Homily: Yr B Proper 21, Aug 26 2012, St. Albans
Readings: 1 Kgs 8:22-30,41-43; Ps 84; Eph 6:10-20; Jn
6:56-69
For the past month we’ve
been working our way through the sixth chapter of the gospel of John on Sunday
mornings, beginning with the feeding of thousands, hearing Jesus surprising
claim “I am the bread of life”, and concluding with the final verses which you
just heard in today’s gospel. I’d like
to thank to Matt, Peter and Jonathan who have preached for us the past few
weeks and shared their insights on this remarkable text.
I say that this Chapter 6, this
“bread of life” discourse, is a remarkable text because there’s a dramatic
transition that takes place in this story.
Did you notice it? At the
beginning, there are crowds of thousands – by the end we’re left with the
Twelve. At the beginning, the people are
so enthralled with Jesus that they want take him and make him king. By the end, they complain, they are
scandalized, they turn away and leave him.
What happened? Did Jesus do
something wrong? Did he say the wrong
thing? What did he say that turned them off like that?
Everything seemed to start
so well. Crowds flocked to see Jesus,
thousands followed him, and when the crowd got hungry, Jesus accepted a small
child’s offering of a few loaves and fish and somehow he fed the crowd until
all were satisfied, not only meeting their physical needs, but as Matt pointed
out, he gave them hope, by overturning their basic understanding of the world
as a place of scarcity, and holding out the hope of abundance. This must be a prophet, the crowd exclaims, the
prophet that we’ve been waiting for. Let’s
make him king, and then we’ll always have bread to eat.
Now I get this. When you’re hungry, there’s nothing more
important than getting something to eat. Jesus gets this too. Time after time in the gospels we’re told
that Jesus has compassion for those with physical needs. But Jesus also wants
to move us beyond our physical needs.
This feeding, John tells us, was a sign.
But sign of what? A sign of
something more than just the satisfaction of physical hunger.
I remember when I was in
high school we read the book Animal Farm by George Orwell, his satirical take
on Communism. Is it still on the reading
list at high schools these days? I don’t
know. But I remember after we’d read
about the pigs Snowball and Napoleon and the horse Boxer and the rest of the
animals, just in case we hadn’t figured it out, the teacher got up at the front
of the classroom and said, “Look I just want you to know. Animal Farm isn’t about farming”.
Well when Jesus stands up at
the front of the synagogue the next day to address the crowds who are still
hungry and are still looking for more bread, Jesus says, “Look I just want to
know, it’s not about loaves of bread.”
And then, blow by blow, he
proceeds to push the crowd out of its comfort zone.
“Don’t work for food that
perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life which only I can give
you.”
Questions begin, grumbling
starts. Obviously we’re not getting any
free food today. So what’s he talking
about?
“You want the bread that
only God can give, the bread that gives life to the world? I am the bread of life. I am the bread which comes down from heaven.”
Muttering and
complaining. Who does he think he
is? What sort of a claim is he making?
“The bread that I will give
for the life of the world is my flesh.
Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life; those who
eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.”
By this time even Jesus
disciples, his closest friends, the ones who have been traveling with him for
months, even they’re getting spooked. “This
teaching is difficult,” they complain to each other, “who can accept it?” They’re offended, they’re scandalized.
And this is where I want us to
pause for a moment. Do you find this
teaching difficult? Do we understand why
the crowd was offended? Are you scandalized
by what Jesus has said?
Because if we don’t get why
everyone was scandalized by this, we might as well go back to eating bread. Cause this stuff is meant to scandalize us, it’s
meant to shake us out of our complacency.
(walk
up to Mary)
“Mary, I want you to eat my
flesh and drink my blood, so that you will live in me and I will live in you.”
How did that feel to all of
you? I tell you what, to me it felt
totally creepy, and if I was to do say that in all seriousness instead of as an
illustration, I expect that Mary and a whole bunch of you would probably leave
and never come back.
But that’s what Jesus does
say in all seriousness. This is a
difficult, scandalous, offensive teaching.
It’s scandalous, because as
Jonathan reminded us last week, the literal sense of eating flesh is simply
disgusting. Jesus clearly doesn’t mean
these words literally, but he is trying to shake us up.
It’s offensive to the crowds,
again because as Jonathan reminded us last week, the whole notion of drinking
blood goes against all the Jewish dietary laws.
It’s shocking because of the
claim Jesus is making. The crowd was
happy enough to recognize Jesus as a prophet, even “the prophet”. But Jesus is claiming more. He’s claiming to be greater than Moses, the
one who fed the people with manna in the wilderness. He’s claiming to be the Son of Man, the one prophesied
in the book of Daniel who would inaugurate God’s kingdom on earth. He is claiming to be the one who has come
down from heaven, the one through whom heaven and earth are linked. He is taking on the divine name of “I am”.
This claim in itself is
enough to get Jesus killed, in fact the charge brought against him at his
crucifixion was blasphemy, the claim that he was indeed the son of God.
So by this point I think we
can get why many in the crowd were shocked by what Jesus had to say, why even
his own disciples found this to be a difficult teaching.
But what about us? How do we react to all this? Is there anything
difficult here for us? So far, maybe
not. We can get past the literal unpleasantness of crunching Jesus’ flesh, we’re
not troubled by Jewish dietary laws and chances are if you’re here on a Sunday
morning you’ve already come to terms with claims about the divinity of Jesus.
But let me keep pushing!
Jesus says, “those who eat
my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.”
Is it my imagination, or do
I hear in these words a remarkable suggestion, even a demand of intimacy? Eating, taking something into my own self,
having it become who I am, taking the flesh of Jesus into me so that he can
live in me and I can live in him? This
is a radical invitation to intimacy, so radical that I’m not sure I’m
comfortable with it. I mean, I’ve gotten
used to the notion of Jesus as a prophet, calling for justice. I’m comfortable with the idea of Jesus as a
teacher, providing guidance for my life.
I’ve come to see Jesus as the Son of God, the one sent by God, the one
who reveals what God is like, the one who is God himself. And it’s relatively easy to think of God as
God up there or out there, the one that I can pray to when I feel like it, the
God who is like a divine therapist in the sky when I’ve got a problem, the one
I can ask for my daily bread. But the
idea that God is near, that God wants a relationship with me that is so close,
so intimate that Jesus uses this language of eating and drinking and living in
me, that does seem to be a difficult teaching.
Am I ready for this? Are you?
And then, to make things
even more difficult, I swear that in all this talk about eating flesh and
drinking blood, I hear overtones of self-giving, of sacrifice, of suffering and
even death. Yes, there is the promise of
life, of real life, abundant life, eternal life. But to get there, certainly there is at least
a hint here that it may not be easy. And
of course, as the story of Jesus plays out and heads towards the cross, we’ll
know that we were right to hear these hints, and that the teaching about
drawing into this close, intimate relationship with the one who endures such
suffering, is indeed a difficult one.
At the very least I think it’s
safe to say that Jesus has managed to shock us out of our preoccupation with
loaves of bread and direct our gaze to what he would call the things of the
spirit: what it means to live abundantly, what it means to be loving and
self-giving, how we fulfill our needs for belonging and connection, what it
means to live in the presence of the God revealed in Jesus, how we go about
creating lives of meaning and purpose in response.
None of this teaching is
easy; much of it is difficult, even scandalous.
Because of this, many of
Jesus disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish
to go away?”
Simon Peter answered him, “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.”
Amen.
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