For Sunday
Proper 15B
Collect
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus loves playing with expectations. In every way. He loves to play (intellectually, mischievously, hopefully, encouragingly) for himself and those he is teaching. He zags when everyone else zigs.
He also never lets literalism stand. This seems to be important to him.
Here he is, talking about his purpose in the world—how God has brought him into the people’s midst to show them the way—and he offers an affirming, attractive, life-giving image to them: “I am the bread of life!” and the response of some faith leaders is essentially, how is this guy bread? LOL.
We read this and think: literalism.
But their response displays a more insidious character than that. They don’t take him literally about the bread part, but the eating part. Their actual words are
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
which shows that they understand that Jesus isn’t bread. But they are stuck on the purpose of such a physical image. They don’t have enough imagination to play with words, to listen deeply, or to dream of something different.
They hear bread and they get literal about one part of the idea.
They don’t get what Jesus intends. They don’t understand him, let alone what he has come to do and be. Not because they don’t get metaphors or take everything literally. But because they take part of it literally and miss the bigger picture Jesus is sharing.
Jesus doesn’t just use a metaphor to describe a metaphysical relationship. He’s also using this material image to name the material character of the Missio Dei. Which means our expectations for metaphors can lead us to misunderstand Jesus today. That Jesus doesn’t just feed our souls. His purpose is to transform the world into one in which people are fed with literal bread. So we all are fed.