'Jesus said, “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 crowd 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.”'
--John 6: 35, 41-51
'Elijah went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.'
--I Kings 19: 4-8
I remember kindergarten. And I remember the part that I enjoyed the least, which was nap time. I hated it. Maybe I don’t show it, but I had an awful lot of energy as a little kid – broke a lotta stuff and gave my parents a lotta gray hairs. But whether it was me or some other rambunctious young’un, we always had to take a nap and have a snack late in the day when we got really cranky and hungry.
There’s wisdom in that, you know? When the prophet Elijah got scared and cranky because folks were trying to kill him, he just wanted to lie down and die. What did God do? Had him take a nap and gave him a snack, a cake baked on a rock. The times when we are least able to understand what is going on around us are usually the times that make us the crankiest. Ask Kristen sometime about the occasions when I most get cranky. It’s when I don’t understand what’s going on, to which she will ask, “Why are you so upset?” and all I can say is “I don’t know!” The best solution I’ve found is to stop, maybe lie down for a bit, and even have a snack. Those Snickers commercials aren’t wrong.
When we don’t understand, it often leads us to lash out, to get defensive, and to complain and gripe. It happens to kids, and to adults; after all, we're just taller children. After Jesus feeds 5000 people then explains to them that what they’re hungry for isn’t physical bread that will perish but a different bread, a bread from heaven, he him-self, the people get real cranky. The final line of last week’s Gospel is the first line this week: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Turns out, folks took Jesus pretty literally with that one. Immediately the crowd grows cranky, even angry over what Jesus is saying. None of this is making any kind of sense. How can bread come from heaven – and how can this guy that they all know, who is just an ordinary son of an ordinary family, claim to be from heaven? What’s he trying to pull?
Perhaps the crowd isn’t that much different from us. Folks today have a tendency to want to read the Bible literally, and when they do they come upon a passage like this, they grumble that that just don’t make no sense. What’s more, our post-Enlightenment minds don’t do well with symbolism and metaphor, so we waste our time worrying whether or not we understand or are being under-stood, and we get cranky when we don’t or aren’t. Bread from heaven. Eternal life. The bread I’ll give for the life of the world is my flesh. Who wouldn’t need a nap and a snack after trying to listen and understand all of this?
There are a few things that we can unpack, though. Jesus brings up the story from Exodus that we heard last week, about the people eating the manna in the wilderness, and he says that they ate it and died. Was the manna poisonous?? Not as far as we can tell. Again, it’s not literal. Rather, what Jesus is saying is that bread alone – physical stuff – is not enough to sustain life. Yes, they died…eventually, not because they ate the manna, but because all things die. What Jesus is offering is not a physical bread that only temporarily satisfies and then is gone. He offers himself, his teachings, his love, his grace, his mercy. These are the things that we “feed on” , that give us a kind of life that is not encumbered by the threat of loss or death, a life that is more attuned to the goodness of God in the world and recognizes to the Christ-light that is within all creation, within our neighbor, and yes, even within ourselves.
It is our deepest held conviction that at the holy table, the altar of God, we receive the very bread of heaven and, to borrow words from an older version of our Prayer Book, we feed on him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving. St. Ignatius of Antioch called the Holy Eucharist the “medicine of immortality.” It is here with outstretched hands and open hearts that we taste eternal life.
Still, we have to remember that when Jesus talks about eternal life he doesn’t mean something that is waiting on us when we die; after all, he uses the present tense in his teaching today: “whoever believes HAS eternal life.” It’s not later, in some future heavenly realm where we get our reward, it’s now. And right here, in this place, surrounded by these saints, we step outside time and share the same feast as all those other saints. We don’t have to understand how or why. A little boy I once knew, who isn’t so little anymore, used to come up to Communion and put his hands out and say, “Gimme a cracker!” That cracker is the bread for our journey, out into an ever-changing and confusing world. It sustains us as the cake sustained Elijah for 40 days in the wilderness. We need only believe this, or so we’re told.
The Greek word we translate as ‘belief,’ is pistis, which means a self-surrendering trust. To believe is to surrender, to let go of our need to have everything figured out, our need to be in control or to understand. Sabbath rest is at the heart of this self-surrendering trust. More than a mere nap, the practice of Sabbath leads to transformation, it is the quiet space we cultivate for God to once again take up residence, our greatest weapon to combat the overwhelming feeling that we have to know or do everything. As Thomas Merton, one of my spiritual heroes once wrote, “Lord I do not know what I am doing, but I believe that the desire to please you does, in fact, please you.” Even when we don’t understand, the fact that we want to, the fact that you showed up today, that matters, and that’s enough for God. Maybe it could be enough for you too.
So brothers and sisters, in the times when you feel confused or cranky, remember the kindergarten method: return to the altar of God for nourishment from the very bread of heaven, and find your Sabbath rest to remember who you are and whose you are. Remember that you are enough, and cultivate that self-surrendering trust in Jesus to continually transform you into who you already are.
