Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
I'm suddenly remembering why I got in the habit of always taking Sundays in August off. These are hard readings from the Gospel of John!
The verse I just read, which I’ll come back to, was in last week’s portion of this section of John’s Gospel that we’ve been reading all month. It’s called the “Bread of Life Discourse,” the chapter-long speech that Jesus gave a little while after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the miracle where he turns a few loaves and fish into a meal for the hungry multitude who’ve followed him to the countryside to hear him teach.
John’s Gospel, unlike the other three (Matthew, Mark and Luke) doesn’t ever narrate Jesus breaking the bread and offering the cup at the Last Supper--the basis (of course) for our weekly practice of the Eucharist. The focus in John the night before Jesus died is on a different ritual altogether, the washing of the disciples’ feet in a gesture of love and service. But John does have (unlike those) this long chapter in which Jesus teaches about the significance of the bread, and his flesh; the wine, and his blood. Jesus in John’s Gospel teaches about the Eucharist.
What he says is so strange and difficult to understand that--and we’ll see this in next week’s reading--his followers begin to leave him over it, shaking their heads and walking away. Even the disciples nearly abandon him.
A preacher whose sermon I read this week said that, one time when she preached on John's Bread of Life Discourse, she was so relieved to get a sermon out--she even thought it was pretty good. After the service one of her parishioners said, "Well, you know Jesus probably didn't say a word of that, don't you?" (So much for that!)
Most scholars think this is later church teaching, put into Jesus’ mouth. Since John’s Gospel was the last to be written, and reflects ideas that don’t seem like they would have come from the time when Jesus lived, it’s thought that Jesus’ teachings on the Eucharist here come more from the Early Church than from Jesus himself.
But it’s sacred Scripture, and so we’re called to revere and try to make sense of it.
When I approach these passages in John, rather than try to understand them as a whole, I do what I would with a difficult poem: I just pick lines, here and there, that stand out. And one of them that I've always loved from this discourse is that verse: "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Just a few chapters before this one is a sort of companion to this section we're in here. Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well. They talk, and (typical of John’s Gospel) their conversation gets a little theological and hard to follow (it's significant that Jesus has such a conversation with a woman--and she’s also impatient with his abstractions). The woman offers Jesus water to drink, and he tells her about the living water that only he can provide--water she won't have to draw from a well, that she'll just always have with her.
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There's a spiritual state (I haven't reached it) where God's provision in our lives no longer surprises us. It doesn't seem to come day by day, as if tomorrow it might not continue. You never worry about it being withheld--that doesn’t even cross your mind. Your trust in God is so sure and complete, that you just relax into the certainty that you'll always be fed, clothed, held, loved.
It's like water that never ceases to flow, and bread that's just always there.
If that's something like what Jesus was trying to say to his disciples or to the Samaritan woman, it makes sense that it's hard to describe, or explain. Not many people reach that advanced state like he did. But we're on that path. Every time we come to this table and eat this bread, I like to think we're a little closer to that kind of trust.
I remember one of my seminary professors telling us--and this wasn’t a theological claim or explanation--that she feels like each wafer she receives transforms a little bit of her into what she’s meant to be. I was new then to the Episcopal Church, new to the Eucharist, and I remember receiving that remark like a child would: almost like something magical takes place inside you when the wafer enters your body, a medicine that heals you inside. In fact, she was an Aquinas scholar, and it occurred to me this week that we might have been talking about St. Aquinas’ idea of the Eucharist as “spiritual medicine.” I no longer remember.
But I still think about that almost every time I take Communion. It gives me hope that we can reach a state of perfect trust in God if we just keep eating, keep receiving. That’s my prayer for myself, for my kids, all of us, every week we’re here. Think what good we could do in the world, for the world, if we reach this state of trust and safety. It all flows from that.
So let’s keep coming to this table, and bit by bit, we’ll be transformed. We’ll never be hungry, we’ll never be thirsty. We won’t fear; we’ll simply trust, God's provision will always be there for us.