Sermon for August 8, 2021: Bread of Heaven Based upon John 6:35, 41-51

John 6:35, 41-51 
35 Jesus 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. 
41 Then 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 for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ 

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Even Karoline Lewis, who wrote what is probably my favorite commentary on the book of John recognized how difficult this metaphor is to parse out. You see, whomever put together our reading series decided to have us consider Jesus as the bread of heaven for five Sundays in a row. Lewis said, and I agree, “How much can you preach on Jesus as the Bread of Life?” I decided that I probably couldn’t swing five sermons. But, I bet I could work on one, because, it is a fascinating metaphor isn’t it? What does it mean for Jesus to understand himself to be like bread? And, what does it mean for the people who follow him? 

     The last time I was invited to preach on this text was three years ago, on a morning when we had three baptisms, that of Penny Pray, Gaby Lazure, and Alice Lazure. It was also a morning where the rain nearly up-ended our plans. You see, we were supposed to be at our church camp. If it rained, there was no way we could all huddle inside that little building. Thank goodness Penny said we could come to her place. We got the phone and email tree going and stuck Doug Whittier, if I remember correctly, on the camp road to redirect anyone who didn’t get the message.

     In that service, hummingbirds and loons dropped by to remind us of the Holy Spirit showing up like a dove at Jesus’ baptism. Water skiers zoomed by, waving and sharing a bit of joy with us. Mel Burrowes played music for us. And, Kate Goodspeed was our reader. We had two reading for that Sunday. Kate read the first one, which was today’s text from John and a second from Ephesians, 4:25-5.2. I would go on to preach the Ephesians text. When I mentioned my choice, to my delight, Kate said “thank goodness” or something like that. She had noticed that the John text is an awfully weird one. It definitely talks about eating Jesus’ flesh like bread and, well, given that we are don’t believe that we are actually eating Jesus when we take communion, sorting out this kind of squishy metaphor is... complicated.

     Even Karoline Lewis, who wrote what is probably my favorite commentary on the book of John recognized how difficult this metaphor is to parse out. You see, whomever put together our reading series decided to have us consider Jesus as the bread of heaven for five Sundays in a row. Lewis said, and I agree, “How much can you preach on Jesus as the Bread of Life?” I decided that I probably couldn’t swing five sermons. But, I bet I could work on one, because, it is a fascinating metaphor isn’t it? What does it mean for Jesus to understand himself to be like bread? And, what does it mean for the people who follow him? 

     Here are a couple stories we need to keep in mind when we hear Jesus call himself bread of heaven: the story of God feeding the Israelites in the desert and Jesus feeding the people by the Sea of Galilee. I have preached on those two stories. See, I needed a little lead in to get to today. If you remember from my sermon last week, when the people were six weeks into the wilderness and had grown afraid... when they misremembered the predictability of slavery as stability... God reminded them that slavery wasn’t great and the way forward into liberation was through God’s abundance. Even though the journey would be hard, God would provide for them. The manna and quail were meant to renew the faith and replenish the bodies of the people journeying to the Promised Land.

     Two weeks ago, I preached on John’s version of the feeding of the 5,000. Remember, it’s the only miracle story that is in all four Gospels. In that story, Jesus demonstrated the ways that God’s compassion and abundance moves through him by feeding an enormous crowd using a little bit of food donated from a child. He later walks on water, too, telling his disciples not to be afraid. It is the day after feeding all the people and walking on water that Jesus starts talking about food metaphors. Notice he feeds the hungry people first, like God for the Israelites. But, the food becomes a way that they can learn more about God, and, specifically, how Jesus is the Incarnation, God’s Word become Flesh.

     Usually when I hear people say “you are what you eat,” they are trying to shame other people about their food choices and bodies. That is not how Jesus talks about food in John 6, though he does worry that people will get distracted by the food he shared with them and forget the message behind in. A few verses before our reading today, Jesus says to the people whom he had fed the day before that he thinks they are just showing up because he fed them. He says “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” And, then Jesus unpacks how he understands his own mission as being a gift from God to renew and replenish God’s people.

     In her commentary on this chapter, Karoline Lewis notes that bread is a significant foodstuff for the people that Jesus is preaching to. It is a part of every meal and often the only meal people had. To have bread is to have food. To have food is to have life. Bread is connected to the ability to live and survive in this world. Jesus seems to choose bread as his metaphor because it is so loaded with connections to survival, both in everyday foods, in general, and in the specific story of God providing manna in the wilderness. Lewis notes that, like the story of the woman at the well in chapter 4, whom Jesus offers Living Water, this metaphor of the bread of life demonstrates that what Jesus provides is “basic, indispensable for life.” God provided the manna, which made life possible. God provided Jesus, who gives new life to those who follow him. The bread and the fish, which Jesus gave them to support their living, helped them see him as this life-giver from God.

     When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life,” he is reasserting his claim to his divine mission, that he has been sent from God, like the manna, to renew and replenish the people. That is where we started today’s reading, with Jesus saying, remember, God sent the bread and God is sending me. My mission is love and abundance and life. Our reading skips some stuff where he explains that this means believing in him will be as satisfying as eating and drinking when hungry and thirsty. He says that belief will provide what one of my friends calls “soul sustenance” straight from God. And, these people, who know his family and know his past, can’t quite wrap their heads around him ever being more that Joseph and Mary’s son. We’ve heard this before, haven’t we? They understand their relationship with Jesus in one way, as neighbor, child at the synagogue, teenager arguing with his parents. And, Jesus is inviting them to understand their relationship with him in a new way, as a source of New Life, sent to them by God, as God once sent them manna from heaven. They are hesitant to see him in any other way than how they have known him.

     Lewis argues, and I’m inclined to follow her argument, that at the core of the book of John is a message that abiding with Jesus, that is being relationship with Jesus, brings New Life. This bread metaphor, with connections to the physical acts of eating nourishment sharing food, as well as historical connections to the shared Jewish story of being tended to in the wilderness by an ever-present, food-producing God, is being used to help the people connect being in relationship with Jesus to being in relationship with the ever-present God. To believe in Jesus is to draw near to him, to be in relationship... to abide with him. In the past, the people ate what God had sent, that was, manna and quail. But, Jesus says, those people eventually died. Relationship with Jesus, though, will be different. He asserts that there is an eternity that relationship with him has to offer.

     All of that seems well and good. But, what about this eating flesh business. That’s the most disconcerting part of this metaphor. As I wrote this sermon, and remembered that day on the lake three years ago, I remembered how our faith is lived out in our bodies, bodies that shivered in cold lake water, that stood strong on skis, and felt the rhythm of the songs we played and sang together. Our faith is lived in bodies nourished by the food we shared on Penny’s deck as much as the fellowship we shared by the lakeshore.
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     John tells us that Jesus was the Word made Flesh. Flesh like our flesh, that lived and moved and was nourished by God. Flesh that was born and tended to like ours. Flesh, life, that flourished in relationship with, and for, humanity. To assert that he was bread and that he was flesh was to remind people that, though he understood himself to be from heaven, his calling was to be here, providing life and renewal, physical and spiritual, to God’s people. Our relationship with Jesus is not up in the clouds, but right here, as close as the bodies in which we live. To know Jesus is to feel him as closely as the bread we eat and the flesh it becomes. The metaphor is still complicated. But, relationships are complicated. At least in this one, we know we’ll be fed. And, maybe that’s the kind of renewal he offers. Not quite quail, but new life all the same. 
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Resources consulted while writing this sermon:
Karoline Lewis, John: Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014)