Bread of Life 07
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
April 24, 2007
I have been wearing glasses since I was ten years old. Like many children I was diagnosed as myopic because my fifth grade teacher, Miss Etner, sent a note home to my mother telling her that I was having difficulty reading math problems on the black board. So over time I have grown used to near-sightedness: I tend not to notice things in the distance, and can leave students in the back row with their hands raised for what seems like an eternity.
Whenever I
read the sixth chapter of John’s gospel I think on the condition of nearsightedness
as an almost perfect metaphor for the human spiritual condition. Reinhold
Niebuhr understood this when he wrote Moral Man and Immoral Society, an
incredibly trenchant book about the human tendency to treat those near
us better than we treat those at a distance. My father, in his own way, summed this
up in his own oft-repeated saying, “Hitler had a dog.”
But it’s
not so much our moral inconsistencies as our general thick-headedness that engages
me as I think about the sixth chapter of John’s gospel. When Jesus
says “I am the bread of life,” the people listening to him persist
in thinking about bread in a rather near-sighted way. Perhaps I have watched
one too many episodes of The Sopranos, but the conversation between
Jesus and his hearers sounds something like a mob negotiation or a bad
city council meeting: “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it
and believe you? What work are you performing?” [John 6.30] Or as
the old joke has it, “What have you done for me lately?” Jesus’s
listeners are the auditory equivalent of myopic–near eared?–because
they can only see so far as their own self-interest.
And more than
that: they mistake the signifier for the thing signified. They seem to
want the bread for its own sake and not for the sake of the thing (or the One)
it represents. They want the bread as a sign of Jesus’s religious
authenticity, when (to paraphrase Emerson) what authenticates Jesus’s life
and teaching is Jesus’s person and words themselves. The tension
in this Gospel reading is between those who demand bread as a parlor trick and
One who offers bread as a sign of himself. And so that is why, almost in
exasperation, Jesus says, “For the bread of God is that which [or he
who] comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” [John 6.33]
And then, finally, “I am the bread of life.” [John 6.35] What Jesus
offers is neither a “taste” in the mob sense to buy off his detractors,
nor is it a show which will dazzle them into submission. What Jesus offers
them is himself, the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
As one who
is constitutionally near-sighted, I recognize this kind of religious myopia. I
know what it is like to think I desire the signifier when what I really long
for is the signified. In some sense I want the signs of abundant life more
than I want that life itself. Jesus is using bread to talk about the larger
life that is on offer. The people who hear him have gotten stuck at the
level of bread. I do that on an almost daily basis.
We should
not be too hard on either them or ourselves in this. Bread, after all,
was a rare and precious commodity in Jesus’s day, and so it is not surprising
that the peasants who followed him might be curious about where their next meal
was coming from. And you and I live in a culture of advertising which so
constantly overstimulates our desires for things we do not have and do not need
(either objects or status, take your pick) that we are easily misdirected to
long for the signifier of the good life rather than the good life itself.
“For
the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” The
One who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world is, of course, Jesus.
And what that One gives us, of course, is not so much bread as what bread stands
for, life.
As I get older
my life-long myopia is being ameliorated by the oncoming of its opposite, which
happens to all of us as we age: presbyopia, literally “the vision
of elders” is the fancy word for farsightedness, for the inability to focus
on that which is near at hand. When I hear Jesus offer me life and I focus
on the bread which stands for it, I am being, as the disciples were, myopic. But
as I age I notice, both in myself and in the people in the church I spend my
time with, the more obvious signs of advanced presbyopia, the inability to see
that which is near at hand. Jesus is the bread of life, that which gives
life to the world. In the post Easter church, it is you and me–the
body of Christ–who not only stand for but who are literally Christ and
that bread in the here and now. If one of our problems is that we myopically
grab for bread when we are offered life, the other is that we are so presbyopic
that we cannot see that which is close at hand. We overvalue the false
and we undervalue ourselves. Christianity is not only a religion about
Jesus. Christianity is a religion about you and me. At the risk of
sounding a bit blasphemous—but why stop now?--it is not the bread, gluten-free
or otherwise, that we offer which will transform the world. The only thing
we have to offer which will transform the world is ourselves, the fragile men
and women who have been drawn into Jesus’s fellowship and who have found
ourselves saved and blessed and healed in that life changing encounter.
Today we gather
at Jesus’s table to be fed with and share the bread which stands for the
life of the world. That bread and that life are Jesus. That bread
and that life are now you. Love and accept and take yourself seriously
enough to step into what being that bread and that life demand of you. And
always, as Jesus, gather with your friends to give thanks. Amen.