John 6:24-35
Little Gods and
True Life
James Sledge August
1, 2021
I Am the Bread of Life, Joseph Matar, 2006
I’m going to assume that most of you have
heard of Joel Osteen, the televangelist and pastor of the Lakewood Church in
Houston, Texas. The church occupies the renovated, former home of the Houston
Rockets and pre-Covid hosted around 50,000 worshipers each week. On top of
that, another ten million or so watch on television.
Osteen may be the most successful of the so-called prosperity gospel preachers, and along with millions of worshipers, he has a popular book, Your Best Life Now. According to him, God wants you to be happy, content, and have the best of everything, and the Christian life is about tapping into God’s goodness, God’s desire for you to have a nice house, a fancy car, and flush bank account.
From a biblical and theological standpoint, Osteen’s sort of Christianity is rather easy to critique. It ignores large portions of Jesus’ teachings. It is all about acquiring while Jesus speaks frequently of the need let go of the material and refocus our lives on doing God’s work in the world. In a very real sense, Osteen is heretical in that his teachings put God in service to us rather than us in service to God and God’s hopes for the world.
I’ve not noticed very many progressive Presbyterians who seem drawn to Osteen or the prosperity gospel in general. I’m not entirely sure why, but perhaps those raised in more traditional, mainline Christian traditions find him a bit on the crass side. He turns God into a sort of fairy godmother, a small god whose primary purpose is to improve your life, granting you everything from money and possessions to a parking spot right up by the store entrance.
Of course it is possible to create a less crass, more sophisticated version of a divine fairly godmother. We Americans have been well trained in consumerism, making it easy to think of God or religion as simply one more item we need to make our lives better. In this less crass version of a small god, making us feel better spiritually can become the good thing God exists to provide us. Perhaps we might call it a spiritual prosperity gospel.
Not that I would ever say that we don’t get anything from following Jesus. The Jesus we meet in John’s gospel says that he came so we would have life and have it abundantly. However, I’m reasonably certain that Jesus defines abundant life differently that we do.
Modern people may be particularly prone to view God through the lens of consumerism, but that doesn’t mean that ancient people couldn’t also view God as a potential fairy godmother. In fact, Jesus seems to accuse the people in our scripture reading this morning of just that.
Our reading takes place on the heels of Jesus miraculously feeding 5000. Jesus and his disciples had journeyed to the other side of the Sea of Galilee shortly after that feeding. They had slipped away from the crowds who later discover that Jesus is gone. And so they also journey to the other side of the Sea, trying to find Jesus.
When they locate him, they ask about his journey to Capernaum, but Jesus completely ignores their question, instead responding. "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” The miraculous feeding has not helped the people understand who Jesus is. Rather it has caused them to view Jesus as the provider of goodies, a potential fairly godmother.
The ensuing conversation follows a pattern repeated many times in John’s gospel. Jesus attempts to move the people beyond thinking about literal food to “the food that endure for eternal life.” But the people remain fixated on actual bread, recalling the manna the was miraculously provided to the Israelites in the wilderness when Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt.
Jesus again tries to help them understand the different sort of sustenance he is talking about. He speaks of a different sort of manna, “the true bread from heaven,” adding, “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." But the people can’t stop thinking about literal bread. "Sir, give us this bread always."
Jesus then makes clear that he is the true heavenly bread, the food that endures for eternal life. “I AM the bread of life.” The gospel employs an emphatic way of saying “I AM” that was also used to reverently speak of God without actually using God’s personal name. It can’t really be rendered in English, but this I AM is a clear claim of divinity.
If we were to read a little further in John’s gospel, we would see that things only go downhill from here. The people were happy to have a fairly godmother, someone who could provide lots of goodies, but they had little interest in someone who challenged their understanding of God and life with God.
I sometimes wonder if I’m not a lot like those people in Capernaum all those centuries ago. I’m happy for God, for faith to improve my life in some way, to make it better or more meaningful, but I want Jesus to stay in the religious lane I’ve constructed for him. I want him to stick to fairy godmother formulas and not insist that I must change, that I must realize that he is life itself.
As Jesus continues talking with those folks in Capernaum in the verses beyond this morning’s reading, he takes his claim to be the bread of life to a startling conclusion. “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
I can soften the blow of those words by realizing Jesus is speaking figuratively, that he here speaks of the Lord’s Supper, but I’m not sure I want the supper to be that central. I grew up having communion a few times a year, and it was mostly a recollection of Maundy Thursday, not sustenance essential for life.
_______________________________________________________________
One of the problems inherent with all religion is a tendency to package God, to convert God into something understandable and manageable that can be accessed as needed. But the Jesus we meet in scripture insists that we must encounter him on his terms, that we must be recast and reshaped by the love and grace he offers us. This God can be understood and grasped, but only to a point, and at that point we must become open to mystery beyond our understanding, mystery that has the power to change us, to call forth life in ways beyond our imagining.
John Calvin, the 16th century reformer and the founder of our theological tradition, said that is what we encounter in communion, “a mystery felt rather than explained.”[1] Reflecting on the Lord’s Supper he wrote, “For, whenever this matter is discussed, when I have tried to say all, I feel that I have as yet said little in proportion to its worth. Although my mind can think beyond what my tongue can utter, yet even my mind is conquered and overwhelmed by the greatness of the thing. Therefore, nothing remains but to break forth in wonder at this mystery, which plainly neither the mind is able to conceive nor the tongue to express.”[2]
"I AM the bread of life”, says Jesus. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." I wonder, could that really be true?
No comments:
Post a Comment