John 6:56-69, from Proper 16 (21).

If you think understanding the Bread of Life discourse has been hard these past several weeks, just wait until you try applying it.

In this week’s reading, Jesus has just finished explaining, as best as he can, that we must abandon ordinary life and its ordinary sustenance for an eternal type of life in which, somehow, we live by eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

If we add in what we now know about the rest of Jesus’s story – the tearing of his flesh, the spilling of his blood, the resurrection of his strangely wounded-yet-wonderful, real, surreal, and hyper-real body – we might begin to grasp what Jesus meant, and what Paul meant by being crucified with Christ, and no longer living, but being more alive than ever because of Christ living within us.

But how does this work? How do you actually do it, assuming you can get as far as wanting to try? And how do you know you’re doing it the right way, or to the right degree?

The disciples speak for all of us when they complain, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

In September of 1905, while working as a lowly patent office clerk in Bern, Switzerland, a brilliant-but-unknown man named Albert Einstein published a paper showing that the relationships connecting mass, energy and light could be expressed with the equation m = E/c², later rearranged into its famous form: E = mc².

It’s an easy equation. “E” stands for energy. The amount of energy you would get if you could convert mass into pure energy would be equal to the mass (m) multiplied by the square of the speed of light (c). A high school algebra student could solve for any of its component variables. But the truths the equation represents are hard. Hard to understand. Hard to put into practice.

In that respect, I think the teaching that emerges from the Bread of Life discourse is a lot like Einstein’s famous equation: paradoxically easy and hard at the same time. The easy answer to the questions, “What is eternal life, and how can I get it?” is the one Jesus gave us all the way back in verse 29: “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent,” and again in verse 35, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

The E = mc² of the Gospel really is that easy: Put all your trust in Jesus, and you will receive eternal life.

But the underlying truths are hard. I’ve been working at the equation at least since I was nine, and I still don’t get it right most of the time. Putting all my trust in Jesus means putting none of it in myself. I’m lousy at that one. Putting all my trust in Jesus means saying “yes” to whatever he asks of me. Terrible at that one, too. Receiving eternal life means turning loose of my regular life. Again, a raging failure. Part of the reason it’s hard is because trusting Jesus isn’t a one-time thing. Like E = mc², it’s an ongoing relationship between multiple things, most of which can vary, and each of which constrains the other.

In the end, we can do no more than what the disciples did at the end of the Bread of Life discourse. Asked by an obviously frustrated Jesus whether they would go away like everyone else has, Peter speaks up for the obviously bewildered group: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

God knows it’s hard. And I’m not being profane. God truly knows it’s hard. Because he knows, he became flesh and blood, let our evil destroy both, and then turned death backwards upon itself, destroying both our evil and our guilt, all to give us a simple equation we could work without understanding: Come to Jesus, and live.

Next week: Proper 17 (22)

 

John 6: 51-58, from Proper 15 (20).

There are more people who say they want eternal life than there are people who actually do, a point that becomes increasingly clear as John’s “Bread of Life” narrative draws to a close.

And to be honest, I’m not always sure which group I’m in.

See, when I try to imagine eternal life, I usually end up imagining something like an upgrade of my ordinary life. Quite a lot in modern Christianity encourages me to think this way. Especially here in the evangelical range of the Christian spectrum, there is no shortage of sermons, books, retreats, seminars and what not about how Christianity can improve my marriage, finances, health, politics, and just about every other aspect of my ordinary life. And the thinking goes that as I install these upgrades, my ordinary life becomes less and less like ordinary life and more and more like eternal life. Death is the terrible-yet-wonderful reboot that completes the process, finally erasing the old and outmoded and overwriting it with the new and better.

But this isn’t at all how Christianity talks about ordinary and eternal life. And not just because Christianity predates computer operating systems by a couple of millennia. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it,” Jesus says in Matt. 16:25. And in Gal. 2:20, Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Or as my preacher intones each time he baptizes a congregant: “Buried with Christ in baptism” – dunk – “raised to walk in newness of life.”

This isn’t language about upgrading my ordinary life. It’s language about completely abandoning my ordinary life, about dying to it and receiving a new, wholly separate and different eternal life in Jesus. To quote Paul again, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (II Cor. 5:17). A new creation, not a derivative one. Passed away, not improved upon.

Expect pushback from anyone, yourself included, who lets what’s being said here sink in. Because, in truth, we cherish our regular lives. We have spent tremendous time and resources arranging them just so. I’ll welcome Jesus’ offer of divine bread for exactly as long as I can get by thinking it will fit neatly into the ordinary bread box resting on the ordinary counter in my ordinary kitchen. The instant I realize he’s offering bread that my beloved kitchen has no place whatsoever for, bread that, in fact, I would need a whole different setup to receive at all, I’ll turn his offer down flat.

That’s what happened there in the Capernaum synagogue. Jesus called his flesh true food and his blood true drink, the true nutrients of true life, and the people finally could no longer escape the realization that he was calling them to give up, not merely enhance, their false food, false drink, false nutrients and false life. They couldn’t understand it. They didn’t want to try. And I confess that I have a lot more in common with them than I care to acknowledge.

But once in a while, I begin to see that my ordinary life is a lot shabbier than I usually consider it. And I realize that, seeing as I’m eventually going to lose it one way or another, maybe losing it to gain the eternal life he offers wouldn’t be so terrible after all.

So if I can get as far as actually wanting eternal life in place of my ordinary life, exactly how am I supposed to go about losing my ordinary life? Am I never to eat ordinary food again? Quietly starve to death with my open Bible in my lap? Quit my job, stop caring about my wife of 26 years, tell my kids they’re on their own? Jump off a tall building so as to leave my worthless flesh on the sidewalk below and go to be with God? Of course not. The call to lose my life is not a call to waste it. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a call to stop wasting it on myself and start investing it, with nothing held back, in this alternate kingdom Jesus has been describing.

We’ll see more about that next week.

***

Next week: Proper 16 (21)

John 6:35, and 41-51, from Proper 14 (19).

We pick up John’s “Bread of Life” passage this week just as Jesus reveals something astonishing and baffling about this otherworldly “bread” he has been describing: He hasn’t come down from Heaven to give this bread to us. He has come down to be this bread for us.

It’s a metaphorical leap Jesus’ questioners just can’t follow. They get stuck on the idea of his having come down from heaven. A few weeks ago, Mark described how the people of Nazareth, Jesus’ home town, couldn’t get past the fact that they had known him growing up. Many in this Capernaum crowd trip over the same issue. They know his parents. They knew Jesus as a child. What’s all this nonsense, they grumble, about his having come down from heaven? They know firsthand that he came from right down the street.

By the end of the passage, though, Jesus’ questioners run smack into an even greater obstacle: their inability to imagine heavenly bread that isn’t manna. Phrases like “Bread of Heaven” and “Bread of Life” were understood as references to the manna that God had provided for the children of Israel to eat while they wandered in the wilderness (Exodus 16). When Jesus starts tossing these sacred phrases around, his questioners start hoping he’s about to miraculously whip up a fresh batch of the stuff, finally proving beyond doubt that he is the long-awaited Messiah.

But Jesus does more than disappoint them. He grosses them out. If you’ll allow me to paraphrase verses 49-51:

“Look, I’m not the manna your dead ancestors ate,” Jesus says. “I’m a whole different kind of heavenly bread. If you want to live forever,” and here, I imagine him pulling up his right sleeve and holding out his arm, “take a bite.”

Earlier in his ministry, Jesus caught some criticism about the unorthodox behavior of his disciples (See the accounts in Matt. 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-21, and Luke 5:33-39). Why, some critics asked him, didn’t his disciples fast? The disciples of John the Baptist fasted, they pointed out. So did the disciples of the Pharisees. They implied that Jesus wasn’t teaching his followers the proper way to be righteous.

Jesus replied with two mini parables about mixing old things and new things. Try to patch a hole in an old garment with a piece of new fabric, and you’re asking for problems, he said. The patch of new fabric will shrink, and the old fabric around it, having long ago lost its stretchiness, will tear. Similarly, if you try to store newly made wine in old wineskins, you’ll soon have a mess on your hands. The new wine will expand, and the old wineskins, which have already stretched to their max, will break. Fasting was an old way of being righteous. Jesus was bringing an entirely new way. New, at least, to those fixated on things like fasting. As Paul would write later, summarizing the thesis of his letter to the Roman Christians, “In the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed — a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.'”

Jesus is calling his questioners to righteousness through faith in him alone, and it’s tearing and breaking their earthward-looking, backward-looking minds as surely as new fabric will tear old fabric, and new wine will break old wineskins.

Eat Jesus’ arm? That’s nuts, not to mention disgusting and probably a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But only if you’re stuck thinking that biting, chewing, swallowing and digesting apply solely to sustaining physical life by physically consuming physical food like bread, manna or a stack of syrup-drenched pancakes. Jesus, John tells us way back in Chapter One, is the Word, the Word that was with God and that was God, right at – and before – the beginning of all things, and also the Word that became flesh to live among us. Think about his flesh that way, and taking it in to sustain your spiritual life suddenly doesn’t seem so preposterous. In fact, if you looked through this week’s lectionary and thought about it even a little bit, that’s exactly what you did. And if you haven’t taken in the Word lately, or perhaps in a very long time, you’re starving for it, whether you realize it or not, no matter how much bread, pancake or even manna you’ve eaten.

Jesus will push this flesh-as-food metaphor even harder in next week’s readings until he completes the tearing and bursting of his questioners’ capacity for his words. Maybe he knows those old capacities are useless, and that everything will be ruined and lost for his questioners unless they develop new capacities. It might seem cruel to you, or even offensive. Maybe this isn’t the Jesus you remember from Sunday school, the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who cuddled lambs all day and smiled adoringly at children. Maybe you’re a tad worried he’ll go after some of your favorite old clothes and some of your cherished old wineskins. Maybe this Jesus seems threateningly intense, confrontational, driven. You’d think he was on a mission to save the world or something.

***

Next week’s readings: Proper 15 (20)

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.