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)
