12 Pent Proper 14
11 Aug 2024
Bread for the journey. Pan para el viaje. Pain pour le voyage. Bread is what sustains us, whether that bread be hard tack, wheat or barley loaves, rice cakes, amaranth, corn, millet, and even beans become “bread.” Every human being needs bread, regardless of what we call it or what we use as bread.
Jesus went to a Roman enclave and said, “Look, here is bread for your bodies; there is no shortage of food and if you follow the path where God leads you, there will be enough for all.
Then he crossed the lake and, on the Jewish side, said that he can offer them bread for their souls, bread that will never parish. “Follow the teachings I give to you.” God cares for everyone and offers us a path to joy.
This week Jesus makes his boldest move; he says he is the bread of life. He is God with us, the Word made flesh. Eat this bread; eat this flesh! It is shocking, revolting. We are not cannibals. But it is meant to be shocking and to cause those who weak of heart to leave and no longer follow Jesus. We, 2000 years removed from Jesus’ words, can not understand the shock value. We eat our sanitized version of the bread and the wine in a very symbolic fashion. Now those early followers of Jesus who heard the words as John, and in truth the other Gospel writers, wrote them, realized that Jesus did not literally mean we should eat his flesh, but before the crucifixion would not have realized the sacrifice Jesus was to make. Yet many of them only saw the human Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph.
Now if I invited you to eat haggis, which is bits and pieces of sheep innards steamed with oatmeal in the intestinal lining of a sheep, many of you would balk. Yet this is nothing compared with the Jesus command to eat his flesh! This is total commitment. That is why we must look to what Jesus said to us in the previous two weeks. He is calling us to deeper and deeper commitment to the way of God. This is the way God intended for humans to live from the beginning of time. Our faith teaches that God entered into the life of humanity in this way, in that time and that place, but that the message is timeless.
Do you have hope, or do you face a crisis of hope? If you truly have hope, you enter this worship space with the expectation you will be fed and sent. You know God is at work in the world and that, for Christians, Jesus is the model for how that work looks.
Paul speaks of hope, joy, and love. Are these most wonderful of attributes not the very basis of our faith?
We face so many crisis: personal, local, national and even world wide. We differ in our politics and in our vision for what should happen in our towns, our state, our nation, and the world.
Yet I think Jesus offers us a blueprint, if you will allow me to use the metaphor, for how we can be different and yet act in a way that brings the Reign of God to fruition. God wants wholeness for all of humanity; that wholeness includes physical as well as spiritual feeding. You came to this space to because you are hungry. It is not my words that feed you; it is the words of the Gospel and the Eucharist.
I think the text this week is not to be intellectually analyzed so much and received by all of us. We should receive it like bread and know that it will nourish us. This is where our relationship to God is: in the bread we eat.
Note: As I was pondering what to say and how to say it, I searched for poems containing the word "bread." One poem created and visceral and uncomfortable image of how we eat bread: Margret Atwood's poem "All Bread". It begins thus:
All bread is made of wood,
cow dung, packed brown moss,
the bodies of dead animals, the teeth
and backbones, what is left
after the ravens. This dirt
flows through the stems into the grain,
For the complete poem, read by Pádraig Ó Tuama: https://onbeing.org/poetry/all-bread/
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