August 18, 2024 – The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
The Rev. Claire Keene
About a month ago, I noticed in reading staff meeting notes that someone had added this annotation: “Episcopal high-carb season begins.” In my early-morning brain fog, I thought, “Huh—I wonder what that’s all about. I know for sure that the word, carbohydrate, is found neither in biblical Hebrew nor in biblical Greek. Then I began to look at the Gospel lessons for the weeks coming up, and I thought, “Oh yeah, I get it. After Proper 11, back on July 21st, the gospel reading is just bread, bread, bread.”
We—well, Jesus– will be talking about bread through September1 this year. (That’s Propers 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16.) That’s a lot of bread. The writer of John’s gospel really wants us to hear some sort of message that Jesus wants us to hear, and it involves bread.
Now, I really like bread. I especially like homemade yeast breads, warm out of the oven. When my son was young, I made homemade whole wheat bread, with honey and yeast, week in and week out. But how can bread be that important to us—is it important enough for five weeks of the same message? Well, bread is a pretty basic food. When other food is not available, bread can keep us from starvation, give us enough energy to do what we have to do to survive. And when we have vegetables and fruits and meats and dairy products to add to it, then a hearty slice of bread is a good platform on which to build a sandwich, or it can become a good wrap to hold loose ingredients together.
Bread is very portable, very adaptable. It’s easy to take with us in a sack or a briefcase to work. It toasts well, when we want something hot. My farmer grandfather even used to eat cold soak-bread for supper— cornbread leftover from noontime dinner, crumbled up in cold buttermilk. (He knew he would have hot biscuits for breakfast the next morning, to go with his sorghum syrup, eggs, and coffee.) Bread helps us make sense of our hungers, no matter where we are, even traveling down a road we don’t know.
So what could it mean for Jesus to say, “Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”? And how could Jesus go on to say, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. . . . Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven”? What does that tell us about our lives, our life in Christ, our life before God?
Jesus is not talking here about rules for a church service, about literal bread and wine, prayed over. And, of course, this passage is not talking about our literally eating human flesh and blood. This passage is talking about Jesus sharing his humanity and his divinity in relationship with the Father and in his relationship and presence with us. That’s what it means for us to eat his flesh and drink his blood—to share his life among ourselves as human beings who are hungry for a greater life and to share his life with God. We need to “taste him” and see how God’s life and human life combine. It’s about relationship and presence: Father, Son, and us.
In Jesus, the life of the Creator has entered our life, as if we have digested and swallowed him, has entered our flesh and blood, has endured life as we endure it, has lived a real human life in the ways that we live a real life: held in the limits of time and space, as our bodies are; has sweated and hungered, as our bodies do; has needed sleep, food, drink, companionship; has matured over time, both physically and in understanding. In Jesus, God’s power and love have entered our world not as a visitor on a short business trip, but as one who has immigrated from another hemisphere, replanted here from life without limitation to a life bounded on every side.
This visiting one, the Son, stands across two kinds of life—divine and human. He has access to the Father in the same way that we have access to and companionship with the Son. The limitations that God endures as the Son, Jesus, are for our sake, so that we might not be stranded here as victims of our sins, our misdirection, our ignorance of what human life is about.
John’s message for us today is not about wafers and wine. It’s about relationship and presence. That is the bread that has come down from heaven—a taste of what it might mean for us to live more fully as God does, in Jesus. It’s about relationship and presence with each other as with God. In Jesus’ fleshly human life, in which he was earth-bound as we are and yet present to the Father, we discover our invitation. We are invited to “swallow” that life, to take it in. In Jesus’ presence we earth creatures can drink deeply and eat fulsomely of the divine love Jesus has brought to our table. Tasting Jesus’ life, we are not only fed and enriched, ourselves. We learn how to pass on his divine love all around.
It’s a faith decision: with whom will we relate, and how?
In Jesus’ presence, our earthly li es can drink deeply and eat fulsomely of the divine love he has brought into our table. Tasting Jesus’ life, we begin to feed others with love. It’s a faith decision, to trust the source of our nourishment, and to pass it on. It’s being fed and feeding others with relationship and presence, sharing the bounty of love. It’s not too different from that moment when a young adult introduces his intended spouse to a parent, saying, in effect: “I want you to have a taste of her: she’s delicious. She nourishes me and quenches my thirst. Enjoy.”
Our faith, our choice to trust, is about Jesus, and it’s about us— relationship and presence, offered in both directions. This is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world: relationship and presence as they are found and shared in Jesus.
The great St. Augustine advised those whom he was preparing to receive their first Eucharist after baptism, “Be what you see; receive what you are”—in other words, become the body and blood of Jesus. Take it in, digest it, let it become who you are–a way of life that bestows heavenly food in this place of need, heavenly drink amidst the world’s thirst.
“From many grains, one bread,” Augustine said, “from many grapes, one wine.” That’s us, as the loving presence of Christ, bearing Christ’s love and grace to whomever we meet next. May we become the bread which we see. May we receive who we are: one, beloved and loving, giving ourselves away to a hungry and thirsty world.
Year B – The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost – August 18, 2024 – The Rev. Claire Keene
