Bloomsbury
Central Baptist Church
3rd
January 2016 11.00am
I am the bread
John 6.22-40 The next day the crowd that had stayed on the
other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there. They also
saw that Jesus had not got into the boat with his disciples, but that his
disciples had gone away alone. 23
Then some boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the
bread after the Lord had given thanks. 24
So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they
themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. 25 When they found him on the
other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come
here?" 26 Jesus answered
them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw
signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that
perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man
will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his
seal." 28 Then they said
to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?" 29 Jesus answered them, "This
is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." 30 So they said to him, "What
sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What
work are you performing? 31
Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them
bread from heaven to eat.'" 32
Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who
gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true
bread from heaven. 33 For the
bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the
world." 34 They said to
him, "Sir, give us this bread always." 35 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. 36
But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. 37 Everything that the Father
gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive
away; 38 for I have come down
from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who
sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it
up on the last day. 40 This
is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him
may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day."
John 6.41-59
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, "I am the bread
that came down from heaven." 42
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'?" 43 Jesus answered them, "Do
not complain among yourselves. 44
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. 45
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. 46 Not that anyone has seen the
Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly, I tell you, whoever
believes has eternal life. 48
I am the bread of life. 49
Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes
down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 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." 52 The Jews then disputed among
themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 53 So Jesus said to them,
"Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and
drink his blood, you have no life in you.
54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal
life, and I will raise them up on the last day;
55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and
drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.
57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of
the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came
down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But
the one who eats this bread will live forever." 59 He said these things while he
was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.
Well, happy new year everyone!
Here
we stand at the dawn of 2016,
a
beautiful bouncing new-born year,
still
only a few days old.
What will it hold for us, I wonder?
Health,
happiness, and prosperity?
Or
suffering, sickness, and war?
Or perhaps it’ll be just another year like most
others:
the
classic mixture of good and bad,
with
a large dose of keeping your head down and getting on with life?
Anyway, tomorrow has enough worries of its own,
as Jesus once said (Matt 6.34),
so
let’s leave 2016 to its own devices for a moment
and
think about how we’re doing today?
So, have you recovered from Christmas yet?
Was the annual festive season of over-eating
and extravagant gift-giving
everything
you wanted it to be?
I think it must have been for many,
because
apparently in the UK
we
spent over £700 million online on Christmas day alone,
up
11% from last year;
and
on Black Friday, we spent over £1billion online in just one day.
And
then, after all of that, we went to the shops on Boxing Day,
with
the sales drawing another 11% of additional shoppers
to
the high street compared to last year.
And
don’t even mention the turkey, Christmas pudding, and alcohol
which
we have consumed in vast quantities as a nation,
as
we consigned our diets to the cupboard
and
let our waist bands out a notch or two.
In many ways, the extravagant consumption of
the festive season
is
a metaphor for the way our world is run.
In a nutshell, we consume to survive.
Tesco
ergo sum, as it is occasionally satirised.
I shop, therefore I am
It’s
no exaggeration to say that our world is built upon a system of consumption.
We even give it a name that says it
all, and we call it ‘consumerism’.
Our
dominant doctrine is one of conspicuous consumption,
which tells us that we are most
fully alive
only when we are in the process of
consuming.
From
food, to alcohol, to goods, to services;
you might say that we consume to
live,
and that we live to consume.
But
there is the inevitable dark side to our culture of consumption.
It may not be fashionable or
palatable to name it,
but slavery is the
ultimate facilitator of consumerism;
we enslave the environment, and we
enslave fellow humans,
all to the service of
our consumption.
One
of the enduring metaphors for a consumerist society
is the image of an empire as a body.
Whether
we’re talking about the Roman, Babylonian, or Egyptian empires of old,
or the more modern empires of the
colonial period,
or the contemporary
empires of global capitalism;
it is possible to imagine the empire
as a human body,
with the flow of goods
and services
feeding its
voracious and growing appetites
and engorging
its swollen belly.
And
of course,
as those at the centre of the empire
grow fat and sleek
through excessive consumption,
so those at the margins struggle to
consume sufficient food to survive,
with their daily labour
being co-opted
to the
service of those at the centre,
rather than to the meeting
of their own needs.
And
in the rush to move from underdeveloped, to developing country,
and then to full-blown member of the
developed world,
we
discover again and again
that the higher a person or nation
rises up the economic scale,
the more wide ranging their
appetites become,
and
the greater their scale of consumption.
We
move from consuming food to survive,
to the consumption of resources to
live in the manner
to which we desire to
become accustomed.
And
the more we consume, the more we need.
The scale of our appetite for
irreplaceable
and increasingly
depleted natural resources is breath-taking,
and the consequences of our
conspicuous and all-consuming appetites
are staggering.
From
climate change to international conflict,
there is a compelling case to be
made
that
much of the suffering experienced by the human race
is a consequence of excessive
consumption by the rich.
For
example, the desire of the developed world
to secure its supply of fossil fuel
reserves for the foreseeable future
lies behind many of the
interventionist conflicts
in the Middle East of
recent decades.
And
our industrial-scale unfettered consumption of oil, coal, and gas
has contributed to climate change on
a global scale,
the effects of which
will be felt hardest
by those in the poorest
countries which are less able to adapt.
Or
think about beef production:
the amount of land given to beef
cattle
could feed the starving many times over.
Beef,
however yummy, is an environmental catastrophe,
and also one of the least efficient
ways to feed a human being,
and
that's before we get to the negative health benefits
of regular consumption of red meat.[1]
And
whilst we’re on the topic of human health,
the obesity epidemic, as it is now
called,
is another example of a society that
enslaves people to consumption;
and again it is, statistically,
the poorest
who
bear the brunt of the problem.
Those
who lack the education and opportunity
to take informed and
healthy decisions,
and who lack the resources and time
to invest in exercise,
are
those most prey to eating
the easy-access, high-sugar, high-fat,
budget meals and takeaways
that are so readily addictive, and yet
so destructive.
At
every turn, we consume people-by-proxy
to feed our voracious appetites.
I
think it is no exaggeration to say
that our society is sick from
over-consumption.
And
never has the world needed more
the counter-cultural challenge
of the one who claimed to be the
living bread
which satisfies our
desires and fulfils our appetites.
To
say that Jesus is the ‘living bread’
is to subvert the narratives of
consumerism that our society lives by.
And
to collectively consume the broken body of Jesus at communion
is an act of rebellion against our
dominant individualist consumerist ideology.
As
we have seen, our global system of consumerism
is one which is predicated on a
global system of slavery and violence,
where
the many work for next-to-nothing
so that the privileged few can enjoy
the fruits of their labours.
And
in this, we are no different to the Roman Empire of the first century;
except they had their slaves living
in their homes,
whereas our slaves live on the other
side of the world.
But
then, as now, the mainstays
of both first and twenty first
century consumerism
are slavery and military
expansionism,
as strong countries consume weaker
ones,
claiming the resources
of another for their own.
It's
an old story, told again and again in human history,
and it was the story of the
Israelites enslaved in Egypt.
The
people of God knew what it was to be consumed by another,
barely escaping with their lives.
They
told and re told the story of their long walk to freedom
through the wilderness of sin,
led
by the fiery cloudy pillar,
and sustained by the miraculous
bread of heaven.
For
the Jews, talk of heavenly food, of bread from above,
meant only one thing: freedom.
And this is the context for our reading this
morning from John’s gospel.
The extended passage from John’s gospel,
sometimes
called the ‘bread of life discourse’
is,
as the final verse of the reading makes clear,
actually
a Jewish homily, or sermon,
delivered
by Jesus the Rabbi in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Jewish worship services in the first century
had
several features in common
with
what we would recognize as Christian worship;
which makes sense, given that Christianity
emerged from within Judiasm
and
borrowed many of its key features.
And one of these common elements was the
sermon.
In
the synagogue, there would be a reading from the Torah,
and
then a reading from the prophets,
and
then a sermon where the text of scripture would be applied
to
the life of the community who worshipped at the Synagogue.
In other words, it could be our normal pattern
of
Old Testament reading, New Testament reading, and Sermon.
On the occasion recounted in John’s gospel,
where
Jesus gives his sermon on the bread of life,
we are able to reconstruct what passages from the
Hebrew Bible he’s using,
and
it’s pretty clear that he’s drawing firstly
on
the story of the miraculous manna from Heaven
that
fed the Jews on their journey through the wilderness
on
their way from Egyptian slavery to the promised land;
a
story we find in Exodus 16;
and
secondly Jesus is using a passage from the prophet Isaiah (54.9-55.5)
where
the Lord promises his people food and drink
which will never fail them,
in
contrast to the bread they can buy in the market,
which
goes off like manna left overnight.
And what Jesus does is to take these two
ancient passages
about
the contrast between earthly food and heavenly food,
and
use them as the basis for his assertion that in him,
people
can find true nourishment
that
will sustain them in ways
that
even the finest of human foods could never achieve.
The broader context of the passage within
John’s gospel
is
also important here:
Jesus has just performed a series of signs
which
contrast earthly things with heavenly things.
So the water at the wedding at Cana
has
been miraculously transformed
into
the fine wine that comes down from heaven;
Jesus has predicted the destruction of the
earthly temple
and
its miraculous rebuilding in in three days,
and
used this as a metaphor
for
his own earthly death and miraculous resurrection;
Nicodemus has been told that being born in the
normal human way is not enough
and
that he must instead be born again from above;
a Samaritan woman has asked Jesus for water
and
instead been promised the water of eternity that never runs out;
and the crowd who followed Jesus into the
wilderness
have
discovered that two fish and five little barley loaves
can
feed thousands of people when blessed by Jesus.
And so the point Jesus is making in his sermon
about heavenly food,
delivered
in the synagogue in Capernaum becomes clear,
and
I might summarise it in this way:
‘If you do not have heaven’s perspective on
your life,
you
remain trapped on earth.’
And Jesus uses the image of bread as a metaphor
to make this point.
For the Israelites, the path from slavery to
freedom
had
been a path through suffering,
a
path through the wilderness that might have killed them off
had
the miraculous manna from heaven not sustained them on their journey.
The Jewish journey to freedom had begun in
Egypt, in slavery;
as
they served the Pharaoh
and
bore the brunt of his imperial aspirations.
And their plight could be written time and
again through human history,
as
one people bind another into the bondage of oppression
and
grow rich and powerful from the suffering labours of the powerless.
But of course, the thing about manna, the bread
from heaven
that
sustained them on their path to freedom
was
that there was only ever enough for that day.
Any that was kept over was rotten by the next
morning.
The Israelites in the wilderness learned what
it was to be daily reliant on God’s
provision
as
they made their journey of emancipation.
And it’s a similar story for the prophet Isaiah,
in
the other passage Jesus refers to in his sermon.
Writing a thousand years later than the exodus,
to
the Jews in exile in Babylon,
Isaiah was addressing a people who owned no
land and could raise no crops,
people
who were reliant daily on what they could buy in the market place,
and
were trapped in the economic snare of Babylonian oppression.
To these exiles, Isaiah spoke of food from
above, food from heaven,
which
would free them from their exile
and
release them from their captivity.
So deep within the Jewish story lay the hope
that
those enslaved and exiled in this world
would
not be slaves and exiles forever;
and this hope was based on a firm belief,
articulated
by prophets and preachers alike,
that
God is at work in the world
bringing
freedom, and release, and restoration.
And it is this hope that finds its focus
in
Jesus’ description of himself as the bread of life,
broken
for the salvation of the world.
Jesus’
casting of himself as the bread that comes from heaven
and which brings life
eternal
is a direct challenge to all
political systems and ideologies
that rely on human
consumption as the means of their own sustaining.
Even
Communism, that idealistic attempt
to control the means of production for
the benefit of the poor,
foundered on the rocks of the
reality of human greed.
The
exclusive claim inherent in Jesus language
is that it is he, and only he,
who offers the bread if life,
it
is only the crucified and resurrected one
who has the capacity to challenge
consumptive and violent ideologies
at their very root.
And
so, when, at communion, we eat the broken body of Christ,
we participate in a narrative of
redemption and freedom
which asserts that the
innocent sacrifice
is consumed by humanity to
redeem it from the inside out.
We
do not eat the bread to survive starvation,
we eat the living bread to survive
death itself.
But
more than this,
the consumption of the bread of life
also subverts the very
narratives of slavery and violence
that dominate human
society.
Because
in the broken body of Jesus
we meet not the unwilling sacrifice
required by consumerism,
where some must suffer
and die so that others can live,
but rather the willing sacrifice
of the one who
identifies with the scapegoats of our world
in order to
redeem consumers from their sins
and
to release captives from their oppression.
When
we eat the meat of Jesus’ body,
we cannot ignore the questions and
challenges this poses
to the way we consume meat, bread,
and other staple necessities to survive.
Jesus
says, that when we eat him, we need no other bread.
If we, spiritually speaking, consume
the flesh of Jesus,
he enters into us and is
at work within our lives
to break the cycles of
addictive yet destructive behaviour.
This
isn't just a 'follow Jesus and he'll give you strength
to break your addiction to
consumerism' challenge,
although that is true,
and I would indeed say that the path
of Jesus
is one which challenges
our destructive addictions.
No,
the challenge that Jesus brings
in his declaration of himself as the
living bread
runs far wider than a challenge to our
unbalanced personal consumption.
Michael
Hardin, who visited Bloomsbury last year, puts it very well.
He says:
In order for us
to properly achieve distance from sacred violence,
[whether they be] witch hunts, Inquisitions,
pogroms and Holocausts
[or] world wars, genocides, death
camps,
renditions, secret
prisons and torture,
we must see the victim from the
perspective of the victim.[2]
This
is what happens when we break bread and share it
in memory of the broken body of
Jesus Christ.
At
communion, we learn to see the victim
from the perspective of the victim.
We
take the bread of life into ourselves,
and we are transformed as we
identify with the crucified messiah.
In our
consumption of the bread of life,
we enter into the story of the
ultimate sacrificial victim,
and his story enters
into us.
When
we consume the body of Christ,
we discover that we need nothing
more.
In
our confession we recognise with humility
that we are enslaved to our
appetites,
that we struggle to give up our
addictions,
and that we are held captive by our
desires.
As
we share bread together,
we consume the living bread that is
the broken body of Jesus;
And
the one that has been sacrificed enters into us,
both individually and corporately;
to
unmask our delusions
and challenge our addictions to
greed and violence.
And
so we come to communion,
to take deep within ourselves the
living bread that is Jesus.
As
we do so, maybe it is time for us to turn our eyes to tomorrow,
as we contemplate the new world that
opens before us
through our participation the death
and resurrection of our Lord.
As
we stand on the cusp of a new year
let us allow the one who comes to us
in bread and wine
to consume us, even as
we consume him.
May
we learn what it means for the living bread of his broken body
to nourish us day by
day,
sustaining our commitment to live
peaceably, one day at a time,
challenging our
addictions to consumptive addictions
and the violence
inherent within them.
May
we , through Jesus, find ways of subverting and resisting
the systems and practices that lead
to death.
May
we learn what it means to desire Jesus more than possessions,
more than money, more than power,
and
in our hunger for Jesus so find the freedom to truly live.
What
would our lives be like
if we learned what it is to be daily
reliant on God’s grace?
As
Jesus might have said:
Give
us this day our daily bread,
free us from our addictions
and release us from our compulsions;
deliver
us from greed,
and forgive us our excesses,
as we forgive those whose excess
defines us.
For
your is the kingdom,
the power and the glory.
Forever
and ever, Amen.
