Karen Hollis | Aug 11, 2024
Pentecost 12
John 6:35, 41-51 Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 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 forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
On the Seattle University campus, where I did my theology degree is the Chapel of St. Ignatius. Walking into that space is like walking into a different realm. The modern building was designed to represent different seven bottles of light in a stone box. Cut out of the plain textured walls are windows of different sizes, colours and opacity. One first enters the narthex, a room well-lit by large front windows. A curved wall invites the visitor to proceed further into the space of the sanctuary. Dimmer and warmer, the sanctuary is like a womb, with beams of light pouring in or trickling in through various features, curved or straight, somehow all working together to create something greater than what the architect could do alone. The ceilings are tall, yet it still feels intimate, enveloping the visitor in the tenderness of mystery. The Chapel of St. Ignatius is a space where form and light come together, where body and spirit unite. At the far end of the sanctuary there is a room always aglow . . . a tree dwells in the center of it, and at the base of the tree lives the tabernacle, where the Blessed Sacrament is kept. For those unfamiliar with Catholicism, when the priest consecrates the hosts, the wafers used for bread, there are often some left over. These are placed into the tabernacle for the next time they are needed. Meanwhile, people can come and pray in the little glowing room, with the Real Presence of Christ there in the tabernacle.
Catholics believe that in the Eucharist, the wafers become Christ’s body, through a process known as transubstantiation. This was not an uncommon topic of conversation during my seminary years, being at a Catholic university and all, but it was ironically a United Methodist professor who really explained it well. (and the UC is part Methodist) In transubstantiation the form stays the same, while the essence changes. So, the host, as it is called, stays the same, made of whatever they’re made of – I heard a priest joke once that he could believe they’re the body of Christ before he could believe they are bread – the host physically remains the same, but the essence of it changes, the central quality or the character of it changes . . . changes into Christ . . . into the Real Presence. In the consecrated host, matter and spirit unite.
As I explored the stuff of spirit in preparation for my reflection today, I found pretty quickly that it was difficult to talk about spirit without the body. While it felt a bit ironic or paradoxical to include the body, I also deeply resonated with it . . . for it is through the body – through the physical – that the spirit is made known.
In the Christian tradition, we look first to Jesus, the Christ, as one who exemplifies this reality. The church has long celebrated Jesus as fully human and fully divine. One who has human parents, known by the whole community . . . and is able to confess his spiritual identity as God’s own child. In order to be one, he must be both . . . or it doesn’t work.
In the words of Richard Rohr, Christians around the world “daringly believe that God’s presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him – and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world.” Rohr’s book, The Universal Christ, has the liberal/progressive church in rich conversation about shifting our perspective from looking up to Jesus as one holy and separate from us, to seeing Jesus as an example of the Holy in all of us. We are munching on the idea that we are formed in a world where matter and spirit commingle.
While at first glance, this morning’s text doesn’t appear to help in this journey, when we dig into it, what we find might surprise us. Twice in this passage Jesus is referred to as the Bread of Life, the bread come down from heaven. Without context for his words, it seems like he has some spiritualized, otherworldly secret sauce that makes him better or different from the rest of us. The context of his words connects back again to God providing Manna in the desert. It’s a gift that can’t be stored away or saved for later, rather God’s provision and presence are for today. As we have heard over the past couple of weeks, Jesus is like Manna, yet what he is offering goes beyond what God did in the desert. But that’s not all. This whole discourse began with Jesus feeding the 5,000 – do you remember how many baskets of fragments were collected? It was twelve: one for each tribe of Israel. In the Jewish imagination, these baskets represent the twelve loaves of shewbread that was consecrated each week in the Temple, before it was destroyed. Shewbread was like Manna in that it illustrated an aspect of God’s character without being God itself. Now, the crowd wouldn’t have interpreted the symbol as a manifestation of God, it’s not transubstantiation and was never intended to be. Here’s where it gets interesting. Unlike Manna, shewbread never expired or went bad. So, in Jewish popular imagination, Jesus was reinterpreting the meaning of shewbread in a new context. Jesus is new shewbread that never goes bad. “To believe in Jesus as the Bread of Life is primary to acknowledge the relationship between God and God’s people.” Even though the Temple is gone, God still provides. Jesus spoke and taught and helped people shift their thinking, and helped them see that what they were hungry for was already within them. Helping people to turn toward the indescribably love that is within us.
With all of this in context, Jesus keeps talking . . . remarkably, there’s more. Jesus tells them that he is so committed to this purpose, he will dedicate his body to the flourishing of his people . . . and maybe that’s what’s so holy about him. There is power in his enfleshed belief that his people are deserving of abundance and prosperity which he evidenced by feeding them.1. It’s not a magic secret sauce, it’s Jesus aligned with his path, reinterpreting the symbols of his tradition. He shows up fully human and fully divine.
In a world already Christ-soaked, we are also fully human and fully divine, we also have souls longing for expression through our bodies. In the words of John O’Donohue, the body is a sacrament . . . a visible sign of invisible grace. [Through our bodies] the unseen world come to expression in in visible world . . . All our inner life and intimacy of soul longs to find an outer mirror. It longs for a form in which it can be seen, felt, and touched. The body is the mirror where the secret world of the soul comes to expression. The body is a sacred threshold.
And the body and soul need feeding. As we continue to munch on this idea of our own sacredness, let us remember again our shared practice of eating and drinking. What if when we remember Jesus and all he is to us, we also remember in the bread and cup that we are sacred. What if when we take a bite of really delicious bread – living bread – or sit down for a meal with family and friends, we take a bite and remember that we are sacred . . . that in us, body and spirit unite.
1. Enfleshed Aug 11, 2024