Mark 10:2-16, from Proper 22 (27)

Read upside-down, this week’s Gospel reading goes something like this:

Some children needed to see Jesus. Some of them were sick and needed healing. Others needed – at least in the estimation of the adults in charge of them – Jesus’ blessing.

But Jesus was busy, his disciples said. He and they were deep in conversation about truly important stuff. Stop bothering us. Go away. You and your problems aren’t worth his time.

Maybe one of the kids started crying. Maybe one of the parents started shoving. Maybe Jesus just perceived what was happening in that all-knowing way he sometimes did. Whatever brought the situation to Jesus’ attention, he became “indignant,” in Mark’s words, that his disciples were giving the kids the brush-off.

Abruptly ending the discussion his disciples had considered so vital, he commanded, in what I like to imagine was a booming voice that silenced everyone in the house, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

And as everyone suddenly got interested in their sandals, or maybe even got upset with Jesus for so rudely ending the debate, he added, “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

And then he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.

It’s telling, I think, that Mark doesn’t describe what Jesus said as he bear-hugged each child.

“Welcome, little Reuben. My, you’re burning up with fever. There, there. It’s gone now. You’re going to be just fine.”

“Rebecca, my daughter. Thank you for coming. Of course I know your name. But I am pleased that you are surprised. Blessed are the meek. They will inherit the earth.”

“And here’s Jeremiah. A great man bore your name a long time ago. Are you brave, like him? I think you are. You have much to say, Jeremiah.”

“You have a famous name, too, Esther. Do you know the story? Of course you do. Esther showed faith and courage – and saved her people. You have faith and courage in you, too.”

“Hello, Levi …”

One after another they came, each a little miracle. And Mark didn’t think any of it was worth writing down. Just a bunch of kids, that’s all. What really mattered, what Mark thought we really needed to know about all these years later, was what the disciples had been discussing before the brats had interrupted them: The righteous way for a man to get rid of a wife he no longer wanted. Moses had clearly said that all a guy owed such a woman was a certificate of divorce freeing her to go charm some other poor sucker into having her. But Jesus, reminded by the Pharisees of this law, had said that not everything permitted by God was pleasing to God. What God most wanted, Jesus had said, was for husbands and wives to love and care for each other always.

That was a teaching that, for whatever reason, the disciples urgently felt they needed to get to the bottom of. So they were questioning Jesus about it. The ability to kick a woman to the curb gave men a lot of power. Giving that power up was a pretty big deal. But if they had been hoping for some wiggle room, or for some indication that Jesus had misspoken, Jesus disappoints them. Instead of easing up, Jesus doubles down. Divorce a spouse and marry another, and you make yourself an adulterer, Jesus tells them, be you a man or a woman. Perhaps the disciples where opening their mouths to object when those darn kids elbowed their way into the room, and Jesus acted like nothing in the world, not even such an important issue as divorce, was as important as showing love to a squirmy, snotty horde of … ugh! … kids!

Maybe we modern Christians wouldn’t put debating divorce ahead of serving needy children. But I’ll bet there are plenty of other things we would, and do, put higher on our priority lists. Look at the facilities we invest in, the political objectives we pursue, the rules we protect and enforce. Does love come before those things, or after? When we have to choose between love and those things, which do we choose?

Let the little children come. Do not hinder them. Whatever and whoever your kingdom belongs to, the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

Next week: Proper 23 (28)

Mark 9:38-50, from Proper 21 (26)

This week’s Gospel passage reads like a game of theological Whac-A-Mole. Continue reading “Theological Whac-A-Mole” →

Mark 9:30-37, from Proper 20 (25)

I doubt any aspect of my life would escape disruption if I were to take Mark 9:30-37 seriously. Continue reading “Striving for last place” →

Mark 8:27-38, from Proper 19 (24)

Always a paradox, Peter got things dead, solid perfect, but only about half the time.

In this weeks’ passage, for example, we see him nailing the question about Jesus’ true identity. “You are the Messiah!” Peter declares, and we learn from the context available in Matthew that Jesus responds by designating Peter as the foundation of the Church and the keeper of the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Not a bad score for a Galilean fisherman, eh?

But just one verse after the exchange ends, we see Peter trying to talk Jesus out of Jesus’ plan to bring salvation to not only Peter but the entire rest of the world, including you and me. Peter meant well, to be sure. He probably didn’t understand the big picture and took Jesus’ talk about being killed by enemies and raised to life three days later as nothing more than evidence that the desert heat was messing with Jesus’ head.

But Jesus is thinking all too clearly, and he gut punches Peter with the famous rebuke in verse 33: “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

From rock of the Church to embodiment of Satan in right around 100 words? That must be some kind of record, even for Peter.

It’s reasonable to wonder why Jesus didn’t just bench Peter and put one of the other disciples in the starting lineup. Take John, for instance. John never screws up, at least not in any of the spectacular ways Peter did. John seems utterly devoted to Jesus, and at the foot of the cross, with Judas dead, Peter grieving his three denials of Jesus, and every other disciple off hiding in fear somewhere, there’s John, close enough to hear Jesus ask him to take care of Jesus’ mother, Mary. You half expect Jesus to add, “And you’re the new rock of the Church, John. Go get the Kingdom keys from Peter, and tell him he’s fired.”

I’m glad Jesus picked Peter, though. It means there’s hope for me. It’s not that Peter’s flaws give me permission to throw my hands in the air every time I mess up and say, “Well, there I go, just being Peter again!” If I think the scale of grace Jesus showed to Peter merely gives me a pass to do whatever I want to do, then I’ve missed the point entirely. That grace is a measure of his love’s depths, not of its limits. To make the point another way: Perhaps even Peter’s batting average looks unattainable to you. If you’re looking for tips on how to improve your stats, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I don’t think God keeps stats, so I don’t see the point of keeping mine, and I think you should give up keeping yours. The only logbook that matters is the Book of Life, and my name is written in it solely because I believe. If you’ve believed, your name is there, too, written no bigger or smaller, fancier or plainer than mine. Or than Peter’s.

Next week: Proper 20 (25)

Mark 7:24-30, from Proper 18 (23).

If you want your Jesus scrubbed clean of his humanity, if you prefer him not only sinless but sin-proof, if you think the line in Hebrews about his having been tempted in every way we are couldn’t possibly mean he ever felt like asserting his rights, going his own way or at least telling God, for pity’s sake, to just hold on a minute, then don’t read Mark 7:24-30.

You won’t like it.

There are ways to explain away the harshness with which Jesus responds to the Greek woman from Syrian Phonecia who falls crying at his feet and begs him to drive the demon out of her young daughter. When Jesus tells the woman his mission doesn’t include ministering to “dogs” like her, maybe he is just trying to shock the racism and nationalism out of his disciples, who are watching. Or maybe he’s testing the woman to see whether her pride will get in the way of her concern for her daughter.

But the likeliest explanation, to me, is the one Mark seems to be waving in front if our faces in verse 24. Jesus went – “withdrew,” in Matthew’s version – to Tyre, a gentile area north of Galilee, on the shore of the Mediterranean. There, he “entered a house, and did not want anyone to know it.” If Jesus was, as we read in Matthew’s account, “sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” why is he hiding out in a house in gentile territory, with nary another Jew in sight?

If you’ve ever spent any time in ministry, I’ll bet you know exactly why.

Jesus is exhausted. In this and the previous chapter alone, he has been rejected by the people he grew up with in Nazareth (and nearly thrown off a cliff by them); has lost his cousin, John the Baptist, to King Herod’s executioner; has miraculously fed a crowd of more than 5,000 people, only to end up arguing with them; and has made enemies out of Israel’s religious elites. And he has done all of it while healing an endless stream of people suffering from a staggering array of maladies, sometimes by his own choice and other times by getting more or less mugged of his divine power. He is done. He wants a break. He wants his life back. So he has run away to hide, if only for a few, precious hours, so he can get a square meal, a hot bath, a full night’s sleep and maybe even a lazy morning with a real breakfast, a cup of coffee and the paper.

And the plan is working just fine until this gentile woman shows up with – what else? – a hard luck story and an urgent problem only he can fix. Worse, he knows exactly what will happen if he helps her. Instead of getting chased around the country by one horde, he’ll soon be getting chased around the country by two hordes, and he’ll have no place to get away from either of them.

You’ve been there, haven’t you? Say one, little “yes” to God, and before you know it, you’re in for way more than what you bargained for. It’s like taking a kid to a toy store and handing him your credit card. In no time, you’re getting gleefully and obliviously dragged up and down the aisles, the cart is overflowing, and your bank account is way past empty. God takes and takes and takes. And when you’ve got nothing left, he asks for even more. And you know the asking is a sham, because he has your card. In fact, he has all the cards, as both he and you know. Somewhere in the rush, your willingness to go along with all of it buckles, survival mode kicks in, and the “you” in you finally decides to stand up for itself and tell God that you’ve had it, that enough is enough.

That’s the point Jesus almost gets to, here. Almost. He just wants this woman to go away. First, he tries ignoring her. Then, he tries insulting her. But she doesn’t budge, and the divinity in him finally makes him realize why: She has nowhere to budge to. She is bereft of any option besides lying in a sobbing heap on the floor in front of him and pleading for her hopeless daughter’s healing. It breaks his heart, his defiance evaporates, and he says “yes,” not only to her, but to vastly expanding a mission he thought had already gotten unbearably vast.

You or I wouldn’t have done it. You or I would have picked her up, tossed her outside, slammed the door and bolted it. I think Jesus wanted to, because I think that’s what being tempted in every way we are means. Perhaps you love him less for that. I love him more for that. It means he understands how hard it is to say “yes” when you know you should but have no idea how you’ll ever cover the cost. I’ve chosen to do it as a stranger, a friend, a colleague, a son, a husband, a father, and a Christian. But much more often, I’ve chosen not to. Jesus chose to say “yes” every single time, including the time, still to come, when he would say “yes” to being stretched out on a cross and surrendering the last of what little he had left by then.

Ultimately, I think that is the reason Mark chose to tell us this unsettling story. As much as we’d like to cast ourselves as Jesus, stoically rallying to obey God over the objections of our flesh, that’s not the role for us in this drama. We’re the woman, of course. When Jesus says “yes” to her, he says “yes” to all the rest of us gentile mutts who come to him with nothing and ask him for everything. You’d think he’d get tired of it. Maybe, sometimes, he still does. But his answer never changes.

Next week: Proper 19 (24)

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, from Proper 17 (22).

I refer to myself as a “recovering Pharisee” on the About me page. This might be a good week to explain why.

Mark 7 opens with a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. Such conflicts appear often in the Gospels. One might have expected Jesus to go around yelling at sinners, especially considering that there were so very many of them on hand in the mash-up of Jewish, Greek and Roman culture that pervaded Galilee during the time of Jesus. There were pagan temples and idols and spas everywhere. The Galilean capital, Tiberias, managed to be unclean in its entirety, having been built atop an old graveyard. But Jesus embraced the region and its many Jewish sell-outs, most notably the tax collector Matthew. What seems to have made Jesus angriest, Frederick Buechner notes, “was hypocrisy and irrelevance, and thus it is the Pharisees who come in for his strongest attacks, the good people who should have known better. ‘You brood of vipers,’ he called them. ‘How can you speak good when you are evil?'”

On this particular occasion, the Pharisees had noticed that some of Jesus’ disciples were eating with unwashed hands, a violation of Jewish law. Mark – who, tradition holds, wrote his Gospel mainly to Christians in Rome who were unfamiliar with Jewish ways – pauses to explain that, “The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.”

Whether Mark intended them to or not, I can’t say, but his words invite us to sneer at the Pharisees’ feverish devotion to such customs. For for the sake of your digestive tract, I do hope you wash your hands before meals and eat off of clean plates. But the Pharisees, Mark’s text implies, thought doing so made them better than everyone else, and they had no reservations about saying so.

I resemble the Pharisees a lot more than I like to admit, though. You might, too. They were, after all, the fine religious people of their time. They went to worship services every week. Every line of scripture was at least familiar to them. Surrounded by a corrupt and violent society, they saw devotion to their beliefs and traditions as vital to preserving faith in, and fidelity to, the one, true God. Many Christians in many churches would assert the same about themselves today.

So what was Jesus’ problem with them? If they were, as Buechner says, “good people who should have known better,” what, exactly, should they have known better than than they did?

Pharisees like me tend to see rightness with God as a condition we have to maintain. We love verses like John 3:16 and hymns like “Amazing Grace,” but it never really sinks into our heads that God simply made us right with him through a maneuver that had everything to do with Jesus and nothing to do with our behavior. As St. Paul wrote, in words that moved Martin Luther and touched off the Protestant Reformation:

“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

We Pharisees don’t get that. Instead, we keep working and working and working to keep God pleased with us. And since we’re so afraid of his displeasure, we figure you ought to be afraid of it, too, and we have not reservations about telling you so. If you refuse to be as afraid as we are, well, we consider you part of the problem, and we’ll treat you as such. In doing that, we’ll forget all about treating you like the brother or sister you are. Perhaps most closely to the point Jesus makes in this painfully pointy passage, we consider ourselves bastions of righteousness under siege by a corrupt world, and we’re not about to take in the likes of you and all the sinfulness we think you would bring with you.

Jesus bluntly tells us Pharisees in this passage that we can stop worrying about letting defilement in, because it got in a long time ago and has been spewing out of us ever since, adding to our guilt each time. Meanwhile, what should be coming out of us isn’t. Jesus doesn’t get into that aspect of the problem here, but he does elsewhere. “A new command I give you: Love one another,” Jesus tells his disciples in John 13:34-35, only hours before his arrest. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And in Matt. 25: 31-46, the sheep on Jesus’ right had showed love and compassion, while the goats on his left had withheld both, and neither group seems to have been all that aware of what it was doing.

So, what comes out of us – or doesn’t – reveals what’s going on inside of us, and before we yuck it up over the stupid rituals of these wicked Pharisees, perhaps we should consider whether we’re truly any different from them.

While jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, in April of 1963 for leading a march without a permit, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. penned a response to a statement eight moderate white clergy had published in The Birmingham News criticizing the march and other demonstrations. If his words to Birmingham’s white religious leaders – good people who should have known better – don’t sting at least a little, we would be wise to wonder why. A sampling:

“I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

“I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.’ In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.’ And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

“I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?'”

I am a recovering Pharisee because I grew up as a good kid. I memorized my Bible verses and listened quietly to the lesson instead of fidgeting or talking and gave the right answers when asked. You would have loved having me in your class, and you would have urged all the other kids to be more like me. But somewhere along the way, I started to get the idea that I really was better than the others, and I began to protect the goodness I thought I had in me by shutting out, and even attacking, those whom I judged less committed to right living than I was. My church offered everything I needed to live apart from the messiness of the world. Sinners were welcome to come to us and become like us, but we weren’t about to go to them. We put up barriers, like a dress code that forbade long hair on males, pants on females and blue jeans on anyone, that were ostensibly about protecting decency but were at least as much about discouraging the poor and otherwise different from joining us. Minorities were few, and there were subtle, unchallenged rules about mixing with them.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ time would have welcomed me, and I, them.

It’s none of your business exactly how God finally managed to confront me with my moral inadequacy. What matters is that he did, and I finally saw that my only hope lay in the the type of righteousness St. Paul described, a righteousness apart from the law, a righteousness through faith, and faith alone. But I doubt I’ll ever get fully rid of that old Pharisee on this side of heaven. I still default to judgment and self-righteousness, to fear of God’s wrath instead of faith in God’s love. Recovery is an ongoing thing, and thank God for grace.

Next week: Proper 18 (23)

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.