Friends
Peace be with you.
If I were to walk up to you and say to you “I am the Big Mac of Burger King”, what would be your reaction be to me? Or if I were to say, I am sort of the Labron James of football, what would you say? Just put up with one more; what would be your reaction be to me if I were to say I’m sort of the Sears Tower of St. Louis? Would you question overall if I’m feeling okay or would you question when I worked at Burger King, or do I have the talent to play football, or have I ever been to St. Louis? The reason I’m asking this is because, as we continue to move through the Bread of Life Discourse from the sixth chapter of John’s gospel, there is this really interesting question that I kind of find baffling. It’s coming from this group of Jews who received from the feeding of the five thousand. Last week, they falsely attributed the miraculous gift of manna from the Old Testament to being a gift from Moses instead of what it was, a gift from God. So Jesus set that straight. Jesus identified himself as that manna from heaven, which is where our passage begins this week. The part that confuses me is, when Jesus said to this group of his fellow Jews, that he was the bread from heaven, they didn’t ask how he was bread. Instead, they couldn’t believe that he came down from heaven. So they’re fine that he identified himself as bread? I guess it’s possible that this was just their first point. Like, if I said, “I’m the Sears Tower of St. Louis”, you may say, first of all, the Sears Tower is in Chicago not St. Louis. But I’d hope you’d want to know what in the heck I meant identifying myself as the Sears Tower. I’d hope there’d be a follow up question.
I feel like they’re really saying that Jesus can’t be from heaven because they don’t like the idea of someone coming to earth from there. I’m sure part of this has to do with the emphasis on God’s transcendence that our Jewish brothers and sisters emphasize to this day. The Jewish people recognize better than anyone else that we are not God and God is not us: that he is completely different. This means that we can’t control God or manipulate God as though we are in charge. But I can’t help but think that they also had a problem with a carpenter’s son believing that he came down from heaven. If God was going to become incarnate in their minds, it wouldn’t be through Joseph and Mary. My guess is that they would expect a messiah to either appear out of nowhere without a father or mother or to at least be born to one of the high priestly families. But certainly no messiah is coming from a family with calluses on their hands.
That’s the amazing thing about God. If God didn’t want us on this earth, he doesn’t need to kill us in the desert, as it appears the prophet Elijah wants in the first reading. If God wants us gone, you know what he has to do? Stop wanting us. That’s all it takes. If God stops wanting us for a second, we don’t exist. You exist because God wants you to exist. I exist because God willed me into existence. God knows everything about us. He wants us to get to know everything about him. How does he do that? Is it by leaving an instruction manual? Sort of, but we made the Bible under his inspiration. He mostly does this by inviting us into a relationship with himself.
He invites us to get to know him in a sacramental relationship. What does that mean? To preserve the transcendence of God, the “otherness of God”, he gives us things like bread, oil, water, wine, and people to bridge the gap between him and us. As we know, the Eucharist looks and tastes like bread and wine and, if we are Catholic and in a state of grace, we are allowed to consume it but we know that it’s really his body, blood, soul and divinity. It’s the bread that came down from heaven that is meant to be a connection between the transcendent God and we fallible humans. It’s a sacrament because it’s intimately connected to Jesus who, himself, transcended heaven and earth by being fully God and fully human.
I can understand why this group of Jews was confused that Jesus said he was from heaven but you’d think they’d be just as baffled at the idea that he called himself bread. Maybe they could understand something our generation can’t: that God himself came to his people in the manna in the desert. What makes it hard for our generation to see the God who wills us into being, willing himself into our life by becoming the Bread of Life in the Eucharist? Imagine how that could change if more people spent an hour every day, or at least every week, adoring the Lord in adoration…
