The Jewish leaders in John’s Gospel
remind me of those characters from the old Scooby Doo cartoons who nonchalantly
appear at the beginning of each episode, but since there are only ever one, or
at most two, new characters introduced in an episode it becomes painfully
obvious who the bad guy is going to be in the end. Like any good Scooby Doo
villain, I can imagine the Jewish temple leaders shaking their head at the end
of the Gospel and saying, “And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t
for that meddling Jesus.” (For those of you who think I use too many current
pop culture references, understand that everybody in high school has
absolutely zero idea what I’m talking about right now)
“The Jews,” as
John frequently calls the group of temple leaders who interrogate Jesus, are
never going to accept anything divine about Jesus—it’s just not going to happen.
He’s going to keep telling them things like “I am the bread of life,” or “I am
the light of the world,” or, as we heard with Nicodemus a few weeks back, “I am
the Son of Man.” Sorry to ruin the end of the story if you’ve never read John’s
Gospel, but “the Jews” are never going to get it. They’re always going to despise
that meddling Jesus. And it’s for reasons like the reading we have today.
In
today’s scripture Jesus is talking about bread and eternal life, which sounds
simple enough until he goes and says, “Oh yeah, I’m the bread of life.” That
manna that came down from the sky when Israel was wandering in the
wilderness? That’s right; that’s me. Now, that is a crazy
thing to say. In fact, even after the cross and the resurrection, it’s hard to
wrap our heads around that one. It’s why there are so many diverging views
about the importance of communion. If the bread and wine are so special,
perhaps we should serve them only on particularly special occasions, but if the
bread and the wine are the source of true life, then perhaps we should be
serving them every opportunity we get. And let’s not even get started on what
all this means!
I’m
not going to go into the theology of communion any further (because I like it
when you don't click away from my blog in the middle), but if you have any interest in Lutheran
history there are some great accounts of Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli going
back and forth on the nature of communion when every time Zwingli made an
argument about the spiritual nature of Jesus’ body Luther would come back and
say “Yes, but this is my body.
This is my blood.” As any student of theology can tell you, our
political leaders were not the first people to argue the definition of “is.”
So,
in a way, I can sympathize with “the Jews” who really have no idea what Jesus
is talking about, and I can also sympathize with all of you who have very divergent
views about communion—how often we should do it, who should take it, and what
is actually happening during the ceremony of it—because, honestly, we are all
just guessing. Part of the reason why we find communion really tough to
understand is because of this same old struggle we have between what is
physical and what is spiritual. We might be OK with talking about the bread of
life, but when we actually partake in communion we’re more comfortable with
Jesus’ other language about “remembering” him. We’re not always so sure if
we’re OK with the idea of actually eating Jesus.
This
is what Jesus is up against over and over again in John’s Gospel. We are not so
different from “the Jews” in that we get really confused about the distinction
between the physical and the spiritual. All the while Jesus is piling on, saying
things like, You have water? Great. I
have living water that will never again make you thirsty. You have bread? Great. I am the bread of life; eat of me and
you will have eternal life. It’s easy to spiritualize all of this, and we often
do, but let’s not ignore that Jesus makes his examples with the most physical
of all things. Bread, water, wine, blood, flesh. You can’t get more bodily and
physical than that. For a Gospel that begins “In the beginning was the Word” we
might assume that what follows is mysterious prose spiritualizing everything
about this Jesus who came down as the Word incarnate, but what follows instead
is a Gospel that never strays too far from the physical senses: a Gospel about
what we see, taste, and touch.
Christians
love to spiritualize. We talk about heaven in mostly spiritual terms, we think
of holiness as a refusal to partake in earthly pleasures, and we assume that
meditation and prayer are about achieving some kind of deeper, spiritual peace.
But John’s Gospel refuses to go there. Instead, John suggests, in the words of
Wendell Berry, that “Creation is one continuous fabric comprehending what we
mean by ‘spirit’ and what we mean by ‘matter’” (from his essay, “Health is
Membership”). For two thousand years since Jesus, various Christian groups have
been trying to escape from earthly bodies to a better, spiritual plane, but
Jesus seems concerned with something different: not escaping this flesh but
resurrecting it. The bread of life is not
only a spiritual thing; instead, it
is one of the few truly earthly things we ever experience, because it is one of
the only things we can see and taste and touch that is not covered by the sheen
of sin.
We
have dug trenches between what we call “spirit” and what we call “physical
matter,” and for the most part it’s getting harder to talk across that divide.
Some of you may have caught the Bill Nye – Ken Ham debate about evolution and
creationism a couple weeks ago, which is a perfect example of this. They argued
over the same old spiritual versus physical divide. Ken Ham will tell you that
the debate has everything to do with scripture, but it has almost nothing to do
with scripture. Bill Nye will tell you the debate has everything to do with
science, but it has almost nothing to do with science. Instead, this debate has
everything to do with the idea that the world is peeled apart into layers of physical
and spiritual, and since they’ve already made up their minds about the way the
world is constructed they never speak the same language. The only people
winning this kind of debate are the people not watching.
The
ironic part of debating the spiritual and the physical is that Christians have
the perfect example of a God who is both. Jesus is fully divine and fully
human. And in John’s Gospel we are beaten over the head again and again with
this language designed to get us to see that creation is both physical and
spiritual; it is one fabric; and Jesus came not to peel away the physicalness
of creation, but the sinfulness. You can’t say that Jesus only came to
spiritually remove our sin, because his examples are always tactile—as physical
as they could be. You can’t say that Jesus came to free us from our earthly
bodies, because his promises of eternal life and resurrection of the dead are promises
not just for our souls (after all, he never uses the word “soul”), but rather
these are promises for all of us—our bodies and our spirits.
It’s
much easier to think that the body is bad and the spirit is good, because it
relieves us from much commitment in our earthly lives. Too many Christians have
turned to Paul’s letter of Galatians where he writes that “what the flesh
desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the
flesh,” (Gal 5:17), and we have assumed that this means we are called to reject
all things physical in order to pursue a better, more spiritual life. But in
doing this we have ignored that the fruits of the spirit that Paul lists—love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and
self-control (Gal 5:22-23)—are nothing without a physical component. Try to
imagine generosity or love without any physical sign. Imagine if you told a
person you love, “I love you in spirit, but I won’t go so far as to touch you.”
Nobody
acts like this, so why do we live our faith like it?
Jesus
came in part so that we would no longer have to make distinctions between the
physical and the spiritual. One is not good and the other bad, because through
Christ they are one and the same. The Jewish leaders are confused because they
are trapped in an understanding of the world that is not wide enough to fit
Jesus, which is pretty much the same trouble we face today. If it’s spirit
versus matter we all lose, because we will continue to talk past each other,
becoming louder and louder in our certainty, and all the while missing the
point that Jesus is making. Jesus is the bread of life, and life is a much
deeper mystery composed both of what we call matter and what we call spirit.
We’re better than creating division where there is none. We don’t need this.
All we need is the bread of life. So, come. Your sins are forgiven. Taste and
see. Everything else is just noise.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment