Richard Davenport
August 18, 2024 – Proper 15
John 6:51-69
Jesus has some pretty strange things to say in the Gospel reading today. He’s been saying some odd things for the last couple of weeks. It all started off when Jesus gets a little critical of some of the people who have been following him around. Rather than seek him out for grace or his teachings or something like that, they were mostly just after the free food. Jesus spends an extended dialogue with them teaching them about what gives life and what does not, what is important and what is not so important.
Jesus starts talking about how he is the bread of life. That’s not all that strange, as John records Jesus making numerous “I am,” statements. This is just one more. Jesus is relating himself to something they understand. They are sometimes a little cryptic, but he explains what he means. Here it’s all about bread. First he’s talking about how he’s the bread of life. Those who sought him for food were seeking him out for the wrong reasons. It’s not that God won’t provide. He promises to do exactly that. But if all you’re after is a full belly then you’re really missing the point. God does care that you’re fed, but he wants to do so much more for you.
All of that is not so strange. What is strange is how Jesus explains things. He is the bread of life and the bread he gives is his own flesh? We hear that and think, “communion,” but communion wasn’t around yet. These folks certainly didn’t have that in mind. Jesus is using a metaphor. That much seems obvious. He can’t actually be made of bread. But then he says they’re supposed to eat his flesh. That can’t be right. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if the people were open to cannibalism, God had forbidden it.
Eating his flesh? Drinking his blood? At best it sounds like some weird cult thing. He sounds pretty serious about it too. He keeps talking about people needing to eat his flesh. Jesus might have had some reasonable things to say. The stuff he said before about God sounded alright but now he just sounds like a nutcase. No one’s going to go along with this. He’s just a weirdo lunatic and he clearly has nothing useful to offer to anyone anymore. Most of the crowd leaves, and why not? They have better things to do than have someone tell them they all need to be cannibals.
The folks who are leaving have rather missed the point Jesus is trying to make. All of this started because the people sought Jesus out to get more free food. Jesus chastises them for thinking that’s what he’s all about. So they want to know what they should do instead. Jesus tells them about faith. Now they want to know what proof he has that he can tell them what to do. Their fathers had bread given to them by God in the wilderness. Why would Jesus tell them what they’re doing is wrong? They ate the bread God gave them just fine.
But Jesus isn’t really talking about bread. He’s talking about life. The people come to him looking for food. No big deal. God can give them food, he does it every day. Jesus wouldn’t have given food to the thousands who had come out to hear him if food was really the problem. Instead, Jesus is answering the question: how do you come to have life?
That’s an easy enough question to answer for us. I just have it. I look at myself; I’m alive. I live my life every day. I do what I want to do, what I need to do. I work. I play. I talk to my friends. I go out and about. I take care of myself. When I wake up in the morning, Dr. Frankenstein isn’t standing over me shouting, “It’s alive!” No, I move. I breathe, all on my own. It’s the most natural thing in the world. I’m not a wind-up toy. I don’t need batteries. I just live. I don’t need someone or something to make me live. I already do. Someday that won’t be the case, but for right now I have all I need.
Sure, there are times I’m not getting what I need. There are times I need bread or something to put on the table. That’s usually a problem with the supply line. Someone isn’t getting me what I need when I need it. The Israelites had that problem in the wilderness. They needed bread and God wasn’t giving it to them when they needed it. Otherwise, things were fine.
Life has its problems, but usually everything goes pretty smoothly and there is rarely anything to worry about. We have very few needs, really, and those we can generally manage ourselves just fine. Our life isn’t something out there. We don’t need recharging. We live. We live under our own power. We don’t need other things or people to give ourselves life. We are independent, free thinking people. Our lives are our own. Our parents gave us life but now that life is ours.
Is it though? I mean, that’s how we think and how we operate. It’s all ours. Sure we need to eat and all of that, but that’s just part of our life. We’re still the ones living it. We go about our business without a thought to how any of it got there. We manage most of our life on our own, but it’s a life contained in a little bubble, a shell, that we never bother to break out of or even acknowledge. We give so little thought to how all of the things that give us what we need in life are brought to us.
In a conversation I had recently, we were discussing food. It’s the most basic thing you need to live. Whether you’re a college kid living off of pizza and Mt. Dew or whether you’re really into healthy eating and are all about the veggies, you have to eat to live. Our discussion was about how we are increasingly aware of how heavily processed foods like your prepackaged meals aren’t very good for you. They’re full of preservatives and other chemicals that are known to cause different kinds of health problems, not to mention typically being high in fat and sodium. But scientists are now also pointing out most every kind of food is bad for you in one way or another. The organic produce showing up in our grocery stores is supposed to be free of pesticides and other chemicals. It may be that farmers haven’t added anything to the produce they are growing, but that doesn’t matter if the soil itself is full of harmful chemicals. Old pesticides, heavy metals, excessive fertilizer, and all sorts of other things fill the very land used to grow the food we eat. Even the very food we need to sustain our life is slowly killing us.
We think it’s all ours, but all we have is a bunch of sand that continually slips through our fingers no matter how hard we try and hang on. It’s not something you can ever win. The best you can hope for is to hold off losing as long as you can. The life you have is growing shorter every minute of every day until it finally runs out completely.
Right after Jesus is baptized, he goes off into the wilderness to be alone. He spends 40 days out there fasting. It’s at that point Satan chooses to strike. Satan points at the rocks around him and tells Jesus he should turn them into bread. Jesus certainly could do that. For any of us, going without food for 40 days would mean running out our clock a little faster than we would otherwise. But Jesus doesn’t. Instead he responds, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Jesus is concerned about eating. He’s willing to make sure thousands of people have enough bread to eat. But he knows that food will not keep them alive forever. Just like the Israelites in the wilderness ate the bread God gave them and still died, just as everyone else has since, whether faithful or not.
Instead, Jesus offers an alternative. Life that doesn’t run out. Eternal life. Life that doesn’t come from food or anything else in this world. It isn’t going to be like our food, which does as much harm as good. Jesus is going to give us the word of God, the word that creates, the word that restores, the word that builds up and strengthens. Jesus himself is the word made flesh. He is the one who gives life and he wants to give that life to those around him.
The crowds following Jesus are under the impression that their way of life is the only way to live, the only way anyone can live. Jesus wants to eat what will actually give us life, the word of God. On our own, we have nothing. But Jesus doesn’t want us to be on our own. That’s what forgiveness is all about. Our confidence in our own abilities and strength have set us on the path to death. We are each like cracked bottles, slowing dripping our life away. We come to Christ and acknowledge what we have done. We relied on ourselves and it got us into trouble again and now our life is spilling out. Jesus forgives our false bravado, our stubborn determination to fail. His grace patches us up, fills us with life again. Our stubborn desire to set off on our own and do it ourselves breaks everything all over again. His forgiveness is still there for us, always ready to put us back together.
All of that is just the beginning though. That isn’t what Jesus is after because that’s still fighting a losing battle, it’s still just slowing the process down. For us to have life, we need Jesus to be our life. We need him to be what feeds us, sustains us, helps us grow. We need him to be what keeps us going from day to day, and not whatever we manage for ourselves.
When Jesus speaks to the crowds and when he speaks to us about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he’s speaking metaphorically, and literally. He is the Word made flesh. We are to drink in and savor every word that God speaks because every word he speaks is for our benefit, to make us whole again. He speaks to us of the dangers of this world and the traps we find ourselves falling into, and he speaks to us of how he has overcome the world and offers us new life. But he is also speaking literally. The bread of this world will not feed us forever. Only he can. He offers us his body and blood in the bread and wine he gives us at his table. Bread from heaven. Bread of life. The bread that is Christ himself, given to you so you may live, and not just live, but live forever.
The disciple Peter often makes mistakes and his brashness often gets him into trouble. After hearing everything Jesus said here, he is probably rather confused too. All of this talk of eating flesh and blood seems pretty strange. Nonetheless, his response is the truest statement anyone could make here. You can picture him looking around as everyone mutters and walks away. He shrugs and says, “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
We pray to our Father for our daily bread, often not even realizing how much he is giving us. The bread of heaven, the bread of life. Jesus himself comes to you to forgive you and restore you. God speaks to you today. He invites you to his table to share in the bread of heaven, the body and blood of Christ. He invites you to share with him, to receive forgiveness, to receive life, his eternal life.