Sermon Pent 12, yr B, 2024

One of the more difficult questions I get asked as a priest is, what happens when I die?  Or worse what happens to my child? Husband? Sister?  The truthful answer is I don’t exactly know.  No one exactly knows.  The scripture is full of hints, clues and we take the ones we like best and place them prominently in funeral services. 

Scripture though, is full of contradictions, changing theologies, and the many writers have many, many interpretations of what God has told us.  Not to mention that we have had thousands of years to come up with our evolving theologies and popular fiction around what is heaven.  In Jesus time, for Jewish people there was no concept of heaven.  The dead when to Sheol the place of the dead, regardless of class, belief or behaviour.  

Faith was about how they lived their life in the here and now and heaven was interpreted as a profound closeness with God.  There were questions then as there are now about what is heaven?  Where is God?  What happens after death? 

However, for most people life was about day to day survival; especially in war torn and occupied territories under Roman rule, including Judea.

In Jesus time the majority of the population was poor, enslaved, desperate.  There were rich people in the Christian community, as is clear from Corinthians…but it seems most were disenfranchised, literally people without rights…without personhood.  Under Roman rule anyone who wasn’t Roman, simply didn’t count; so as Thomas Hobbes put it… people lived a life with 

“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Leviathan (1651) pt. 1, ch. 13.   

Life was so poor and uncertain that many people were members of funeral societies, groups which took up a subscription to ensure members got a decent burial, not exactly the golf club.  This is the context in which the apostle John wrote his gospel, this is the context in which Jesus lived…these are the people to whom he preached “I AM” the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.  Clearly this would have appealed to those hungry and thirsty and it was meant to.   However, John’s gospel always calls us to go deeper, to look at the signs and the symbols that Christ provides, not just on a superficial level, but as a guide to something more. 

This is the first time in John’s gospel Jesus says “I AM”, and just as we discussed previously about how the miracle of bread would have brought to mind Moses and the manna, so to does this.  I AM that I AM is how God identified himself to Moses at the burning bush.  Timeless, eternal, incomparable.  So, when Jesus says I AM the bread of life.  Those powerful associations we’ve spoken of would occur, and a very immediate association with God would have been apparent. 

It’s no wonder that Jesus’ neighbours began to grumble.  “is this not Jesus , son of Joseph, whose mother and father we know?”  Who is he to make such claims?…recall in other passages that Jesus’ family tries to take Jesus in hand for embarrassing the family name with such claims.  In other scripture his friends and neighbours try to toss him off a cliff, for similar claims.  That is how shocking and how impactful Jesus’ teaching was.  I Am the bread that comes down from heaven, I AM the bread of life, I AM as God is.

 For those listeners who were Jewish this would have been a lot to swallow, perhaps even more so than for people in the post modern age.  The Jews already believed in God, and they were very faithful as Rome found out even to the point of death.

John’s challenge was to equate Jesus with God and God with Jesus.  

“ It is written in the prophets, ‘and they shall all be taught by God.’  Everyone who had heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” 

John’s gospel uses the prophets to point again and again to Christ…teaching not only Jew, but gentile that God and Christ are one; and whoever believes has eternal life; not merely day to day life.

But what does that mean?  Over time we have added a lot of theology to the concept of eternal life, and art and culture have added their two cents.  So, our concept of heaven, eternal life and life after death is thoroughly muddled and extraordinarily varied.  John, however writes in the first century, and John was still formulating what eternal life meant.  For us in our much later time and place, we have associated eternal life with living forever.  Living forever in heaven or hopefully not, in hell (another concept that didn’t exist in Judaism).  Now our concept of heaven varies in understanding from a garden of paradise, to harpists on clouds to all the images that exist in movies and art.

For John though, eternal life was something quite different.  John 17 contains Jesus’ teachings about what will happen after the crucifixion.  It is a part of his farewell teaching to his disciples and in that teaching he speaks about eternal life.

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent..”

In John the teachings of eternal life equates not with a privileged paradise in the eternal future, but in an understanding of Christ and his gifts to the believing community.  The bread that came down from heaven is Christ, and the sustaining life he gives is a community that lives eternally.  A community that believes that Christ is God, embraces the gifts that Christ gives and the love that is shared between them.  For John’s community eternal life wasn’t a far off theological concept, but something to be lived into now. 

Eternal life was a promise that daily life as people experienced it was not the be all and end all, there was more.  Each life had value and worth, each person…Jew, Gentile, slave, free, person under the law or not, had value, worth and would be granted the gifts of Christ to the benefit of all.  Eternal life was a sign of something to hoped for more than a decent burial.  It pointed to a God who cared deeply and personally for all who believed in him, all who would be taught by God and drawn to God through Christ.

For the apostles, the disciples who wrote the epistles (the letters) and those who were there the time after Christ’s resurrection was the last days and in those says the Spirit moved and Christ appeared and Christ’s promise bread from heaven was a promise of Life, a life full of purpose, and hope.  “‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life”.

How this became our understanding of heaven, I don’t know.  What I do know is that it gives me hope.  My life isn’t the dire situation of a 1st Century Judean, in fact I’m well provisioned and housed, contented enough to not be desperate for God.  Many of the people in my situation could take or leave God religion and the whole mess…after all they have better things to do.   However, my situation is not the majority.  Most of the world doesn’t have the privilege of safe contentment.  We are the privileged few, who have the luxury of ambivalence if we choose.  For the world at large, who struggle for their daily bread, Christ’s words hold a depth I cannot fathom. 

What I can understand, however is the interpretation that Eternal life with Christ is a faith filled life that gives life to community.  I can understand John’s gospel opening that Christ shines light into the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.  That all shall be taught, and hear, and learn, and believe.  That all those who believe Christ is God will live a life of faith, as their Jewish ancestors in faith did.  Recognising that faith in God necessitates a life lived in response to that faith. 

If Christ is the living bread who came from heaven to feed the world so that we may not die; and I am a faith filled Christian then I have a responsibility to be taught, and hear, and learn what Christ calls me to do.  Which is to believe and in believing follow Christ’s teachings. 

The bread of life is meant to be shared.  The bread that came from heaven, that intimate connection with God, and feeds the world physically and spiritually.  Not simply day to day, with no hope for tomorrow, but bread for eternity…and eternity of hope for tomorrow and the next day and the next.  We are called to feed Christ’s community…all those who Christ was sent to save.  The whole world, one disaster, one country, one corner, one person at a time.  The living bread which feeds the world with hope, faith, relationship and eternal life.

 

It’s a big calling, a big vocation; after all who are we…one little person in this big, scary, messed up world.  They were saying, “is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph”? no one ever expects our neighbour to be special…to be the bread that gives life to the world.  Well, neighbour, we may not be Christ, but we have been given that bread and like the feast of 5000, we may be satisfied, but there is a LOT left over.  Christ, his teachings, his promise and his instructions to us are the very bread of life to a world with little hope.

Lord, give us the bread forever! And Lord let us share it, with everyone, eternally.

 

 

 

 

 

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