Proper 13 Year B 2024: John 6:24-35

 When you read my educational background on my resume, my bachelor’s degree looks like a grab bag of programs. I hold a bachelor of arts in political science with minors in music and math. And usually, in job interviews, the seemingly unconnected programs are one of the first things interviewers ask me about. It’s very common for political science students to have minors in fields like English or history, but a benefit I didn’t anticipate in choosing those programs that were so outside of the norm was that it made my resume interesting.

Sometimes our different fields, our “ologies”, mix in good ways; ways in which they build on one another. Systematic Theologian Rev. Dr. Ian Markham has his students say at the beginning of every semester, “Jesus is our epistemology” - which is a mix of theology and epistemology - the study of how we know things. And teams in fields such as engineering are often interdisciplinary, requiring expertise from several different specialties to bring a project to fruition. 

But sometimes we ask one “ology” to do the work for another in a way in which it is not prepared to do. We do that a lot of times with our theology and the way in which we read the Bible. We ask our biology or cosmology or geology to do the work of theology, when that is not what the authors of the Bible are doing. They are all explaining their theology - from the Greek for god, theos.

A lot of this is more of a modern theological problem. The original hearers of the creation story did not think it was a geological explanation. Nor did they believe that the story of Noah was about a meteorological phenomenon. And in today’s gospel, when Jesus reminds his listeners that what they have just witnessed isn’t a gastroenterological phenomenon when he says, “You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Jesus is getting at, “you’re listening to your gastroenterologist and in so doing are missing the theological point.” The people are starting at their stomachs and seeing everything through the lens of “I’m full”. Jesus is inviting them to start elsewhere.

I once had someone present to me a whole biological theory for the Blessed Virgin Mary’s pregnancy. It was…convoluted. And partway through, I just had to stop him and remind him that the writer of Luke not only didn’t even know enough about human reproduction to be making this statement, Luke also didn’t care. Because Luke wasn’t making a statement about Jesus’ biology. The Gospel of Luke is a theological argument about the nature of Jesus and what Jesus means to us theologically. Everything Luke writes is in service of the theology.

In his Gospel, John tells us, both at the beginning of the Gospel and post-resurrection, what John’s theology is. At the beginning of Chapter 1, he’s a bit ethereal: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” But by Chapter 20, John wants to make sure no one has misunderstood him: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

Where are we in today’s reading? Jesus feeds the 5000, tells us that it isn’t really about bread, and then talks about metaphorical bread for another chapter. Last week we read the first 21 verses of Chapter 6, the kickoff of five weeks of working our way through the chapter, or, as Fr. Tim Schenck calls it “breadapalooza” or “bread-tide”. And we will see that after three more weeks of Gospel readings…Jesus’ listeners still aren’t getting it. Peeking ahead a bit, Jesus says “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.” Incredibly, after all of Jesus’ explaining, his listeners still dispute among themselves saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

But the crowd to whom Jesus is speaking in today’s text seem to have at least an inkling about the message. They’re on the right track. Because they really hear what Jesus is saying when he reminds them of who provided them with manna in the wilderness. They make the connection, pleading “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus simply says, without any hidden meanings this time: “here is how to have it always - through me.” 

This chapter in John, with the people’s encounter with bread and Jesus’ instruction to eat his flesh and drink his blood as a path to eternal life, is the closest John gets to an establishment of the Eucharist. There’s no “last supper” in John like in the other Gospels.

Theologian Fr. John Macquarrie wrote “In any encounter with God, (God) has the initiative. He comes to us before we think of seeking him. We can never, as it were, manipulate God or have him at our disposal. It is unfortunately the case that sometimes the sacraments have been misunderstood as a kind of magic. We can indeed wait upon God at set times or in particular places or in such practices as prayer and eucharistic worship. But it is not our faith or our expectation or our activity, still less is it the power of the priest, that produces the encounter with God. He has always got there before us. Sacraments are not human inventions to summon God at our convenience.” (Macquarrie, 6) I think that is what Jesus is getting at when he says, “whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” Jesus is assuring us that he is always there for us to come to. God always beats us to the punch, is always waiting for us to find Him.

When I was a child, I took “God is everywhere” pretty literally. In my childhood logic, every space that wasn’t taken up by some other object was occupied by God. Which isn’t a bad way to live - entirely surrounded, enveloped by God. I don’t quite subscribe to the same theology these days, but sometimes I wish I did. Because it’s a wonderful, safe feeling, that God is always, physically, right there.

We celebrate rites like the Eucharist and Baptism, because those are places in which we have found God before, and have found God in a powerful way. But when we don’t enter into them in the right headspace, when we think we’re summoning God through the bread, the wine, and the water, it’s like the people thinking they’re experiencing Jesus through the bread in their stomachs. When churches were worried about whether people receiving “drop off” communion at home during Covid were following the expectations of having participated in the virtual service, we were thinking about it the wrong way. Because people weren’t hungry for a wafer. You can get 1000 of them for $15. We were hungry for what that consecrated host becomes: the real presence of Jesus Christ. If we remember that hunger in all that we do and live our lives craving for Jesus then everything we do will nourish our faith. Amen.