The bread of life is my flesh

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

To tell the story of one’s life can be a difficult thing. It can be joyful, but it can also be sad. Life seldom leads us straight path, a path without hitting bottom, without bumps, without pain. Those things that matter to us in life, that have made us into who we are, are often tied to some experience that was not an easy one.

Because they tell us that we are vulnerable, we tend to keep those stories to ourselves, share them only in places of trust, with a friend maybe, with a spouse, a partner, grown children.

When Lady Wisdom calls the simple-minded to come join her feast of bread and wine she beckons that we might leave the path of Folly, the seemingly straight and happy path, and get on the bumpy road to maturity, to find what really matters in life.

“I am the living bread, says Jesus, and the bread that I will give and the wine that I will give for the life of this world, is my flesh. I go the bumpy, painful road to the cross so that you and the world may have life. A life that matters. And in me you will live forever.”

The story of Jesus Christ the way John tells it in his Gospel, reflects a lot of pain, a lot of struggling. The antagonism begins already in the introduction to the Gospel, even before we hear “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, ...” Very soon after the opening we hear: “...yet the world did not know him.”, “... and his own people did not accept him.” This sounds profoundly sad, and as it goes with sadness, as the Gospel continues, it is using stronger and stronger expressions of anger and enmity. Expressions of enmity and anger that, separated from its original context, have caused a lot of grief in the course of the history of preaching and teaching the Gospel of John.

Yet, John ate of the bread of life and had come so close to the fullness of grace, that in his gospel he also gave us some of the most profound insights into God’s grace and images of it, so that we might come to recognize the bread of life ourselves and find the path to life eternal.

John’s and the life of his congregation was not an easy one. It was challenged and antagonistic.

It was the time after the Romans had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Common Era. The Romans had almost extinguished all of Jewish life and with it Jewish Christian life. John was a Jewish Christian. So was his congregation. They may have lived somewhere in Syria-Palestine.

The few, scattered groups of Pharisees that survived began to pull themselves together and in a unique effort to rebuild what little was left, they unified their often conflicting views and forged what later would be known as Rabbinic Judaism. Out of near extinction grew one of the strongest, vivid, and productive eras in Jewish history.

The Roman governing forces soon gave power to the local leaders to run their own communities. Their interest was to survive, under and in spite of the Roman rule, and to make that happen, their focus was on streamlining, on unifying forces.

What were the local Jewish authorities going to do with a group of Jews who were not ready to be streamlined? A group of people who fervently claimed that a certain Jesus of Nazareth who had died four decades before the fall of Jerusalem, was the Son of God, the Son that God gave to die for the life of this world, out of love for this world; who claimed that Jesus was the Messiah, the bread of life... and “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace”? What were they going to do?

Society was not yet uniform at all. In the Gospel of John there are the crowds, there are the leaders. Often there are “the Jews” - and we don’t always know who exactly they are. There seem to be outright opponents. But also persons and groups in gray areas. Nicodemus who comes at night, and later returns after Jesus has died. He seems to represent people who secretly favor the teachings of the Christian faith in John’s congregation. There are the brothers of Jesus who are pictured as being a bit at a distance, giving advice. Among the disciples there are some who stay, and some who leave. Some of whom later turn against the disciples.

“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 on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”

It is quite possible that the life stories of members of John’s congregation contained not only experiences of struggle, of disappointment and bitterness. But also experiences of persecution and maybe in some cases even death.

The images offered in Jesus’ long speech about himself as the bread of life, about his flesh that he gives for the life of the world, offer themselves in so many layers of meaning to those who believe in him. In the hunger for assuredness there is the bread that nourishes faith. In the search for union with Christ and for the gift of life eternal there is the sacrament of bread and wine. In the fear of persecution and death there is the cross on which Jesus offered his flesh for the life of the world.

Just as God did not leave the people of God in the desert only with manna to eat but also gave them the Thora, God’s good word, so did Jesus not leave the crowds just with a onetime, miraculous feeding of two fish and five loaves of bread, but came himself as the bread of life.

John’s life story and that of his congregation is not an easy one. The words he uses and the exchanges he presents can even be frightening to us who read John’s story of Jesus in our own time, especially after the Holocaust and the centuries that led up to it. However, John’s language of faith is one of the deepest expressions of the love of God the Christian tradition has in store.

In John there is no Last Supper with the disciples. No institution of the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood given for us, for the forgiveness of sin. John puts that with the bread of life. In the last meal Jesus shares with his disciples, in this highly sensitive, we may call it sacramental moment of their community, Jesus sits down and washes the feet of his disciples. The feet of all his disciples, even Judas’. The washing of the feet is the gift of reconciliation. Of forgiveness. This is what John tells his congregation above all. Reconcile. Forgive. And remember the new commandment that Jesus gave you when the feet were washed: “... that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We have come a long way, a bumpy road, as the Church, and as individuals who believe in the life-giving power of Jesus Christ. Although there are many areas in this beloved world of God’s where we could contribute more to reconciliation and life stories with lesser degrees of sadness and pain, there are some areas in which we are beginning to learn and to love.
Next Sunday we will welcome in our pulpit Rabbi Walter, and in a few weeks Pr. Moore will in turn preach at temple Emanu El.

It is the glorious gift of life in Jesus of which we partake in the sacrament of bread and wine that compels us to enter the path of reconciliation and love. A love that we cannot withhold from a world that God loved so much.

And the peace of God which surpasses our understanding, guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.