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.
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Next week: Proper 16 (21)
