In the Bread of Life discourse, Jesus seeks to teach his followers about God, but they keep missing the point. Just like we do.
Jesus shows us how our worry and fear keeps us from the truth.
Proper 14B | John 6:35, 41-51
It starts with a sign.
The hungry masses are fed with a kid’s lunch. Some fish and some bread. Perhaps there’s a metaphor here — like yeast, the feast keeps growing.
But this feast comes to the people in the midst of other things.
Feeding, healing, and sharing.
Work so profound, Herod thinks he’s seen a ghost.
Jesus is leading his disciples and all these hangers-on are following, desperate to touch, hoping to have a glimpse of the Messiah for themselves.
Perhaps they are hoping to be healed. They think there’s something wrong with them. Or they bring a friend to Jesus, looking to get them healed. Or maybe they are there to gawk. Hoping to catch another miracle. Another sign. Because one sign is rarely enough for us.
But Jesus tells them that all this misses the point. They’ve got it wrong. They’re confused.
Jesus isn’t a faith healer. He isn’t there to fulfill desires or individual hopes. He’s there to teach.
Missing the Message
The trouble with following our rabbi Jesus is that we’re always missing the message. He’s not a bad teacher, of course. It’s just that we’re terrible students.
That sign, that miracle with the fish and the bread, the miracle the disciples didn’t understand isn’t about Jesus being awesome. It isn’t about superpowers or some sort of proof that we’re supposed to fall in line behind our great leader. Jesus isn’t our king, our president, or our fascist dictator.
It’s about God. With Jesus, it’s always about God.
Never Alone
We remember that this is a bigger story than us. Bigger than our precious personal relationship with Jesus. Bigger than our country and our very humanity.
It’s about God and creation. A God of love dreaming of a world which learns the boundary-breaking beauty of love.
A world transformed by liberation and toppling of despots, of freeing slaves and stopping armies and then providing enough, always enough manna to live on.
Never truly lost, we are never truly alone.
Like Manna from Heaven
Jesus reminds us that in the bread, we remember the manna. A sign, not of the power of God, but the generous, compassionate mind of God.
Unlike the human mind, full of fear and jealousy, wonder and hope, confused by the signs of our times, God has had far more time to wrestle with those angels and demons.
Angels and demons that always force us to see questions of food, health, ambition as commodities in a limited economy. Our selfishness overcomes our belief and we are blind.
Blind to the pain we cause.
The fear which drives us.
The lack of faith we express.
Always a zero-sum game of scarcity and resource-hoarding.
But the manna is not limited by God’s will.
It’s limited to the appetite of the people.
The manna, like the loaves, like the very bread of life itself isn’t a fixed sum.
Our daily bread, like Jesus himself, isn’t determined by scarcity or abundance.
It’s about enough.
Enough for all to eat. Not a piece, a tiny chunk, an equal nibble. But their fill. Everyone eats until they are full. Everyone. Until they are full.
And then Jesus takes God’s story one step further. He gets the disciples to each grab a basket. Because there are people outside the tribe who need to eat their fill. It isn’t just for them.
They Misunderstand
This is the same thing the crowd keeps misunderstanding about Jesus. That it isn’t about Jesus.
The Feeding. Coming from heaven. Bread of Life.
This isn’t about Jesus. He’s teaching.
‘And they shall all be taught by God.’
Not that Jesus is God. Wasting our time on trinitarian formulations or the divinity of Jesus doesn’t help us understand this teaching!
And I know it’s hard!
With this Bread of Life teaching our own angels and demons and scarcity reasoning and our literal and metaphorical ways of reading texts and our traditional Sunday school memories form into a mush of confusion. Just like that crowd. We get distracted by a word or phrase and what it means.
What the lectionary cut out was the part in which Jesus said that he came from heaven. Which isn’t a boast or declarative about Jesus, but about the origin of the teaching. This, even this, is God’s doing!
But the crowd goes all Nicodemus on him. Remember, he’s the one who got confused by the idea of being born again?
This isn’t about who Jesus is. It’s about who God is.
God has come to them, to us, to all of humanity so that we all may be free. Free of the shackles of selfishness.
Free of a belief in a God who doesn’t care about the poor, the weak, the powerless. A belief which limits and divides us. A belief which encourages brutality and justifies violence.
God comes to us to free us of what we assume gods are supposed to be about. Other gods are selfish, limited, obsessed with being pleased, transactions, scarcity.
Other gods are like kings, tyrants, even presidents and prime ministers—above us. But God walks among us, even later, stooping to wash our feet.
(In)Tangible
This story isn’t just the handful of verses we read this morning, this chapter of John or even the story laid out in Scripture.
It’s life and creation; our community and all the people in it; our yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. This is a story which reminds us that the span of our lives isn’t measured only by us, but all our relationships.
We connect with our parents and their parents. Our children and their children. We don’t live 70, 80, 90, years, but 200, 225, 250 years. Their lives, our lives, your lives, my life are measured on a different scale, a community scale, a global scale, a blessed community scale. A God’s great kin-dom scale!
In all, we live for thousands of years. And we are the caretakers of this creation, this story, learning and teaching and becoming.
And our petty arguments, full of pride and convicted selfishness aren’t the sources of life any more than our saying “I believe in Jesus” is the same as God coming into the world and walking on this soil, eating this bread, and teaching these disciples.
Our obsession with the literal vs. the metaphorical, the factual vs. the fictional, the tangible vs. the intangible is a two-millennia-long adventure in missing the point.
It’s scarcity and angels and demons and petty pride clouding the truth.
It’s the crowds following Jesus because they think they could get something out of it. A healing, perhaps. Another miracle on demand. Either way, something big just for them!
Jesus comes to show us God; that we shall all be taught by God.
We aren’t stuck.
We aren’t alone.
God gives us enough.
And we are enough.
Anything more is selfishness.
Anything less is fear.
We are enough.
We aren’t broken.
Just imperfect caretakers of creation and God’s love mission.
Caretakers made of love.
Whether we can see it or not.
Feel it or not.
We are God’s love.
We are made by love to love the whole world.
Right where we are.
Taught by God;
free of fear
and freed to love.
So grab a basket.
There’s enough bread to take with you.