it some sort of Gnostic mystery, with access controlled by the Church and surrounded with arcane requirements about the ordained status or gender of the president, we have lost the plot – the “salvation plot”. This is the feast of Life for the world – not a celebration of the “in-status” of the Christian community! The Eucharist is no more “ours” than is the cross! And that is no more pronounced than in John’s gospel, where Jesus says, “And I, if I am lifted up [on the cross], will draw all people to myself!” John presents the “lifting up” of the cross as the great, free invitation to all! How dare we do less with the Eucharist! The Eucharist is the anamnesis – the remembrance – of the cross. It symbolises the cross, and ought to do so by virtue of its radically open invitation: “whosoever will may come”.

 

True bread and false bread (1Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 3-14/Ephesians 5: 15-20)
John presents Jesus as the True Bread. The manna in the wilderness was not the true bread – it merely foreshadowed it. It did not give Life in the sense that Jesus does.

I want to look at our other two readings in terms of this gospel theme of discernment – distinguishing between what is true and what appears to be true. Solomon asks Yahweh for the gift of wisdom in order to be able to discern between good and evil (3:9). Now we often naively suppose that the difference between the two is as clear as black vs white, light vs dark, death vs life. For all the fact that John talks in these terms of absolute opposites, today’s gospel passage should caution us against supposing that he is as dualistic as he is often accused of being! “The Jews” claimed that the manna in the wilderness was “the bread that came down from heaven” – the True Bread. The weren’t saying, “The Golden Calf is the true God”! They had taken something good and used it as a means of resisting the truth about God in Jesus. Solomon knew what John portrays: it is sometimes intensely difficult to distinguish between good and evil, truth and falsehood. And the stakes can be enormously high!

Similarly, the Ephesians are enjoined to be wise (Ephesians 4:15), exercising discernment. There was apparently little difference between a good old drunken sing-along and Christian services of worship in Ephesus (Hmm! It would be pretty darn difficult to mistake some of our exquisitely ordered services, solely with hymns written by people who have been dead for at least a hundred years, for anything like a riotous party! Wonder what that says?). Yet Paul says there is a difference, and it isn’t about appearance.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the implications for the types of spiritual freedom that were clearly commonplace in the early Church and which we might do well to discover! The point I want to make is that “living as wise people” is about the spiritual discipline and task of discernment – of distinguishing between true and false claims to truth. The fact is that a lot of stuff – from froth and bubble to dangerously evil things like Apartheid, Nazism and contemporary Israeli nationalism have been “justified” by appeal to Jesus, the Church, the bible, tradition and God! Things which are good in themselves (like manna in the wilderness) can be misused to resist the truth of God in Jesus – the grace which saves. It’s about discerning what is true bread, and what is false. And failure to discern which is which means that people miss out on the True Bread and the Life which is offered in Jesus – the True Bread whose flesh is given for the Life of the world.

 

Amen.