No one need go hungry
A sermon on Jewish and Christian bread
We find ourselves in the middle of a five week series of readings that take us through the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. This chapter has three main parts: the feeding of the 5,000; Jesus walking across the sea of Galilee; and the “Bread of Life” discourse. This week I want to step back and comment on the larger context of this chapter and of John’s Gospel as a whole.
The Gospel of John was the last of the canonical gospels to be written – probably in the early years of the second century. Although it is rooted in earlier traditions – for example, John’s account of the miraculous feeding echoes the Gospel of Mark - it reflects a development of theological reflection on the meaning of Jesus. “I am the bread of life” is the first of the “I am” statements of Jesus in John’s Gospel: I am bread; light; door; good shepherd; resurrection and life; way, truth and life; true vine. All of these are ways that Jesus identifies himself with God, the great “I am.”[1] John’s Gospel has what is called a “high Christology,” a view of Jesus in which his divinity is brought into the forefront of attention; not to the exclusion of his humanity, but in a more pronounced way than in the synoptic gospels.
The Gospel of John was not only written later, but in the context of a growing rift between the church and the synagogue. Remember that Jesus and his earliest followers were Jews. The writer of John’s Gospel is also Jewish, and writes to persuade his fellow Jews that the understanding of Jesus as both divine and human, and as the fulfillment of Jewish messianic expectation, is true and consistent with a right understanding of scripture. Jesus the Christ is the hope for Israel and for the world.
For most Jews, who might otherwise have considered Jesus’ followers as a curious Jewish sect, this was a bridge too far – a bridge which many Gentiles were crossing. This threatened to erase distinctly Jewish identity. So, Jewish disciples of Jesus began to be expelled from the synagogue. This is why, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ conflict with the Judeans seems so fraught. The current tension between church and synagogue is read back into the Jesus story as a tension between Galilean and Judean Jewish piety.
We must tread very carefully here. What is a debate between Jews has been interpreted too often as a debate between Christians and Jews that justifies anti-Jewish and antisemitic violence. “The Judeans” in John’s Gospel are not all Jews, and certainly not our Jewish neighbors today. The “Jewishness” of John’s Gospel is evident in the way that Jesus is depicted in John Chapter Six. The feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus’ miraculous crossing of the sea recalls the Israelites crossing of the Red Sea and the provision of manna, the bread in the wilderness, to sustain them on their journey. We are to understand Jesus in terms of the Exodus narrative as a new and improved Moses.
John’s Gospel goes even further, identifying Jesus with the Wisdom or Word of God, which already in the Torah was symbolized by bread. We read in Deuteronomy: “The Lord humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”[2]
This is echoed by the prophets, such as Isaiah, who identifies bread with God’s word: “For as the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”[3]
This is the bread from heaven of which Jesus speaks, and with which he identifies himself. It is the bread of holy Wisdom, as in the Book of Proverbs, in which Wisdom, the pre-existent and eternal creative power of God, cries out, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”[4] The Judeans complain when they hear Jesus say, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” much as the Israelites complained about the manna in the wilderness.[5] They know Jesus’ parents. They know he is from Galilee. Who does he think he is?
This is where John’s Gospel takes a mystical turn, and where what became Christianity parted ways from what became rabbinic Judaism. In the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE, some Jews began to identify Jesus Christ as the Word and Wisdom of God, whose very body is the bread given for the life of the world. They welcomed Gentile converts in a universalizing movement. Other Jews, the vast majority, identified the Torah as the Word and Wisdom of God, whose study and practice is given so that Israel may be a light and blessing to the nations.
Some were drawn to Jesus, others were not, as Jesus himself observes in John’s Gospel: “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.”[6] Those drawn to him recognize in his life the divine presence that creates and sustains the world. They are fed by Jesus’ life – not simply by his memory or inspiring story but by his continues giving of himself to us. Here, we may see already an indication of the importance of the Sacrament of Holy Communion in the early church; the visible sign of the spiritual reality of Christ’s continuous mediation of divine love and life.
To put it simplistically, Christians feed on Christ, while Jews continue to feed on Torah. Both were developments of Jewish tradition and theological reflection. Later Judaism, at least in its mystical strands, came to understand Torah as pre-existent and eternal, constituting a spiritual body or presence corresponding to its historical revelation, in much the way that Christians came to understand Jesus. What is important is that God continues to feed us with the bread of life, though the loaves may look and smell and taste different.
Let me draw a few concluding points from this historical digression:
1. Christianity is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and cannot be understood apart from it. Jesus is a Jew. If you hate on Jews, then you are hating on Jesus.
2. Christians are not people of the book, at least not in the same way that Jews and Muslims are. Christians are people of a person: Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the bread from heaven; not the Bible. The Bible is important, but it does not carry the kind of weight that the Torah does for Jews and the Koran does for Muslims.
3. St. Paul, in the earliest and best reflection on the relationship between emerging Christianity and Judaism in Romans chapters 9 – 11, maintained that Gentile Christians were grafted on to the root of Judaism, and “it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you” and that God’s election of Israel as beloved continues, “for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” And St. Paul maintains that God will show mercy to all. “All” means “all.” [7]
So there is a parallelism between these two traditions, rather than Christianity superseding Judaism. Are they the same? No. Are they equivalent? Yes and no. Are they valid expressions of God’s promise to bring the whole creation to its fulfillment? Yes. We who are drawn to Christ, and who find in him the bread of life that sustains us on the journey, do not need to condemn those who find their bread elsewhere. Instead, let us rejoice that in the divine economy, no one need go hungry.
[1] Exodus 3:14.
[2] Deuteronomy 8:3.
[3] Isaiah 55:10-11.
[4] Proverbs 9:5-6.
[5] John 6:41; cf. Numbers 11:1-15.
[6] John 6:44a.
[7] Romans 11:18, 29-36.