Hebrew Scriptures – Deuteronomy 8: 1-3, 11-181
1This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. 2Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. 3He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. ….
11Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. 12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, 16and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. 17Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” 18But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.
Epistle – Ephesians 4: 25 – 5: 22
25So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. 26Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27and do not make room for the devil. 28Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. 29Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. 30And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. 31Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, 32and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
1Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Gospel Lesson – John 6: 35, 41-513
35Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. ….
41Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
“Is Not this Jesus, the Son of Joseph?”
One day when I was a child and playing around my great-aunt Clara’s kitchen, she answered a knock at the door – not the front door, you understand, the kitchen door; only strangers came in the front door! On the small back porch stood the woman who lived just down the road. In the midst of half-suppressed sobs, she began to tell my Aunt Clara about some tragedy that had just happened. But before this woman could finish I heard Aunt Clara say, “Come inside. I’ll put on some tea.” The two came in and sat at the large oak table with its neatly appointed table cloth, and nourished by tea and my great-aunt’s murmurs of understanding and support, the woman seemed to heal right before my very eyes.
I remain eternally grateful for Aunt Clara not shooing me out of the kitchen – thinking that I was underfoot or didn’t need to hear all of this – because I learned a lesson that I’ve never forgotten. My Aunt Clara’s neighbor didn’t need tea, and yet she did. The tea was intimately connected to the love that she received. A cup of tea, without the love, has no power to heal at all.
So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, just like us, Jesus may have often talked about food. Hey, even if it were to ask the age-old question, “What’s for dinner?” I think that Jesus was as concerned about basic nourishment as any of us is. But, along with every biblical scholar that I respect, the gospel storytellers often put words in the mouth of Jesus to have him speak what they think he should’ve said about food and eating. Today’s rather weird and complex story from John’s community is one of those times of having words put into the mouth of Jesus. It’s meant to continue the sub theme of those readings from the Gospel According to John that we read last week about food – or, more specifically, about bread.
Long before the early Christian community picked up the debate, the teachers in Deuteronomy were reminding us that we do not live by bread alone, but by the revelations of the Sacred in our midst. Here in the Gospel According to John, that community claims that the very essence of God has become flesh, that all we need to sustain our lives has been given to us in Jesus. What are we supposed to make of that? Beyond the breakfast with which each of us began our day today, and the lunch that we might even now be looking forward to, what is it that “feeds” and “sustains” us? And just where are we supposed to look for it?
With any reading of these sixty-six library books that we call the Bible, we have to know a whole lot more about the Hebrew people and the stories that shaped their lives – in this case the one about food called “manna” in the wilderness – in order for us to fully understand some of the references in this story. Jesus is visiting the village of Capernaum, just down the road from his own home town, and he may have attempted to offer a new level of teaching – like his use of parables, a re-imagined world. And to help his audience make this transition the storyteller John has Jesus referring to a story from their own tradition.
Now, Jesus is no literalist. His language is the language of the parable: imaginative and poetic, remember: mustard seeds become huge plants, water becomes wine, five loaves and two fish feed a multitude – and so on. So it’s no surprise that his listeners seem stuck in the literalist’s way of understanding things. They’re outraged because they can’t hear the deeper truth behind the words. Is it any wonder that, with words such as these, to outsiders the early Christian communities were thought to be peopled by cannibals? Either way, Jesus is scoffed at for his efforts as some decide that his teaching isn’t orthodox enough; so they leave. Hey, the same kind of thing happens in the church even today!
Many of the things that Jesus said never made into the Bible – sometimes, I think, because the church hierarchy found them deeply disturbing. Think about what’s being said in our gospel reading for today and compare it with what Jesus is remembered as having said in a book that didn’t make it into our Bible, The Gospel of Thomas:
Jesus said, “If you bring out what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.”4
And if it isn’t “living bread” it’s “living water” – as in the story of Jesus with that woman at the well.5 If you haven’t got it you might as well be dead. To the people of the Ancient Near East “living water” might have been just a phrase that meant “running water” – not well water – but at least running water was clean and not stagnant like those puddles and pools that did nothing but sit in the sun and turn foul; they had no outlet and so nourished nothing.
Like the God of the prophets who led them out of the wilderness long ago, the people came to believe that Jesus would not abandon them if they followed him. He would give them “food,” sustenance, for the long journey ahead, his very self – what the church has come to call the bread of life, the cup of salvation. We who would follow – and call others to follow – Jesus, must share with others those same things that nourish and strengthen us along the way. So the church, like the communion table, isn’t a place to linger; once we have been fed, we’re to leave here, get back on the journey we call life and follow wherever it is that Jesus might lead us.
Jesus often spoke to our deepest needs in terms of our physical wants. Hunger and thirst are both used in the Bible as metaphors for the desire of our souls for God. The psalmist cries out, “O taste and see that the Lord is good…” (Psalm 34: 8a). Tasting or savoring something is a graphic description for a deeply personal experience of what God has to offer us in life. In the Lord’s Prayer, we hear ourselves asking for bread before we ask for forgiveness; and it’s elementary psychology that would tell us that we can’t teach somebody a lesson in morality if he or she is starving. Even Gandhi understood that as he is believed to have said that to a hungry person God could only appear in the form of bread. So, yes, you and I may not live by bread alone, but can people in most Third-World countries hear this word – appreciate this imagery of “the bread of life” – if their basic needs for survival aren’t met first?
The Roman emperors during the time of Jesus thought that the way to keep the masses in line, the population distracted and happy, was to give them pan et circenses – bread and circuses – in other words, lots of cheap food to take the edge off of their deeper hunger, and entertainment enough that they would be distracted from what was really going on behind the scenes. This tactic has always been used by tyrants and demagogues to divert people’s attention away from their real needs, to take their minds off of any notion that they might participate in real change, of helping to create a more human future for everybody – like health care reform. Sometimes a regime will stir up a good war or two in order to divert the people’s attention away from who their real enemy is. Our vast professional sports industry, as well as our conspicuous consumption of junk food, might be emblems of our own present-day distraction from human needs – our own bread and circuses. Barriga llena, corazon contento, says the Spanish proverb: “full belly, happy heart.” But then Jesus comes along and messes things up! He says, “You are not to live just to stuff your first-world bellies.” Live also for the gospel word of compassion and of sharing, of a table at which all are welcome and none are turned away.
Some sociologist, or culinary expert, I can’t recall, once noted that human beings are the only creatures who eat with their heads up, not down, so that we might teach ourselves that our heads are what are the most in need of filling and feeding.6 The mouth, not the stomach, is the principal organ of discernment in eating. So it’s our developed insight and awareness, our taste-test theologizing, if you will, that we’re being invited to exercise now to understand just how Jesus might have used that phrase “the bread of life.”
The writer of Ephesians also tells us today that we’re supposed to be truth-tellers and forgivers to each other, to serve each other with the open-handedness of compassion, and to throw into the garbage can our moldy meals of anger, bitterness and slander, in other words, to be real bread to each other – after all the etymology of the word “companion” literally means “one with whom I break bread.”
It’s been said that if the human race were to die out today, the whole world’s supply of wheat wouldn’t survive more than three years. Our very source of bread, the grain itself, has become dependent upon the human community for its existence. Out in the countryside, places in the wilderness can be seen where wheat has jumped the farmers’ fences and run wild in gullies and ditches for years on end. But the grains get smaller and so can’t be used for much in the way of feeding anything. Most of us, in nourishing each other, can’t survive for long without knowing that someone cares for us.
In just a small part of one of the greatest stories that I ever read, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee wrote something that resounds with deep truth; she said, “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.”7 There is great wisdom in that statement. Food follows the appearance of death not just to sustain those who grieve, but to remind them of those who still love them on this side of the grave – those who also need nourishment and have come to serve as ongoing reminders that life goes on.
The “bread” spoken of in today’s readings is different, of course, from a potluck supper or the finger-foods served at a reception following a memorial service. What we’re talking about here is the very essence of the Sacred. It doesn’t accompany death; it fends it off. This “bread” impels us to choose life – to choose tomorrow, our future, God’s future. This “bread” doesn’t keep body and soul together on this side of the divide; it escorts us across.
If it’s true (what I was telling the children) that “You are what you eat,” then if we “eat” God’s food, we become one with God. You and I are to be the same signs of life-giving love that Jesus was. We’re to give of ourselves every bit as much as he did to sustain the life of the beloved community. With the same wisdom exemplified by Gandhi and Jesus, Mother Teresa said of her work in India that they gave dying people bread because they were starving and dying not just for bread but also for love.8
But, now wait a minute! Wasn’t this just Jesus, you know, the boy down the street whose father and mother we know? Who’s he that we should listen to him? Yes, it’s true; he was just a carpenter’s son, but he was much, much more. And so, too, can we.
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1 Today’s first reading is a reinterpretation of that covenant brokered by Moses at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19: 3ff. – also called Mt. Horeb in Deuteronomy 5: 2 and elsewhere). This version highlights some themes important to the prophets: the 40 years as a time of testing, and manna interpreted as a symbol of God’s nourishing word.
2 Our reading from the Letter to the Ephesians is actually part of a diverse collection of moral and ethical statements that the early Christian community came up with in order to provide a guide for its new converts – a kind of catechism, if you will. And like a lot of the teachings in the New Testament, many of them have clear connections with the Hebrew Bible. What’s unique about this particular reading is its strong emphasis on the community as a motivation for right behavior – advice that that group calling itself the Napa Tea Party needed here last Monday night [http://www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2009/08/05/opinion/editorial/doc4a7918305d01f722673520.txt]! While this is a central theme of Paul’s, it now seems to be taken up, in his name, by the author of this letter.
3 Interpretations of the desert manna as a symbol of God’s nourishing word were nothing new to the people of the Ancient Near East, but the application of this image to a human being – as the very presence of God’s word – was a new teaching. So this is something put “in the mouth of Jesus” by the Johannine community; in fact it’s the main point that the author of this gospel wants to make: not just that Christian rituals are to replace Jewish ones, but that all rituals and symbols, now, have to be reinterpreted in response to that early community’s experience of Jesus. For them, to believe that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ, meant that they believed that they were fed, nourished, and given life by him.
Almost any progressive biblical scholar today, however, would point out that Jesus would never say these things about himself; and yet this account does represent some of the early mythologies that came to be created about Jesus and who people did come to believe he was. The question left for us to ponder is “What do you think?” Who is Jesus, for you?
4 Saying #70 in the “Gospel of Thomas” from The Complete Gospels, Robert J. Miller, Ed. (Polebridge Press, Sonoma, CA, 1992), p. 316.
5 John 4: 7-30.
6 I think that was said by Robert Capon in his book Food for Thought, but I can’t find the reference.
7 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Warner Books, 1960), p. 281.
8 I believe that the actual quote from Mother Teresa was this:
At the end of our lives, we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made or how many great things we have done. We will be judged by "I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless and you took me in." Hungry not only for bread, but hungry for love. Naked not only for clothing, but naked of human dignity and respect. Homeless not for want of a room of bricks, but homeless because of rejection. This is Christ in distressing disguise.
This from the website: http://everything2.com/title/Mother%2520Teresa.