From the Daily Lectionary for Thursday in the Fourth Week of Lent
John 6:41-51
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Clearly Jesus and the Jewish elite are not on the same page. The chief priests, Pharisees, and scribes are comfortable with their theistic ideas of God; that is to say, they prefer a God aloof in the heavens, distant, unknowable, who, as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, from time to time “stirs the affairs of the world with a stick.” Jesus speaks of God as among the people, incarnate, with profound empathy in the human community; a God who “does things.”
The Jewish authorities consider such a teaching heresy. How could one claim to have come down from heaven? But that is the writer of John’s message: Jesus and those who follow him, who trust in the way he teaches, are indeed “of God” with power to heal, forgive, and restore. The bread that God gives to the world, as it has ever been, is Love… Love borne by the human heart that only desires to sacrifice for the good of the whole. Such love will engender heaven on earth.
And to further make the point Jesus tells his interlocutors that the bread God gives to the world is his flesh, an appalling metaphor to be sure. The allusion is not just distasteful, it smacks of the ancient rite of human sacrifice and the literal eating of human flesh. A few verses hence Jesus will add blood to the equation: “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood there is no life within you.” Such a saying would not only offend the sensibilities of decorum, but would be an affront to the Jewish reverence of purity.
Jesus, of course, is not being literal, but decidedly dramatic to make his point. Some scholars interpret this passage as a teaching on the Eucharistic meal. But to be sure, the priority here is the theology of Incarnation. Love requires flesh and blood, which is to say, God requires flesh and blood. Love makes its home in the human heart. Love is incarnation. To love the world, God requires the human community. Without the human community, the church, God can’t love purposefully, reasonably. Dare we say that God depends on us? Think on that, good people. How would such a teaching inform our vocation? Do you believe that the Incarnation is you?
A Prayer of the Incarnation (BCP p. 252)
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
