18th Sun in Ordinary Time • Exodus 16:2–4, 9–15 • Eph 4:1–16 • John 6:24–35 • 8/4/24
Last week Jim spoke about bread for the journey. One of the risks of a journey is that it separates us from whatever sources of sustenance we had in the place we left behind. The Israelites in the wilderness, recalling the abundant meat and bread available in Egypt, were acutely aware of this.
As I began the journey of writing this homily, not knowing where it would take me and fearful of getting stranded, I found myself snacking addictively on pita chips to relieve the hollow feeling of uncertainty. Bread is still the ultimate comfort food. I wonder if this connects me, even now, to some first-century scribe with writer’s block, stacks of blank parchment on one side and pita on the other…
Bread has double-edged power here. It imparts the strength to carry on, but it can also be distracting. If I divert too much attention to hoarding bread for the future, like some of Moses’ followers (who gathered extra manna, only to have it spoil), or if I seek only to fill my stomach, like some of Jesus’ followers in today’s Gospel, I may miss the point of the journey.
John’s Jesus, fully aware of this, uses the very attraction of bread to refocus his followers’ attention by calling something else “bread” and “food”—something much harder to define but closer to the meaning of the journey. “Do not work for the food that perishes,” he says, “but for the food that endures for eternal life”—the “bread” that won’t leave you “hungry.”
As Moses says in Deuteronomy 8 (later quoted by Jesus), we do not live by (physical) bread alone. What nourishes your spirit? What sights or sounds, experiences, companions, presences, or activities bring you alive and intensely awake? Or are you wandering in a wilderness of your own, separated from what once fed you in this way? Despite Jesus’ claim that this “bread” will never leave us hungry, we do sometimes hunger and “thirst for the living God.” The Psalmist did; many mystics have; some of the Gospels report that Jesus himself, in Gethsemane and on the cross, couldn’t feel the Holy Presence.
Even so… take a moment to remember what it felt like to be nourished by something that, at least once, brought you intensely alive. Rumi wrote, “Your longing is the secret cup.” It reminds you of who you are. Who you are, singularly, as you—and who we all are. For as we heard in Ephesians, our diverse forms and expressions manifest a shared calling.
Jesus uses food, bread, to represent the deeper nourishment we all long for—this indefinable something that calls out our inner alertness and aliveness, that gives our journey meaning. He urges us to work to keep in touch with this deeper part of ourselves, and in doing so to sustain our relationship with the very Source and Bread of life itself, “that which comes from the heavens and gives life to the cosmos.”
This subtly echoes the beginning of John’s gospel, when what brings this spark to the cosmos is called the Word. The full Moses quote, whose context is the giving of divine law, is that we do not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. In Genesis, God speaks the world into being. Words shape our world and our conduct. They infuse meaning and purpose.
Having previously identified Jesus as the living Word of God, John now shows Jesus saying “I am the bread of life.” For John, Jesus is both Word and bread. That is: conveyed in the person of Jesus, the love of God gives our lives both meaning and sustenance.
We could get prescriptive here, dwelling on the detailed “words” of the Law or taking Jesus’ call to “believe” as a call to dogmatic adherence. But scholar Gail O’Day argues that for John, “believing” essentially refers to relationship and mutuality: the arc of God’s reaching out to us is not complete until we consciously receive the gift. And you are the one who knows best when you are conscious of connection with this deeper reality. I hear John’s Jesus encouraging us to regularly put ourselves wherever we are each most conscious of that connection. If we have lost our familiar access to that connection, perhaps through a change in circumstances or a loss of ability, we can honor our grief at the loss and consider the awareness it has left us. We can drink from Rumi’s secret cup of our longing.
John places Jesus’ discourse on bread and eucharist earlier in the story than the other evangelists, who place it near the end. O’Day says this is because, for John, the role of Jesus in restoring our relationship with the Divine encompasses the entire Incarnation, the whole life of Jesus, complete with all the teaching and healing.
We need Word as well as bread, guidance as well as sustenance. God’s love is a map as well as food for the journey. God’s love teaches us to love and feeds us the love we need to do so. For John, in receiving and sharing God’s love, we become part of the vine rooted in Christ, dwelling in and being dwelt in by one another and the Holy One. In the imagery of Ephesians, as we put aside our divisions and grow in love, we are knitted into the body of the cosmic Christ.
So as we move in our liturgy from Word to bread (from parchment to pita), let’s once again ground ourselves in the memory of a moment when our spirits felt deeply nourished. And let’s recall Rumi’s words about longing. Just remembering that such moments can exist reconnects us with the Holy Presence. In this way, longing itself can be our bread, our wine, our teacher and our guide.