11 Sunday after Pentecost, 08/16/2009

Sermon on John 6:51-58, by David Hoster

Jesus said, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever." [John 6:51-58 NRSV]

When Jesus said, "I am the bread of life," you have to understand that he was a person who thought nothing of spending forty days in a desert without eating. Most of the people he talked to were peasants for whom fear of starvation loomed whenever they were forced to miss even a single meal. That meant "I am the bread of life" was talking not only about a different kind of "bread," but a different kind of "life" as well.

What the people in Jesus' audience understood by those two words is no mystery to us. Bread meant survival in their economy. Without it, they died. No life. In their book, bread and life were ground level, physical things.

Jesus came from their world and certainly understood them. Only one day earlier he had fed five thousand of them with physical bread of miraculous origins, sustained their life, and gotten their attention. They saw the miracle of that feeding in light of their ancestral wandering when thousands of people were fed in the wilderness with manna. As a result, many of these people were motivated to leave home and make what was, for them, a risky journey across the Sea of Galilee to see what this Jesus person was really all about.

Bread was on their minds. So was life. But these were not people who accumulated vacation time or savings, so to take a couple days off from work to go listen to a preacher meant leaving behind the productivity that their lives depended on. So they were invested in this trip. They'd rolled the dice. They were in a heightened state of alertness. Survival, though certainly not hanging in the balance, was nevertheless on their radar.

So when they asked Jesus what his credentials really were, they meant it. "Is this going to be like our ancestors and the manna?" they asked hopefully. "Is there going to be free bread in this for us?" And Jesus said, "Nope, your ancestors at that bread and they all still died."

Different kind of bread, then. Different kind of life. Far better bread and life, actually, if you can wrap your mind around what Jesus was talking about.

You and I, of course, know where Jesus was headed. We've read the New Testament and listened to lots of sermons. We know human beings don't live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God, making Jesus himself the bread of life since he was in the business of delivering God's word in those days.

Physical bread, to Jesus, was the "daily bread" of the Lord's Prayer, one of the basic, minimal needs that a person asked of God in order to sustain daily life. But once daily bread and daily life were secured, both bread and life could and must mean something much greater. The bread from heaven was the life giving word of God. The life it gave was eternal

So Jesus posed a question and a challenge to these people. In their heightened state of alertness, would it be possible for them to see beyond bread and life as they understood these things, accept Jesus' credentials as the word of God, and catch the vision of a larger sort of life than life had ever shown them? That's a big leap for a hungry peasant. This is a very tough moment in scripture.

It's no less a tough moment for us, even if we're fabulously wealthy, well fed, and well cared for compared to Palestinian peasants of the first century. Though getting free daily bread would scarcely stir our interest, the most recent issue of the Economist raises the question of bread and life in a different way. Why is it that human fertility inevitably declines in civilizations when their prosperity increases? The wealthier the people, the fewer the people. More bread, less life.

We all understand that phenomenon. It was nothing for families in rural America up to the 19h century to have eight or ten children. By contrast, families in our world of industrialized wealth rarely have more than two, and some choose to have none at all.

We take that picture of wealth and fertility for granted. Yet the Economist's point, a theological point at base, is that absolutely no other life form on the face of planet earth does it this way. Every other herd, flock, covey, school or pride increases in fertility when climate change improves the resources in their feeding zone. Only human life decreases. Why?

As I said, the real answer is theological. Only human beings are capable of turning bread into their god. Since we are smart enough to control the means of production, we can expand the food supply and then use surplus labor to produce all sorts of other things that we quickly come to see as equally essentially to our well-being as our daily bread. Then we worship them for the expanded life they seem to give us. Cars, luxurious clothing, power, education, big screen high-def TVs: daily bread in all its modern manifestations.

We may be far removed from Palestinian peasants in many ways, but on the issue of bread we, too, will follow preachers-usually politicians-to the far side of the Sea of Galilee if we think they can give us free bread or any of the other miracles our economy has generated.

And when life becomes identified with all these false breads that really aren't the same as life, then life itself decreases. Not only does fertility decline with increased wealth, but so too does social health itself. Human history is a record of the rise and decline of civilizations. A people are hungry, aggressively build a powerful civilization, and then decline as their vitality diminishes.

Once again, the population of animals fluctuates according to available resources. Only human population fluctuates according to the spiritual state of the civilization as it describes an arc that first rises and then declines. We all eat manna and then we die.

So when Jesus says, "I am the bread of life," we need to listen. Death accumulates slowly in the absence of the bread of life, but it does accumulate. We invest so much of the best wit and energy we have in building up our income and other resources, our property and consumables that we have little left over for the one who stands at the center of life, our creator and God.

Far from being the bread of life, Jesus in our culture is at best a quick snack we grab on our way to more urgent needs. I wonder if it wouldn't be more honest for churches everywhere just to install drive-through lanes for whatever watered down brand of theological solace they're dispensing. In ours, and in every civilization at the peak of its productivity, it's fair to say that we're so wealthy that "give us today our daily bread" is an utterly meaningless statement for any of us to make.

It is to be ardently hoped that "I am the bread of life" does not become equally meaningless, because our spiritual life hangs on it just as surely as our physical life hangs on daily bread. What does Jesus mean when he claims to be the bread of life? To put it as simply as I know how, Jesus means that we should put the word of God at the center of everyplace we live our lives. We are to consume the bread of life as Eucharistic bread and thus fed and strengthened, become the living presence of God's word in the world.

Thus, loving enemies, resisting anxiety, never lusting and objectifying other human souls, forgiving incessantly, praying without ceasing, trusting to truth for our freedom...all these things feed the soul and magnify our life and vitality. They set us free from life-draining slavery to physical bread in all its manifestations. They are so powerful, in fact, that they fuel us for eternal life, life lived entirely unbound by this physical world.

Human beings were designed and intended by their creator to be far more than creatures who wax and wane according to the dictates of their grazing lands. However, controlling the means of production and freeing ourselves from the physical limitations of the planet is only a bare first step. Just because we can accumulate wealth doesn't mean we've won the battle. We like to think we're the pinnacle of civilization, but we're still closer to the herd animals than we are to the destination God has for us.

There is a great, broad road ahead for humanity and Jesus points the way. We can be free from the ways this planet deals out death but we must be as generous with one another as God is generous with us in all the mental, emotional and spiritual gifts that God gave us for our journey. We must learn to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

When that day comes, and it will, the church will be neither a drive-through nor even a gas station. The church is the people and the people will fuel the world with the love and generosity of God almighty. That's the vision Jesus offered the hardscrabble peasants of Galilee. That's the vision Jesus offers to the wealthy and to the poor of all the generations that have waxed and waned since then.

If we can put our need for daily, physical bread into proper perspective and put the true bread of life at the center of all the places we do our living, then we, too, will catch a glimpse of that vision and come more fully to live the way God means for us to live.

The Rev. David Hoster
Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas, USA
E-Mail: david.w.hoster@gmail.com

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