Angel Food

 

(Scriptures:  I Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 Ephesians 5:15-20 John 6:51-58)

 

Through August, our readings from John’s Gospel have expanded on the theme of Jesus as the Bread of Life.  The readings began on the last Sunday in July with the very concrete account of the feeding of the five thousand.  The crowds, knowing a good thing when they see it, seek to elevate Jesus as their king, their political leader.  The disciples went off across the sea to return to Capernaum – and Jesus walked on the water to join them – and found the same crowds seeking him on the other side of the sea.  In a way, it’s a funny but sad testimony as to how desperate the crowds were, how much they wanted someone to feed them and lead them.  But that will soon change.

Jesus instructs them to seek the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give them.  The crowds ask if Jesus will give them manna, as the Israelites had received in the wilderness.  Jesus responds that the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, and the crowds implore Jesus to give them that bread always.  At this point, the crowds are still with him, more or less.

But now Jesus explicitly identifies himself with the image of bread:  “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”   The crowds begin to grumble – “hey, isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph.  We know his parents.  Where’s he get off telling us he came down from heaven?”  Jesus does not back off, but instead restates what he said even more strongly:  “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.   However eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  The crowds grumble still more loudly – how’s he gonna give us his flesh to eat - perhaps he’ll cut off a hunk of his arm and toss it to us?”  And Jesus expresses the same thing still more explicitly:  “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat of the flesh of the son of Man” – the Greek word translated as “eat” means to gobble down food, like an animal – nothing the least bit dainty about it – “unless you eat of the flesh of the son of Man and drink his blood, you will have no life within you.”  Now the crowds think Jesus has taken leave of his senses, especially since eaten flesh with the blood was explicitly forbidden even in the time of Noah.

What’s going on here?  Some commentators note that in John’s Gospel, the center of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples is not the breaking of bread and drinking of wine – there’s no language of that type in John’s account of Jesus’ last meal with the disciples – but the washing of the disciples’ feet.  So, perhaps, where the other Gospels put the institution of the Eucharist near the end of Jesus’ ministry, John uses Eucharistic language very early on in Jesus’ ministry.  Certainly it’s hard to read this passage and not think of holy communion. 

Other commentators connect the crowds’ reaction to Jesus’ words to the behavior of the crowds who followed Moses in the wilderness.  Remember that in the time of the Exodus, the crowds grumbled that they were hungry.  Moses prayed to God, and God sent down manna – and the crowds who followed Jesus remembered this story very well.  But later on, even though God was feeding them day by day with manna in the wilderness, the crowds still grumbled – “oh, it’s the same thing, day after day….manna morning noon and night, we’re sick of this manna.”  And when the crowds who followed Jesus spoke of manna and Jesus compared himself to manna – the crowds who followed Jesus grumbled.  So there’s a kind of ironic humor in this story from John’s Gospel – the crowds ask Jesus to re-enact the miracle of the manna, and when Jesus offers himself as manna, the crowds unknowingly re-enact the grumbling that took place against the manna in the wilderness.  You can almost picture John the Evangelist, the writer of this gospel, standing off to the side shaking his head saying, “Some things never change.”

Perhaps this is one of those stories that we shouldn’t analyze to death, but rather just taken in, as we would take in bread and wine.  Clearly, Jesus is offering himself – his life, his ministry, his death, all of himself, everything he has to offer - to sustain those who trust in him.  Jesus offers to feed us, to meet our needs, through the gift of himself.  The image is not that of some wealthy bazillionaire tossing some tiny fraction of his excessive and possibly ill-gotten income, tossing some pocket change, to set up a soup kitchen.  Jesus’ image is much more personal – you might think of a mother offering her milk to feed her child.  The offering of himself of which Jesus speaks is a very personal, even intimate self-giving – it doesn’t get much more personal than to offer your own flesh and blood to sustain someone else.  I included in the bulletin the words, with translation, of St Thomas Aquinas’ poem “Panis Angelicus”.  As I read it, one line made me stop in my tracks, makes me want to gasp: “The Lord becomes our food: poor, a servant, and humble.”   Roll that around in your mind a bit….”The Lord....becomes... our food.”  And these words lead me back to the words of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, what has been called the Prologue:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people…..and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”  In today’s Scripture reading, John returns to this image of the Word became flesh, and expands on it – the Word not only became flesh and dwelt among us, but offered that flesh as living bread to feed his people.  Grace and truth indeed!

When we meditate on the complete self-giving of Jesus, really, all there is to do is to give thanks.  To give thanks for a God who even bothers to take us seriously, let alone offer Godself for us.  To give thanks for a God who feeds us, even when we grumble, who made an immeasurable sacrifice to give us eternal life, not just in some far off world to come, but in our lives here, today.

And, perhaps, one other response would be to tell our hungry neighbors where they can be fed.  D.  T. Niles described evangelism simply as “one beggar telling another where to find bread.”  After all God has done and is doing for us, it would be the height of selfishness to simply take it all in without sharing with others.  May we at Emanuel Church always feed on this living bread, never seeking any other source of sustenance, and may we share this living bread with our neighbors who are hungry.  Amen.