John 6:24-35, from Proper 13 (18).
I hope you like bread, because if you stick with the lectionary’s Gospel selections, you’re going to be reading about bread, bread and more bread for the entire month of August. And the more you read, frankly, the weirder it’s going to get. At the end of this week’s reading, Jesus proclaims himself to be the “bread of life.” Enigmatic, perhaps, but chances are you’ve heard the passage often enough to find it familiar. By the end of August, Jesus will be wrapping up the discourse by saying things like, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.”
Um … OK.
I won’t blame you one bit if you bail out of John’s “Bread of Life” discourse at some point in favor of digging into the prescriptions for church harmony that Paul is writing about over in Ephesians or savoring the juicy tales of royal adultery, murder and rebellion unfolding in the passages from 2 Samuel and 1 Kings. But the fact that John spilled so much ink explaining what the Feeding of the Five Thousand signified suggests there might be some important truth, here – truth that will be worth the endurance its extraction will require.
To recap: Jesus, at the height of his popularity in Galilee, fed a multitude by miraculously multiplying and distributing a boy’s donation of five barley loaves and two fish. The miracle replicated, on a grander scale, a similar miracle by the prophet Elisha in a bygone era. With the Passover approaching – always a time of intensified nationalism in an Israel chafing under Roman occupation – the crowd got the allusion and tried to forcibly make Jesus their king. But Jesus gave them the slip via a clever deception that involved his hiking across the surface of the Sea of Galilee under the cover of darkness – and freaking out his disciples by strolling up to their boat along the way.
This week’s reading opens on an interrogation of Jesus by at least some members of the bread-and-fish crowd who, having gone looking for him, have found him in Capernaum, one of his favorite hangouts on the western side of the lake. They want to know how he got there, seeing as he had no boat in which to cross the lake. If only they knew, eh?
A lengthy, often confusing back-and-forth ensues between Jesus and his questioners. One strategy for navigating it without losing consciousness is to focus on understanding what Jesus says and worry less about what his questioners ask, and why. After all, they’re as clueless as we are, and maybe moreso.
When I apply this strategy, I see that Jesus does a lot of contrasting. Seeing a sign vs. seeing only a free meal. Working for perishable food vs. working for eternal food. Moses and manna in the desert way back then vs. God and bread from heaven right here and right now.
Helpfully, John has written about other occasions on which Jesus did the same sort of thing. During a late-night conversation in Chapter 3, Jesus baffles a curious Pharisee, Nicodemus, by contrasting physical birth and spiritual birth. And a chapter later, Jesus sits by a well with a Samaritan woman and contrasts water that eases one’s thirst temporarily with water that ends one’s thirst forever.
In all of these instances, Jesus seems to be trying to get people to look beyond something ordinary, or at least familiar, and glimpse something extraordinary, or even otherworldly. But what? What barely imaginable thing do all these metaphors about eternal food, bread from heaven, living water and spiritual birth point to?
The “Bread of Life” discourse hasn’t shown us the answer yet. But it has told us what we must do to find the answer. Asked by his questioners what God requires of them, Jesus replies, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” That’s the place to start. We must believe in Jesus, perhaps specifically by believing that whatever this extraordinary, otherworldly stuff beyond our ordinary, everyday stuff might be, Jesus has it and wants to give it to us. If we can get as far as believing that we need it as badly as Jesus thinks we do and trusting him to give it to us, perhaps Jesus will do the rest.
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says at the conclusion of this week’s passage. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Come to think of it, he’s talking less like he has this stuff and more like he is this stuff.
Starting to get weird, but that’s kind of to be expected, given the topic. I know the other readings look inviting, but stay tuned here, in John, to see what Jesus says next.
