Proper 14 / 12th
Pentecost — 12 August 2018
Trinity – 7:45 & 10:00 am
1 Kings 19:4-8
| Psalm 34:1-8 | Ephesians
4:25-5:2 | John 6:35, 41-51
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.” [John 6:41]
As you are probably aware, the Old Testament reading at the
Sunday Eucharist is generally chosen because it bears some thematic relation to
the Gospel reading. (At least, with the
Revised Common Lectionary, when you are following Track Two, as we are
doing. I would explain about Track One,
but that would be boring.) Today we hear
a snippet from the Elijah saga, which is found in the 1st (and a bit
of the 2nd) Book of Kings. A
wonderful story, Elijah. And this really
is just a snippet without any context, unless you already know the full story,
which I’m sure some of you do. Elijah is
fleeing for his life into the desert, escaping Jezebel (the queen of the
Israelite king Ahab), who is really really mad at him because he killed all her
pagan priests at Mount Carmel (well…!), and he will encounter the Lord God at
Mount Horeb. But you already know
that. In this snippet the angel of the
Lord is feeding Elijah for his wilderness journey. And we read this today because in the Gospels
we read a couple of weeks ago about Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, and
since then John’s Gospel has been following up with a long discourse about
Jesus as the Bread of Life. (And we
still have a couple of weeks to go!) And
so today we are reminded that God feeds us, just as God fed Elijah in the
wilderness.
And last week, as you recall, the Old Testament reading was
about the Israelites in the Sinai desert, just liberated from their Egyptian
slavery, receiving bread from heaven.
About which they said, “What’s this?”
Or, in Hebrew, “manna.”
So, for a few weeks this summer, we are reading from the 6th
chapter of St. John’s Gospel about Jesus as the Bread of Life, beginning with
the story shared by all the Gospels about the feeding of the multitude, a sign
of who Jesus really is. And the related
Hebrew stories of God feeding God’s people.
“God will provide.”
Right at the heart of our faith, we assume. Or presume. And it may well be presumptuous! I often wonder if the God of popular culture
isn’t very much like a vending machine:
If we insert the coins of faith and push the button, down will come the
Snickers bar or the potato chips or the Diet Coke or new job or the peace of
mind or the answers to our questions or whatever it is we want. If you do right by God, God will do right by
you. A lot of that going around.
But what will God – the real God, the God of the Bible –
actually provide? You may recall the episode
in the wilderness, when the Israelites come to Moses and whine (as they so
often did), “Hey, back in Egypt, we could catch fish in the river for free and
the gardens were full of veggies, but out here all we’ve got to eat is this
whatsis!” [I.e., manna. Numbers 11:4-6] Yes, God provided, but they didn’t like
it. God did not provide what the people
thought they needed, certainly not what they wanted, but because it was God’s
purpose to make of the Israelites a new people, living a new life in a new
land, and the only way to get there from the fleshpots of Egypt was through the desert. (This is not a particularly subtle story.)
And today with Elijah, who is on the lam from the
powers-that-be. And he’s tired. He’s sick of the whole business. He has just killed 450 of the prophets of the
pagan god Baal, and what thanks did he get?
(By the way, I would not draw any moral theology from the Mount Carmel
episode!) But the angel of the Lord
comes and feeds and refreshes him, but not so that he can just go back home
now, but so that he can go on more deeply into the wilderness (yep, same
wilderness) to encounter God. Where God
commissions Elijah to go back and do some more mostly subversive stuff and get
into trouble again. God will
provide. Oh, good.
Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life.” It starts out, of course, as we heard a
couple of weeks ago, with Jesus providing actual bread to a crowd of people who
had followed him out into the boondocks.
And at the most basic level, they seem to have gotten it. First, Jesus can feed us (literally), and
second, that’s like what God did for our ancestors in the desert; so this Jesus
must be the coming prophet who will liberate Israel and drive the Romans out so
let’s make him king! Jesus slips away,
but they chase him down. But he tells them, “You didn’t really get it. The real point is the nourishing of your
hearts and souls and minds and lives, not just feeding your bellies. If you want really to be fed, you must come to me and follow me and believe in
me.”
Believe in Jesus.
I’m inclined to think that “believing in Jesus” may be one of the most
misunderstood notions in the Bible.
“Believing in Jesus” is not the same thing as assenting to certain
doctrines about Jesus. I don’t mean that
doctrines about Jesus aren’t important, or that what the Church teaches about
Jesus isn’t true, or that we shouldn’t assent to it. But when John or the other Gospels, or Paul
in his letters, talks about “belief” or “faith,” they almost always use a Greek
word that connotes not so much intellectual compliance but personal trust and
commitment. Believing in Jesus, faith in
Jesus, is not as much a matter of the head as of the heart. Now, granted, if you are going to commit
yourself and put your trust in someone, you’d better run that past your brain
at some point. (You may have noticed
that our world today is full of a whole lot of people who have obviously not
done that.)
When Jesus says, “Believe in me,” “Have faith in me,” he is
saying, “Commit your life to the Kingdom of God which I am proclaiming and
enacting among you. Trust in me as the
one who embodies God’s Reign.” To
believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world is to commit
ourselves to his pattern of life as true human life, to commit ourselves to his
values, to his cause, to his vision, as the values and cause and vision of God,
to commit ourselves to Jesus precisely as the Way and the Truth and the Life.
A digression: Many,
though not all, of the theologians and scholars over the centuries have seen in
the John 6 discourse on the Bread of Life a reference to the Eucharist,
emerging particularly as the chapter goes on.
I myself think that multiple levels of meaning in St. John’s Gospel are just
what the evangelist intends! And that’s
one of the levels of meaning. But I’m
not going there today. Perhaps Marc will
have something to say about that next Sunday.
(No pressure, Marc!)
God will provide.
And the real nourishment is Jesus.
But there’s nothing cheap or easy or simple about that. We need to question any assumptions we may
make that self-servingly try to turn God into the provider for our own
wants. When God is really providing for
us, God does not leave us with our comfortable pots of stew in our old Egypts,
but leads us out into the challenges and the mysteries and the dangers of the world’s
desert.
