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)
