This Week: Proper 16B
Gospel: John 6:56-69
I suspect that, at this point, there are a good number of preachers tired of dealing with the Bread of Life discourse. Maybe you’ve avoided it by focusing on the rise of Solomon in 1 Kings, which is, itself, a kind of problematic option. Or perhaps you’ve gone to the Epistle the last few weeks. I for one am less interested in preaching from Paul because it feels like I’m writing a sermon based on someone else’s sermon rather than the teaching of Jesus. But that’s just me.
As I worked through earlier in the week with my reflection on the whole discourse, I think there is a real need to speak to the themes running behind the image far more than to the image itself—because the image out of context is like wisdom without experience—it can make sense without doing anything.
Ultimately, I think there are two approaches to the text that draw me in.
The winnowing of followers
There is something deep and convicting for the church in the 21st Century and our obsession with
- winning
- followers
- money
- success
- protection/safety
- power/control
- being “the best”
- never being satisfied
- feeling good
- pleasing 100% of people 100% of the time
- consuming
- going where we are “fed”
when Jesus drives thousands of followers away by essentially saying You’ve missed the point.
This is particularly convicting for us because it is tied to a miracle—a big, public witness to the greatness of God in Jesus. Because people are drawn to consume and then want more of that. More of that excitement, safety, contentment, joy. And Jesus says to them Not gonna happen.
How, then, do we contend with all of this? When so many of us are following Jesus for the wrong reasons. And encouraging others to do the same! Holy cats! The whole evangelical enterprise of the last few centuries was built on the idea of bringing people to Jesus—often with the promise of their getting something out of it (the bread of life). Here, follow this guy—he’ll feed you.
This isn’t only a problem for evangelicalism, however. At the root of this sort of evangelism is a consumer mindset that is in every part of the Christian landscape. The idea that people desire to be pleased by their church, fed by their church, and if not, they can simply go to one that does—this very idea is antithetical to the gospel.
That this culmination of the Bread of Life discourse comes with Jesus talking to his disciples specifically, after all the crowds have gone, comes, not as special teaching, but with the American ring of failure to it. That sense of defeat because Jesus hasn’t “won” people over and convinced them to be better people.
In other words, American (and perhaps the archaic “Western”) ideology would paint Jesus as a loser here. And that would be a spicy sermon!
The Manna / Moses Comparison
One of the recurring images in John 6 is offered with a kind of subtlety that the modern reader is likely to miss. When Jesus says
“This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died.”
we’re probably drawn to that last word. It’s a kind of lightning rod in the text, I suspect. But if we consider what Jesus has been talking about this whole time, there is a common reference being made here.
Jesus is talking about feeding the multitudes and the multitudes wanting to force him to keep them fed. This makes an analogy to the Manna from heaven described in Exodus 16 totally plain. There, God keeps the people fed with daily bread.
But what happens after that point is that people associate the bread, not with God, but with Moses. That it is their human leader that gets them their sustenance. So what Jesus is bringing to mind is
- the way people attribute sustenance to human beings rather than God and
- that the people are already doing the same thing to him.
And because the people are not focused on the love of God and the means of their sustaining being not only physical, but also spiritual grace, they miss the coordinating of grace and love that comes from the Jesus project.
Given all of that, let me sum it up this way:
Jesus calls disciples to participate in a great group project—what we call the Kingdom of God or I like to call the Dream of God. A project that involves physical and spiritual grace, joy, and love. And it begins, not from a vision of self-benefit, but of common grace. Something more akin to universal health, sustenance, and joy. And all of it stems, not from a single person granting it like a benevolent king, but through a mutual life and trust in God.