Sermon — The Rev. Greg Johnston
August 1, 2021
Lectionary Readings
When I was at my last church, there was a Men’s Discussion Group that met every Wednesday morning at 8:30. They’d make a couple of pots of coffee, and sit together around a table in the parish library, and read the gospel reading for that week off the little lectionary handouts to discuss. They were mostly retired scientists and engineers and lawyers, and they always ended up with some fascinating and often esoteric discussion. But I remember one Wednesday morning, just a few weeks after I’d arrived at the church, when someone read the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday, and everyone kind of sat in silence for a minute or so, and then someone said, “Wasn’t this last week’s reading?” And, after a few mumbles and a few nods, they turned to the Old Testament instead. And I know that that Wednesday morning was almost exactly three years ago, because here we are, back in John chapter 6.
Every three years, in the depth of summer, our lectionary switches from reading through the Gospel of Mark to carefully study most of this chapter of John, beginning with the miracle of the loaves and fishes and continuing through the long and meandering sermon that we call “The Bread of Life Discourse.” Even more than the rest of the Gospel of John, this material can get a little tedious. Jesus repeats the same themes and claims in verse after verse, a winding exposition of the theme: “I am the bread of life,” with many variations. (John 6:35)
So I’ll be going on vacation soon.
No, I feel bad joking, because this is the way that priests and parishioners alike sometimes experience these five weeks on the Bread of Life. They can feel as tedious and uninspiring as they are repetitive and circuitous. In a way, it’s remarkably similar to the Eucharist itself: week after week, we say and do the most unusual things, but because we say and do them week after week we start to tune them out. Sunday after Sunday, I stand and the altar and repeat Jesus’ words over bread and wine: “This is my Body. This is my Blood.” That’s an extraordinary thing for him to say! And it’s extraordinary that two thousand years later, after a hundred thousand Sundays worth of Eucharists, we’re still doing it. And yet we almost take it for granted. Most people, on most Sundays, are not at the altar rail in the most pious state of mind: we come distracted by anxiety or boredom, by the sound of our child’s cry from the nursery or a new water stain on the ceiling, by our frustration with the preacher’s sermon or our readiness to get out of here and have some lunch. Of course that’s not all the time. But it’s sometimes. And I’m not saying this to wag a finger at you. I’m saying it to recognize that this is how human brains work: Do something once, and it’s amazing and novel; do it twice, and it becomes passé.
So four times in the next month, Jesus will say some variation on “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the bread of heaven.” (John 6:35, 41, 48, 51) And by the third or fourth time, most of us will stand through the gospel thinking, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn’t this last week’s reading?”
Or maybe we’ll hear it differently this year. Three years ago today, when this gospel was last read, anyone in the world could walk into a church on any given Sunday morning and receive the Body of Christ, the living bread that came down from heaven. Two years ago, the same was true. One year ago today, though, things were wildly different. None of us had received that bread of heaven in four months; and it would be four more before we began to celebrate the Eucharist again. So I wonder whether all this talk of the bread of life and the manna from heaven will seem a little fresher after a year in which we were cut off from it.
There’s a sense, of course, in which Jesus isn’t talking about the Eucharist at all, at least not as we know it. He’s talking about himself through the metaphor of bread. And he’s talking about the miraculous meal they’ve just had, in which five thousand people were fed with five loaves and two fish. The crowd are unimpressed. “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert,” they say; God gave them each day their daily bread for free, and all they had to do was gather it up off the ground, where it had fallen like dew in the morning. What’s one meal, once in our lives—they say—compared to that? But Jesus turns their objection on its head. The manna itself, he says, is just a foreshadowing of him: “I am the true bread from heaven…For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:32-33) The manna sustained your ancestor’s life as they wandered through the desert; but I am the food that will sustain you for eternal life at the end of all your wanderings through this world.
In another sense, Jesus really is talking about the Eucharist. At the very end of the discourse Jesus will tell the crowd that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” and the crowd will be scandalized, because that’s disgusting. (John 6:54) Many of those who follow him will turn away. And this was likely the experience of the early Christians as well, as they spread their newborn faith. At first, people were excited to hear news of the coming of the long-awaited Messiah, then disappointed and confused to hear that he’d died and risen again and then disappeared. And then they were disgusted when they heard about the consolation prize: “He died, and he rose, and he ascended into heaven, so here’s not here now. But don’t worry, he is still with us, because every week we eat his flesh and drink his blood!” Come on. We can admit it here, right? That’s a really weird elevator pitch.
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says. (John 6:35) But when we try to pin down precisely what he means, we tend to ask the wrong questions. The crowd following him around certainly did, more than once. After the loaves and fishes, after all, Jesus walks four miles across the sea without a boat, and when the crowd who’ve been searching for him finally find him, they ask the least interesting question in the world: “Rabbi, when’d you get here?” (John 6:25) “When?” What about “How!?” He tries to explain again and again what’s going on, and they say to him, “What sign are you going to give us? …What work are you performing?” (6:30) As if they hadn’t seen the miracles he’d just done.
We, too, tend to ask the wrong questions about “the bread of life.” I don’t mean to minimize some very important sixteenth-century theological debates, but most arguments about the Eucharist are something like asking, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus reaches out his hands to us to feed us with himself, with his very own life, with the true bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, and we ask— Okay, but in what sense is it you, and in what sense is it bread? What are we talking here… Transubstantiation? Consubstantiation? Spiritual presence? Symbolic memorialism? Instrumentalism? Parallelism? (I’m not making any of this up.) Is Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine a real presence or a spiritual presence, or only a reminder of what the Lord has done for us? If it’s a real presence, then is the substance of Christ’s body present in place of the substance of bread, while the accidents remain unchanged; or is Christ’s body present in, with, and under the species of bread, and that’s all we can say for sure because it’s really not appropriate to import the Aristotelian categories of medieval term logic into theology in such a reified way?
If none of that made any sense to you, you may well be on the right spiritual track. Again, I don’t really mean to make fun. Theology’s certainly interesting. It can be important. And if you think Eucharistic theology is interesting and important, feel free to talk to me about it at Lemonade Hour! (And actually, I think Doug Heim and Alice Krapf both volunteered during our Wardens’ Meeting on Tuesday, as well.) But let’s not forget what Jesus says when they ask him for a sign: “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says to them when they ask him for a sign, “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” (6:27) You are not here because you were rationally convinced. You are not here because you understand intellectually what happens at the altar, because you can articulate a doctrinally-coherent description of the sense in which Jesus is bread or vice versa. You are here because you came to Jesus and were fed.
It’s true for each one of us. In some sense, something once fed us, and we were filled. And we come here, week by week, to look for more. Maybe it’s a satisfying meal. I hope to be a decent-enough cook. But it’s not my meal to serve, in the end. The people ask Jesus, “What should we do to do the works of God?” (6:28) And he answers, “This is the work of God: that you believe.” (6:29)
It’s an ambiguous phrase. We ordinarily translate it this way: “This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (6:29) In other words, this is all the work you need to do that pertains to God: simply to have faith. We don’t need to understand what’s going on at the altar or analyze it in the right philosophical terms. We just need to be here together, faithfully sharing this holy meal.
But the same New Testament Greek phrase could just as well be translated: “This is the work of God, so that you may believe…” (6:29) And that’s a different sort of thing entirely. This, all this, is the work of God, so that we may believe. This bread of life that comes down from heaven is not our reward for believing. It’s our spiritual food. It’s not what we get if we believe. It’s what feeds us so that we have the strength to believe.
Most of us spent most of a year cut off from the Body of Christ made present in the Eucharistic bread. But we were not cut off from Jesus, the Bread of Life himself. In a thousand different ways, he came to us, and fed us, despite it all; and we seek him, not because we saw signs, but because we ate and were filled. We have tasted “the food that endures for eternal life,” (John 6:27) and we have come back again and again looking for more, hungering for the peace of God, praying with the crowd who follow Jesus: “Lord, give us this bread always.” (John 6:34) Amen.