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Sermons at Saint Mary's
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost This past week, our long war in Afghanistan came home to Cape Cod. The sudden, tragic death of Yarmouth resident Marine Corporal Nicholas Xiarhos from a roadside bomb half a world away touched thousands in our community, most of whom never knew him in life. And the response it unleashed was deep and profound. All along his processional route out to National Cemetery, crowds gathered with emblems, signs and symbols. Yellow ribbons, American flags, uniforms were everywhere. In supermarket lines and on the beach, perfect strangers searched together to make sense of it all. In patriotic pride and religious faith, people turned to the past to scripture and ritual, and to venerable ideals like freedom and valor and heroism to sum up the meaning of this terrible loss of yet another young man cut down in battle far from home. And it made me wonder. For whenever and wherever we as a species have been forced to search hard for meaning and purpose in this life, we inevitably turn to the past to embrace the very symbols and beliefs that sustained our forbears in their own crucibles. We turn to images and icons and words to give us hope and faith. We look for those things that are larger than life in order to face what we cannot face, and accept what we cannot accept. This certainly is most true when we read the Bible, and especially so, when we come to this alluring and mystical Gospel of John. Of the four gospels, John is the strangest and yet, the most beautifully composed. The other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the synoptics, because they parallel one another and speak, as it were, in one voice. When we come to John’s Gospel, however, we discover something quite different. John was written at a later date in the early Church, and the writer of this fourth Gospel had a very different objective in his writing. John is concerned with signs and symbols, like light, and living water, and vines, and bread. Unlike the synoptics which focus primarily on the earthly ministry of Jesus, his teachings/miracles, his passion/resurrection, John is far more speculative about the underlying meaning of Jesus’ life and purpose. When reading John, it’s always important to keep in mind that he is an author with great imaginative skill, and the Gospel is a shimmering tapestry of color. John is concerned with the big picture, with cosmological reality surrounding Jesus. He interprets this reality through symbols and signs. One of the supreme examples of this is found in the passage we have heard this morning, where Jesus says: “I am the bread of life; the one who eats of me will never die.” The symbol of the bread of life is taken from the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes with loaves and fish. All four Gospels recount this story. But John is alone is trying to discern the hidden meaning in this great miracle of Jesus. What exactly was John trying to get at? Well, John like the other writers of the Gospel is making a link with the past. In his discourse with the crowds, Jesus refers to the manna that their forebears had received in the desert. This manna or bread from heaven, in the Book of Deuteronomy, miraculously appeared to Moses and the Children of Israel in their desert wanderings. It became for them the symbol of life, and John uses this earlier symbol to interpret who was Jesus himself in his own time. You will recall that in the time of Jesus, there was the popular expectation that in the final day, there would be a Messiah who once again would deliver the Jews from their bondage. One sign of this, it was believed, was that God again would provide manna- bread from heaven miraculously descending to feed his people. For John, this expectation, rooted in the tradition of the Exodus, was in full display in Jesus miraculously feeding the multitude with loaves. So, then, we hear Jesus was hailed as a prophet like Moses. And the crowds wanted to make him King. But Jesus, discerning their intent, withdrew to the Galilean hills, only to be pursued by the masses the very next day. The discourse that follows in today’s Gospel is unique to John: “What sign can you give us to see so that we may believe in you,” the crowds implore Jesus. “Our ancestors had manna in the desert. God gave them bread from heaven to eat.” In other words, this great feeding of the 5000 had brought them to the brink of a new age, by raising up for them a new Moses. But Jesus responds: “I tell you this: the truth is not that Moses gave you bread from heaven, but that my Father gives you real bread from heaven.” The crowds, however, are not persuaded. “Sir”, they say, “Give us this bread now and always.” But Jesus tells them: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry.” For Jesus is not to be a prophet like Moses. His work is not to be that of a historical Messiah. John, like all the believers of the early Church, knew this. So if not Moses, or Messiah, who then is this Jesus? Here John uses the symbol of bread, this ancient archetype that is found in the most ancient of religious traditions, to proclaim Jesus as the food, the true heavenly manna. And those who eat of it will never hunger again. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven,” Jesus goes on, “If anyone eat of this bread, that one will live forever, and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” For the early Church, and ever since, the bread of which John speaks is the Eucharist, and in this bread Jesus is present with us and in us. A symbol this rich, this profound, this enduring cannot be explained away. It cannot be translated any more than we might try to explain away the flags or yellow ribbons that lined Corporal Xiarhos’ funeral procession two days ago. For symbols do not yield to explanation. They only yield to awe and gratitude. That is why we call this most sacred rite we celebrate as Christians the Eucharist, which in Greek means simply thanksgiving. For at this altar we give thanks, we bless, we take and eat, and we enter into the presence of life that is larger and infinitely more enduring than our own. And here, we receive the bread which comes down from heaven, so that we may never hunger again, so that we may never die. top | home | site index |
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