Gary Hall's Clement of Alexandria sermon
Today’s Gospel reading portrays Jesus giving his extended Bread of Life discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum. We do not usually think of Jesus teaching in an institutional setting. The New Testament usually pictures Jesus teaching in houses or atop mountains or beside the road, even once talking to his disciples from a boat. But today’s Gospel almost casually remarks that this revolutionary (and to some, offensive) instruction was made within the context of a religious institution. “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.” [6.57] Why revolutionary? Why offensive?
It’s hard for us to understand what some of Jesus’s followers could have found so obnoxious in this typically clotted Johannine locution. The great Raymond E. Brown would parse that verse this way: “Jesus gives [human beings] a share in God’s own life.” [Brown, I, 292] Some find Jesus’s Bread of Life Discourse troublesome not because of the catholic nature of his Eucharistic theology but because he dares to say something deeply radical about reality itself: by eating this bread and drinking this cup you will be taken up into the very essence and nature of God. Following Jesus isn’t just about mining his nuggets in lessons for living. Following Jesus is about being taken up into a share in God’s own life.
TWhenever I hear the question posed by the disciples today—“This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”—I wince. But then the second blow in the one-two punch sequence comes just a bit after today’s passage ended. “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” [6.66] In his Bread of Life discourse, Jesus offers neither a political program (eat this bread and we’ll throw the Roman bums out) nor a style of piety (eat this bread and you’ll find happiness, health, and well-being). In his Bread of Life discourse Jesus offers us the Eucharist as the thing itself, not a metaphor for the way things are but simply the way things are. Just as we are connected to each other in this meal, so we are connected to Jesus and his Father in the ultimate scheme of things. No wonder some of his followers went, as they say in Hollywood, in another direction. He had said something blasphemous about human participation in the divine, and he had had the audacity to say it in a synagogue.
Today we celebrate the life and witness of Clement of Alexandria, a second century Christian apologist who tried to get at some of the same things Jesus was up to in his teaching. Like Jesus, Clement found himself perched not-too-comfortably between the sophisticates and the true believers, between what Henry Chadwick calls “clever, eloquently defended heresy on the one side and a dim, obscurantist orthodoxy on the other.” [Chadwick, p.95] For Jesus, the Good News was about something more than miracles and Messiahship. It was about the promise of a human share in God’s own life. For Clement, the Good News was about more than the world-denying teaching of Christian purists on the one hand or the achievements of Greek and Roman culture on the other. For Clement, the Good News was about the Logos, divinely implanted in all God’s rational creatures. Clement opposed the Gnostics who defined our fleshly humanity as our problem. And he opposed the orthodox who myopically held that we have nothing to learn from Platonists, Stoics, or Aristotelians. Listen to him in Book I of his Stromata (or sayings):
The Stromata will contain the truth mixed up in the dogmas of philosophy, or rather covered over and hidden, as the edible part of the nut in the shell. For, in my opinion, it is fitting that the seeds of truth be kept for the husbandmen of faith, and no others. I am not oblivious of what is babbled by some, who in their ignorance are frightened at every noise, and say that we ought to occupy ourselves with what is most necessary, and which contains the faith; and that we should pass over what is beyond and superfluous, which wears out and detains us to no purpose, in things which conduce nothing to the great end. Others think that philosophy was introduced into life by an evil influence, for the ruin of men, by an evil inventor. But I shall show, throughout the whole of these Stromata, that evil has an evil nature, and can never turn out the producer of aught that is good; indicating that philosophy is in a sense a work of Divine Providence.—Clement of Alexandria, The Stromateis, Book I
“It is fitting that the seeds of truth be kept for the husbandmen of faith.” “Philosophy is in a sense a work of Divine Providence.” As an apologist for Christianity, Clement knows that there is something particularly true about the Gospel which we must not confuse with the spiritual nostrums and clichés of our popular or intellectual culture. And at the same time, also as an apologist for Christianity, Clement knows that we can only make the case for Christianity in the forms and idioms of the culture we live in. Jesus offers us a share in God’s own life. We need to find a way to talk about that which is neither exclusive at one extreme or lowest-common denominator at the other. We need to know both the particularity of the truth we proclaim and the language of the world we proclaim it to. Jesus spoke blasphemously in a synagogue. They may not have like what he said, but at least they understood him. We need to give our 21st century friends as clear an exposition of what we believe as Jesus, and Clement did.
“Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” [6.66] What does it mean for the church to be a community of apologists, a community proclaiming this new thing that God is doing in Jesus—that God is offering us a share in God’s own life? Jesus’s followers rejected him not because he was vague but because in fact they understood his meaning all too well. Because he spoke the language of the culture he inhabited, Clement found a way to make that same proclamation in ways which both supporters and detractors could understand. Let us never forget that even Jesus could not keep some of his followers from going in another direction. And let us always remember that, like Clement, what we owe God is not success but faithfulness. You and I, with Jesus, cast the net. It is up to God, not us, what those caught up in that net will do about it. No doubt some will turn back and cease to walk with us. But others will hear it and get it and live it out, and for the mystery of that process we proceed in the Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.