Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. ... Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
(John 6:35, 41-51)
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I want to look back to some of the words that were included in our closing prayer last week, often called the Post-Communion Prayer, since we had just celebrated Holy Communion: “Grant that what we have done and have been given here, may so put its mark on us that it may remain always in our hearts. Grant that we may grow in Christian love and understanding, and that ours may be lives of faithful action, poured out for all in Christ’s name.” And having heard those words again, let me ask you in the famous words of Dr. Phil: “how’s that working for you?” Now – I quote Dr. Phil with some hesitation. When he began his television odyssey I actually thought he was a rather serious psychologist dealing with some serious issues. Over the years he became (along with Dr. Oz) what I’d call an “Oprah celebrity” and his shows became – to me – less and less serious and more and more sensationalistic and more driven by the desire for high ratings than anything else. And I’m aware of the fact that on his website Dr. Phil identifies “how’s that working for you?” as “the one question you need to ask to get what you really want.” From a Christian perspective I’m pretty sure that getting what I want is not and should not be my priority. But that question, raised on the Sunday after we celebrated Holy Communion and prayed that prayer still seems important. How’s that working for you? Has Communion put its mark on us? Does that mark remain always in our hearts? Are we growing in Christian love and understanding? Are our lives lives of faithful action? Are they poured out in Christ’s name? Or is what’s said in that traditional post-Communion prayer empty rhetoric with no substance? Are we just the same as we were when we gathered last Sunday? Has Communion made a difference in us? Has faith made a difference to us? Has Jesus changed us? Surely, we should be changed! Communion is a means of grace, and after being confronted by grace, after experiencing grace, we should surely in some way be impacted by what we did last week and by what it symbolized for us, but two things seem to get in the way of us actually allowing ourselves to be changed.
The first thing that we learn from today’s passage is simply that not everyone wants to be changed. Today’s Gospel reading is a continuation of last week’s Gospel reading. In fact the first verse we read today was the last verse we read last Sunday. The emphasis of the passage is the same: Jesus is the bread of life. Some of the people who responded to Jesus’ in today’s passage found themselves confronted with an image or understanding of God that they had never encountered before – a God who simply gave and who asked for no works in return. That was a shaky proposition for a lot of people, and the passage tells us that many of the people “complained.” They weren’t happy about the fact that the image of Jesus as “the bread of life” that was available to everyone was contrary to their view of God – that others might have access to that divine love that they themselves had worked so hard for. That also might explain why we might find it difficult to allow the experience of grace in Holy Communion to change us – because that would remind us that we don’t have God cornered, and that God isn’t just what we want God to be and that God isn’t just for whoever we want God to be for and that God doesn’t just do whatever we want God to do, and that God doesn’t just love only those whom we deem worthy of God’s love, and we often work very hard to make sure that the God we talk about is the God we want and not necessarily the God that is. Edwina Gately is a British Catholic and author and feminist who illustrated the problem in one of her books called “Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets” this way:
Once upon a time we captured God and we put God in a box and we put a beautiful velvet curtain around the box. We placed candles and flowers around the box and we said to the poor and the dispossessed, "Come! Come and see what we have! Come and see God!" And they knelt before the God in the box. One day, very long ago, the Spirit in the box turned the key from inside and she pushed it open. She looked around in the church and saw that there was nobody there! They had all gone. Not a soul was in the place. She said to herself, "I'm getting out!" The Spirit shot out of the box. She escaped and she has been sighted a few times since then. She was last seen with a bag lady in McDonald's.
That’s what happens too often. We want people to accept God on our terms, but not necessarily on God’s terms. We want to be the gatekeepers who control access to God – forgetting that God is, perhaps most powerfully of all, with that bag lady in McDonald’s rather than being confined to our church or our experience.
The second thing that the passage tells us gets in the way of of our transformation is that the message is too good to be true. The passage tells us that Jesus will satisfy us; that Jesus will feed us in such a way that we will never hunger again and in such a way even that we will not truly die. That’s incredible news that should transform our entire existence and everything about how we view life. But instead of embracing what Jesus offered them, Jesus immediately faced doubt for what he had revealed about himself. “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” The immediate response of many people to Jesus was to say “it’s too good to be true.” I sometimes get concerned that Holy Communion becomes a sort of empty ritual for many people. We go through the motions, we say the words, we take the bread and the juice – but maybe we’re not sure why. We forget that the whole purpose of Holy Communion is to be a sign of the grace of God; a sign of the fact that God welcomes all without hesitation or condition. And we tend to be suspicious of anything that’s “unconditional.” If it’s free, if it’s too good to be true – then it can’t be real. I think all the “get rich quick” schemes that abound in the world today make it difficult for us to believe the promise of a God who says that there are no conditions, that there’s no price tag attached to this bread of life that we’re offered. What’s the old saying? “If it sounds too good to be true – it probably is!” And while, in a worldly sense, there may be truth to that – with God that’s just the way it is. God’s love is so extravagant and God’s grace is so abundant that it can be hard to believe. So sometimes perhaps we fail to see in the symbols of bread and wine the sign of the abundance that God gives – abundance not in material things, but abundant life and abundant spirit and abundance in eternity. If we understood that and took it seriously, surely we would be changed, and ours could “be lives of faithful action, poured out for all in Christ’s name.” It’s not too good to be true; it’s so good that it must transform us.
Either of those responses to the grace of God shown so simply in Holy Communion – whether we think it’s too good to be true, or whether we just don’t like what it tells us about God – cause us to harden and resist the call of God’s Spirit on our lives. On the Sunday after celebrating Holy Communion we need to reflect on the experience within ourselves, and ask ourselves how it changed us, how it impacted us, and how it challenged us to be confronted by Jesus with an image of a God who tells us that all are loved and provided for and who reminds us that we cannot hold God captive. Indeed, God tries to bring people together and not to drive them apart, and as people who one week ago were shown the symbols of what God does for us, let’s remember that we are called to be transformed into those who will share the same love and grace to the world that Jesus shared. Indeed, in the words of Henri Nouwen, “in a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.”
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