Accepting the Gift

ACCEPTING THE GIFT
Homily on John 6: 25; 41-51

Bruce Jennings

Grace Episcopal Church
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
August 9, 2009

Jesus said to the people, "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."

Good morning.

There are several pivotal moments in the Bible when the human encounters the divine, and we are asked to consider their relationship. Early in Exodus, for example, Moses is called by God from the burning bush, and Moses asks what God’s name is (Ex 3: 13-14). In other words, he asks God to identify Himself in order to reveal Himself in a special way so that humans can know and understand. God’s answer is complex and highly enigmatic (of course). The Hebrew text (ehyeh asher ehyeh) is hard to translate, but is usually rendered as “I am that I am,” or “I am the cause of being.” A recent translation, renders it as “I will be there howsoever I will be there.” From this derives the appellation more familiar to us, YHWH (pronounced as Yah-weh). God is the Being of being; the precondition, the source, the foundation of all that is; the origin and purpose and point of all that is. “I am the AM of everything.”

In John 6 we find another such moment of encounter, where the identity of the divine is revealed and the proper relationship between the human and the divine is at issue.

Jesus says “I am the bread of life.” I am the enabling bread, the nourishing way, the guide of the journey to the point and purpose of human being. And the telos of being human is to be in the presence of perfect, complete, ultimate Being itself; everlasting life, true life, is being in the presence of God.

Jesus is the bread of life, and he offers himself as a gift to us. That gift is the invitation to God’s open house; the gift that opens the way to find God and complete the journey of our being.

Jesus is a giver. He is not a trader, a deal maker, a pawnbroker, or a taker. Just as life itself is not forced upon us but given to us as a gift, likewise Jesus does not force a certain way of life upon us, he offers it to us. All we have to do, like Elijah, is get up and go. Indeed, Jesus, like the angel that helped Elijah, offers to go with us and feed us along the way, for without him the journey would be too hard for us (1 Kings 19). But accepting the gift, that is up to us.

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Human beings are nervous creatures. We have trouble accepting gifts at face value. “What’s the catch?,” we usually ask. There must be strings attached. If it is too good to be true, it probably isn’t. We have all heard the warnings. They are born of suspicion, anxiety, and, yes, real experience dealing with our fellow human beings, who after all are about as unreliable as they are nervous. When the nineteenth century German leader, Otto von Bismarck, grew very old and finally died, a French diplomat who was told the news said, “I wonder what he’s up to.”

If we have trouble accepting gifts, we also have trouble asking for them on any but our own terms. Somewhere the prayer book has us ask God to fulfill our desires and petitions—not as we want them fulfilled—but in the way that is best for us. We don’t always recognize what is best for us, and we can be most blind when we think we are being most pious and faithful.

I am reminded of the story of a God-fearing man who was trapped in a flash flood and had taken refuge on the roof of his house as the water was rising. He prayed to be rescued, and God answered that he would be saved. A short time later some men came up in a boat and urged him to come off the roof and be taken to safety. The man refused, saying that God would rescue him. Later, as the water was about to cover the house, a helicopter appeared overhead and let down a harness attached to a cable to pull him up. Again the man refused; he would wait for God. After he drowned, he went to heaven and confronted God: “You promised to save me, why did you let me die?” God said, “Well, I sent a boat and a helicopter. What more did you want?”

What more do we want? We expect chariots of fire, but we get rowboats. Maybe that is enough, but sometimes we don’t even notice them.

When we encounter him in this morning’s passage, Jesus, like God did in the Wilderness during the Exodus, has just fed the people, this time with loaves and fish. (Actually he opened the way for them to be fed and to feed each other with his teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.) In last Sunday’s lesson (John 6: 24-35), the disciples are impressed for sure by what has happened by the lake, but still their reaction is to ask for signs or proof. “What signs are you going to give us then,” they ask Jesus, “so that we may see it and believe you?” (The disciples are a tedious and obtuse bunch, are they not?) He answers with a play on words (not unlike YHWH did); words that embody some of the most powerful symbolism and imagery in the Hebrew tradition, and indeed in human experience universally—bread, food, life. He repeats this answer to the larger crowd in today’s verses.

At the time Jesus lived, the Jewish community expected that the Messiah would be recognizable because he would bring manna, harkening back to the feeding of the Israelites in the Wilderness. But Jesus has something altogether greater and different from manna as his gift to people. Himself. He is the true bread. Manna has its limitations. The book of Numbers tells that the people eventually got tired of manna. They had eaten better in Egypt, and they remembered the good times in Pharaoh’s land more than the bad (Num 11:4-6). At first thrilled to have it, they later grumbled and complained that they had nothing but manna to eat.

The needs of our physical body are insatiable and fulfillment short lived. Our memories of comforts past are long, our imagination concerning a better way to live in the future is short; that is to say, limited.

Jesus contrasts himself, the bread that overcomes death, with the manna of the Torah, the bread that sustains the journey but does not overcome death. When Jesus makes this comparison, his purpose is not to denigrate the Jewish tradition, but to incorporate it. The Exodus story in many ways is the heart and soul of Judaism. It is the creation of the people, the moral transformation of a crowd of slaves into a community in covenant with God. This great story of moral learning has in fact been the paradigm of political liberation and the struggle for freedom in the Western tradition ever since.

One way to understand the import of what Jesus is teaching in our Gospel lesson today can be expressed this way: The great struggle for a new way of living and a new way of seeing is not only a collective, political struggle—the journey of the people out of bondage, across the wilderness, and into the promised land. It is also a personal struggle, a journey that each of us must take within, a struggle turned inward to the spiritual growth and development of each human being.

What does accepting the gift, gathering the bread, involve in this internal exodus? This text in John echoes the answer that the Gospels repeat again and again whenever anyone asks Jesus about his identity or what he does or where he lives: Come and see. Come to me. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” Come. It is as if Jesus is saying to us:

Don’t just sit there and expect me to come to you, because even if I did that, you probably wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t recognize me, like our friend on the roof didn’t recognize the gifts that God had sent. You come to me.

What’s that? You don’t know the route? I will show you the way, or show you how to discover the way within yourself.

You don’t have the courage? Stop your complaining, (or in another translation), stop your “murmuring.” (Murmuring is born ultimately of fear and frailty, which are among the very facets of the human condition that prevent their own vanquishing.)

Know that it is your fears that paralyze; it is your faith that frees. Jump.

What does gathering the bread of life involve? Self-knowledge and an openness to something larger than oneself, and new.

Part of the Christian faith is understanding that we don’t always understand; believing that there is a bigger picture than the one we see. We need to believe in God’s plan for us, trust in it, have faith in it. When you are given the bread of life you don’t send it back and ask for pumpernickel instead. The poet E. E. Cummings, in lines taken from a poem that I will share with you in full in a moment, asks how we limited beings—we beings that must rely on our paltry senses—can doubt God, who has lifted us from no to yes. There is no proof beyond the presence of the yes, and none is necessary.

If you open yourself to the gift, you will not be in need anymore; you will not be incomplete, any more. Jesus says: “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry...”

The trick is in recognizing the gift when it is offered, for it does not come wrapped in a ribbon under the tree on Christmas morning or by the cake with birthday candles. It comes in strange packages, at unexpected times, in unexpected ways. And in our Gospel lesson today, John is talking about the Gift of gifts, the ultimate gift of life in the presence of God, the end and fulfillment of our being. The tragedy—or is it irony?—in this text is that the Gift of gifts is right in front of the people, yet they do not recognize it for what it is. Their vision and knowing are quite literally superficial, on the surface. They did not see the ultimate Gift because it came in the packaging of the body of a rather poorly dressed carpenter’s son from a jerkwater town. They were looking for a flaming chariot and got a rowboat.

The incarnation was a one time only event, but the offering of the gift of life is an ongoing gesture. As a giver, Jesus keeps on giving. Countless times. In our text today I find no hint of scarcity in the offer at all. “Opportunity knocks but once,” is not the spirit of this passage. If Jesus’ offer is a test, it isn’t a timed test, like the SAT. You have as long as it takes. The One who offers it does not get tired, or impatient, and does not despair of us, as we do of him sometimes.

The Gift of gifts is hard to recognize as such. I bet each one of us has been presented with it countless times, and not noticed. We are too busy and too preoccupied with small things. Our priorities are upside down, and the point of so much of the wisdom that Jesus teaches is to set them right side up.

This does not mean that in order to recognize and accept this gift, you have to have it already. Well, in one sense, I suppose you do, but that is very subtle theology and way over my head. The point I can grasp is that we have to act, we have to do something that rouses us out of the inertia of human sin and gets us up on our spiritual toes. It is come and see, not sit and wait. When Elijah wanted to lay down and die; an angel told him to get up and eat—“Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” (1 Kings 19:7).

Jesus says, “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.” I do not interpret this as a recipe for self-neglect, or indifference to the human level of being. We should attend to our own human good and human flourishing, and to that of those around us. We should have a plan for ourselves, but we shouldn’t suppose that it is the only plan operating in our lives. God’s plan interacts with our own human initiative, responsibility, and action. Our friend on the roof fails to see that a human escape plan and God’s rescue plan just happen to be one in the same, in this case.

We can’t just sit and wait. We need to seek out and discover. How long was the burning bush standing there, with the flame that does not consume, before Moses came by to check it out? (Ex 3: 2-4). How many others lacking his curiosity and courage hurried along without going off the road to look and see. Or again, several folks who lacked the chutzpa of Moses, but who were pillars of the community at the time, passed by the man who had fallen among thieves before the Samaritan looked, saw, and did something—he helped and gave, yes, but he also received; he took the offered bread of life (Lk 29: 30-37).
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I would like to close these reflections by sharing with you a short poem, which just happens to be one of my favorite poems. Maggie and I used it in our wedding ceremony 37 years ago; and just a few years ago, when we donated a park bench outside the new Hastings library building, we had a portion of it inscribed on a plaque on the bench. So yes, it is one of my favorites, but that is only part of the reason I thought of it for today. It also expresses, I believe, something profoundly relevant to today’s Gospel lesson. It says what I find in the complex meaning of this sequence from John 6, and says it so much better than I have just now have.

This poem is by E. E. Cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky. and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday. this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)