John 6:51-58
The feeding of the five thousand with loaves and fishes. The seekers demanding satisfaction from Jesus. The town gossips scoffing at their neighbor’s son as he claims to be heaven-sent. Jesus has been preaching the same sermon against multiple backdrops, across multiple communities, and with every passing moment he dives deeper and unspools further the controversy of faith. I am the bread of life. The Gospel of John lingers long on this image, as Jesus expounds upon his self-revelation and implores us to listen, to understand, to taste and see. For us, these thousands of years removed, with the language of the church and the practices of faith overlaid in a mosaic over the words on the page, it may not seem needful of such explanation. After all, what words are we so accustomed to hearing as we reach out our hands on Sunday morning? “The bread of life, given for you.” What words are we taught to pray from an early age, the same words that for some will remain in our memory even when our own name has left us? Give us this day our daily bread. It is a familiar image, a phrase often heard at the bedside and the graveside. Jesus is the bread of life. God give us this bread. The familiarity might be a great comfort, or a great mystery, or a bit of a bore. But this repetition is a signal to us that we must lean in and listen closely. Jesus preached knowing it would get him killed. This sermon is a matter of life and death.
Jesus’s sermon sparks confusion and dispute among his listeners. His strange claim that his own flesh, his body, is what he will give the world disturbs them. When the Hebrews in Exodus begged God for flesh, for meat to eat, they received quails, birds of the air to prepare and eat. But Jesus says that he is the meat to eat, like the quails in the desert or the fishes in the grassy field. Blood has long been understood to be the physical essence of life, the part of our body that animates us, the life in us that belongs to God and must not be spilled thoughtlessly. When Jesus claims that his blood will be offered to the world and will be given to his people to drink, he is talking about a sacrifice like those on the altar of the temple, life poured out. At its most explicit, this is a bizarre invitation to cannibalism, and one of many times this wandering preacher will tell the crowds about his impending death. How can he give us this? They ask. Even if he dies and his followers make a meal out of his body, this is a finite resource, and definitely not the kind of heavenly banquet they’ve been promised. When Jesus said “I am the bread of life,” his listeners were displeased, but it was just a strange thing to say. Now, Jesus has moved in a startling direction, one that cannot be comfortably taken at face value. The warm loaf of bread and the chalice filled with sweet wine his words elicit in our imagination could not be further from the carnage his words evoke in his first listeners. This is a confrontation. We do well to embrace the dissonance.
When Jesus says that he is the bread of life, he is not merely giving us yet another warm and comforting image for God. When Jesus says that those who will live forever must eat his flesh and drink his blood, he is bringing us back to that grassy field, to the loaves and the fishes meekly offered up for sharing. The bread and the fish, the bread and meat, were divided, torn into pieces to feed thousands. Jesus will not allow us to forget that this story is more than a Sunday School picnic, it is the story of his life and death, the same story we remember at the altar. The Holy Eucharist, communion, is not a tame and spiritualized conversation about a shared meal, it is an incarnate and divisive claim to union with God that goes beyond our wildest imaginings. To eat the flesh and drink the blood of our Savior requires us to remember that we are bodies, we are creatures that rely on God and God’s creation for our continued existence. To consume Christ is to embrace the reality of a love so big it created and continues to create our world, and to know that this love stooped down to join us in our own flesh and blood. We do not gather around the altar or around the fellowship table for its own sake, but for the sake of deepening our connection with Christ and with one another through him. It is in this way that Christ abides in us, and we in him. He is as close to us as our own life, the blood that runs through our veins and the food that fills our bellies.
The temptation to distance our creator, to place our faith in some spiritual out-of-body realm that can be severed at will from our mundane daily reality is strong, and dangerous, and Jesus will not allow us to stay there. We meet God here, in the world, in our flesh, in our daily bread and in our common life. The bread of life is not a concept, or a nice image. It is our reality. It is true, and real, and here and now. Our relationship with Jesus is as physical as the food we eat and just as necessary for our survival. God did not come down from heaven to be intellectually understood or emotionally engaged. God came to have all of us, our mind and our body and our heart and our soul. Anything less is a thought experiment, a futile exercise in writing our own reality. Everything about you, down to your very essence and bodily existence, down to even what you eat and drink, must be about the business of Jesus. Being a disciple is about more than our thoughts and our feelings and our preferences, it is about our bodies and our behaviors and our tables and our fellowship around our tables. The story of God is the story of blood and bones and belovedness. The bread that brings everlasting life, the bread that raises the dead and heals the broken, is our daily bread. This is our story. “Behold what you are; become what you receive.”[1]
[1] Augustine, Sermon 57 “On the Eucharist”
Mother A Writes 